Skeeter

To give us a brief break from bad Michael Hoffman Jr. movies, today I decided to mix it up with a bad Clark Brandon movie. Really, I feel it’s the least I can do for all of you, when you’ve been waiting ever so patiently for another review of a movie with giant mutated animals and a preachy environmentalist message. It’s been over a month since Kingdom of the Spiders, after all.

Of course, the main difference between the two films is that Kingdom of the Spiders was actually a good movie, while this one is utter dogshit. Outside of that, both films are set in small towns in the American Southwest, both have preachy environmentalist messages (though in different veins -- Spiders was about how our overuse of pesticides had left spiders with no food source other than people, while this was a more standard one about greedy developers poisoning the water supply), both have giant bugs killing people, and both have the bugs start in on all the livestock before any people get offed. One might almost suspect that this was intended as a lazy ripoff under the assumption that since so much time had passed since the earlier film nobody would notice any such similarities.

And lazy is the perfect word for this film. There is such little effort put into the movie that one might almost think it was an early effort of 90s hipster irony, where the filmmakers were being intentionally lazy for an effect, but the only seeming effect on display here is that nobody wanted to work too hard. The plot is thoroughly by-the-numbers and repetitive (there are no less than three mosquito attacks that involve a character being inside a car while another character is killed outside), the acting is uniformly terrible (with the exception of Charles Napier, who plays the snarling bribe-taking sheriff as overtly hostile I have to assume he was channeling his own anger at having agreed to be in this), and the titular mosquitoes are an abomination. I am quite familiar with rubber monsters having limited mobility, but these (aside from being flown around on strings) have none at all for the most part, smacking into people, cars, and otherwise while looking as though they may as well have been wood carvings. There’s even a sex scene between the two leads that’s just as passionate and lifeless as any I’ve ever seen -- when your actors can’t even muster up the energy to pretend they want to sleep with each other, there is something critically wrong.

There’s also a gunfight near the end that’s mostly pretty terrible, like a particularly bad episode of Walker Texas Ranger, but I can’t completely hate it when it ended with a guy getting shot and doing a back flip through a corral fence. Was it bad? Certainly. Was it awesomely bad? Absolutely.

I do have to say, though, when something like that is one of the best parts of a movie, you get to wondering what direction your life has taken. Sadly, I was unable to find the film’s trailer despite checking a whole three pages on Youtube, but I did find the first mosquito attack, so you can all watch that and share a tiny fraction of my pain.

Rating: ½ *