The King Father Bug

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I've always been a huge fan of Guillermo Del Toro's 1997 film Mimic, but when it came out I had no idea that he himself was unhappy with the final film. See back then I apparently found other ways to spend my time then by looking at movie news 24/7. I don't know either. I can't even imagine what I did. Anyway I guess he and The Wiensteins fought over he making of the horror film - shocking, I know. Yadda yadda, they enforced their own less-bleak ending onto the movie.

Well now, thanks to the wonder of the internet, we can see a rough cut of Del Toro's original ending! It's over at JoBlo, you've got to go over there to watch it. It really really rough footage, with the time-stamp and all, but it's a curious thing to watch. I've seen the film several times - although it's been a couple of years - so I immediately knew the changes at the end. Susan (Miran Sorvino), Peter (Jeremy Northam) and Chuy (little Alexander Goodwin) reunite in a completely different environment - instead of it being a crime scene type situation, with fireman and police officers everywhere like it is in the original film, here they find each other in what appears to be the crowded floor of Grand Central Station (it's hard to tell) and no one is paying them any attention at all. This I think works great and definitely ups the despair quotient - they've battled this huge battle underground but nobody knows or cares.

But the new footage ends on a note that I'm not entirely sure I get, and I blame the low-quality of the video. We see Chuy looking into the crowd and I think he's supposed to be seeing something, probably some "funny shoes" - he's an autistic kid that's been able to single out bug-men from regular-men because their feet are different - but I really couldn't tell.

Anyway it's awesome for a Mimic nerd like myself to see the footage. Funny story - we studied Mimic in a film class I took in college on horror film and everyone else in the class just hated the movie and had no idea why our professor was making us watch it, and our professor seemed totally taken aback. I think he thought he was being hip, picking this new flick for us. Well I got it, professor!


What's always fascinated me about Mimic is that it's a female-centered big monster movie a la Aliens that's actually about fatherhood. Seems like every other female-driven horror film is about the womb and motherhood, but here we have a woman confronted with and angered by her husband's apparent sterility, which she represses and manifests into an overcompsensating dedication to her work, which just happens to involve overstimulating male insects to reproduce themselves to death. Mmmhmm. Anyway this backfires, somehow! Shocking.

The film isn't entirely successful - you can see that there were too may cooks in the kitchen by the end - but it messes around with horror conceits in unexpected ways that I've always enjoyed.
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