Mimic is a 1997 creature feature horror film starring a seven-foot tall cockroach.
10 out of 10 stars. Still scary after all these years.
It’s sometime in the near future and a disease called Strickler’s Disease has killed most of the planet’s children in two years. Dr. Peter Mann of the Centers for Disease Control asks Dr. Susan Tyler, a Professor of Entomology at New York State University, to design a way to kill the cockroaches that carry the disease. She combines termite and mantid DNA in a new breed of cockroach she calls the Judas Breed. This tiny cockroach is designed to be sterile and die out in 128 days.
Three years later a preacher named Harry Ping disappears from his church in New York City. The CDC is called in because the thirty-six illegal immigrants in his basement all have yellow fever. Peter and his assistant find huge piles of excrement hanging from the ceiling. The lab finds buttons from clothing in those piles of excrement, implying that whatever creature left that pile ate a coat or clothing.
Meanwhile two kids find a weird bug in the subway and bring it to Susan at her office at NYSU. It’s a Judas Breed cockroach, but it’s the size of a small cat, and it’s just a baby which means the adults must be huge. She asks the boys to take her to where they found the bug in the subway. Peter accompanies her, but the Mass Transit Authority guy won’t let them in. They need a warrant.
Susan’s assistant calls her because her friend at the wastewater treatment facility has found a giant something. He thinks it’s a lobster. It’s not. It’s a giant Judas Breed cockroach, human sized. Now they’re getting really concerned because the Judas Breed was supposed to have died out three years ago. When they created the Judas Breed they gave them a shorter life cycle, but the side effect was that small mutations occurred much faster and they evolved to become huge, intelligent, and to mimic humans, their only predator.
They eventually get the warrant and the MTA guy takes them into the tunnels under the subway. Susan waits in the tunnel and is kidnapped by a giant Judas Breed seven feet tall who takes her to the larder, where she keeps her food. Meanwhile Peter, his assistant, and the MTA guy find more piles of excrement from the ceiling and the two dead kids who brought her the bug. And from there it’s a fight for survival as the Judas Breed cockroaches attack them, picking them off one by one. Their strategy is to kill the one male that fertilizes all of the females. Good luck with that. 😉
10 out of 10 stars. Great plot, superb acting, and great CGI monsters.
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