Skeeter (1993)
- Andrew Smith
- Jul 24
- 4 min read
"Earth is the final breeding ground."
Plot
As the result of a local businessman illegally dumping toxic waste, the residents of a small desert town find themselves under attack by a swarm of giant mutated mosquitoes.
Review
Though a massive cultural phenomenon in the 1950s, films about giant bugs never really made it back into the spotlight despite odd threats of resurgence every now and then. But in the glory days of the straight-to-video B movie market of the late 80s and early 90s, low budget creature feature films were all the rage. Be they Alien-style sci-fi horrors in outer space, post-apocalyptic creatures in futuristic landscapes or mutated monsters on the loose in small towns, it was a glory time for the video rental market; a vast ecosystem that could support an enormous amount of highly derivative products like at no other time in history (save for today’s on-demand and instant access streaming). In the early 90s, a pair of low budget giant insects films emerged within a year of each other and instantly reminded everyone of why there hadn’t been many of them made.
Skeeter is a pre-Sy Fy flick before the company gained the monopoly on such rubbish monster movies. You know the score: a small American town, corrupt businessmen/scientists, monsters on the loose and any number of clichés regurgitated. Not only content with providing the heroes of the piece with a monster menace to face off against, these films also conjure up some human villains to bite into screen time and keep the plot focus firmly away from showing the monsters. In this case it’s a businessman and a corrupt sheriff but it could have been a mad scientist and mayor, a gangster and a doctor or any number of characters that crop up in these films. The bottom line is that providing a human villain allows the film to pad itself out greatly. Every single second, a giant articulated mosquito is visible on camera, the special effects budget is just haemorrhaging money. To solve this, filmmakers rely on the human villain strategy. He/she becomes the main focus and the monsters become almost secondary. There are a few numerous sub-plots (including the stereotypical big company trying to buy everyone out and cover it all up) and a lame romantic side story, which adds absolutely nothing to the film, except a non-graphic sex scene. In a higher tier film, you could argue that some of this is needed to build out the world or add character development. But in this specific straight-to-video context, these characters offer no genuine narrative value. The underlying screenwriting mechanic is simply to provide a human conflict that shifts the camera's focus away from the monsters they cannot afford to show. That’s the case here as the mosquitoes get very little to do and it’s almost thirty minutes between the first attack and the second attack. The resulting flaws of this padding strategy are agonising for the viewer. A thirty-minute void in a creature feature is a massive amount of time to fill.
Though to say that there are big gaps between attacks, Skeeter seems to even make this time seem like an eternity with a pedestrian pace which just hinders any attempts to get any momentum injected into proceedings when the mosquitoes do attack. Eventually, Skeeter can’t stall any longer and is forced to throw out some more genre goodies. That said, when the mosquitoes do appear they look very poor. Dragged along by invisible string, they are a far cry from the huge mosquito as pictured on the front cover and there aren’t that many of them. They’ve also got thermal vision (think Predator) which leads to a couple of POV attacks. A necessary ingredient of big bug flicks is to have plenty of goo and gunge when the bugs are destroyed and expect to see a decent amount of make-up effects as slime and all sorts of nasty fluids are dripped and splashed across the screen. It’s not an all-out gunk fest but does the job it needs to do. They clearly allocated whatever remaining budget they had for those specific practical makeup effects. It satisfies that visceral expectation of the genre without requiring any complex articulation from the props because an exploding puddle of toxic slime is much easier to film than a walking flying insect.
Skeeter has little else going for it except Charles Napier who (surprise, surprise) plays the bad ass local sheriff. Napier can play these authority figures in his sleep and he’s on cruise control here. It’s a clichéd role but the rest of the parts are too. They’re so clichéd that the clichéd character is in danger of being a cliché itself! William Sanderson is a spineless government official. George ‘Buck’ Flower and Michael J. Pollard also appear in small roles, peppering the town with its customary collection of bums and weirdos to feed to the mosquitoes. The slew of new characters added throughout are there to function entirely as monster fodder. The script is mechanically checking off boxes on a predetermined list of genre requirements, ensuring there is a steady supply of recognisable victims to sustain the threat level and the mosquitoes are therefore well-fed after a sluggish start.
I think back to the similarly-themed Mosquito which featured a throwaway but decent part for Gunnar Hansen (of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre fame) and played up the laughs and cheese a bit more and was infinitely more entertaining. Skeeter’s best hope would have been to turn itself into a light-hearted, self-aware romp instead of trying, and failing, to go down the serious route. Tonally, Skeeter gets it wrong with nonsense about the destruction of the environment and how the town has been slowly losing its identity over the years…. yeah, yeah, yeah. This is not the time nor the place for grandiose evangelising on top of a soapbox.
Final Verdict
Never mind the giant mosquitoes - Skeeter alone will suck the life out of you. I don’t think it deserved the place it used to hold in IMDB’s Bottom 100 (it was there at time of original writing a long time ago) but it’s still pretty awful from the off and is a tough slog to get through, even when the carnage begins to kick in.
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Skeeter Director(s): Clark Brandon Writer(s): Darlene Andrea, Clark Brandon, Lanny Horn, Joseph Luis Rubin (original screenplay) Actor(s): Tracy Griffith, Jim Youngs, Charles Napier, Jay Robinson, William Sanderson, Michael J. Pollard, Eloy Casados, John Putch Duration: 95 mins |  |
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