MOSQUITO DER SCHANDER - Mid seventies German production featuring a mute file clerk who, humiliated and abused by everyone around him, decides to pop down the local morgue with his glass proboscis and start tapping the veins of the only ones who won't sneer in his face and treat him like a subhuman... sound depressing? Yeah, kind of, although interminable scenes of lead Werner Pochath bobbing about on a seemingly undersized scooter do undermine things a little on that score... 'joking' aside, 'Mosquito' is still pretty bleak, despite the scooter comedy-basic. 'Mosquito's elements are pretty horror-basic too, in that we're faced with lone ant/protagonist steadily losing it in an isolated bedsit surrounded by dolls and Giger posters, then a whole slew of corpse desecrations before a wonky resolution. Giger posters I can overlook, but dolls, I'm always up for more dolls. Despise them as clichés, but I can't get enough of them. Neither can Charles Band, and surely he's OK? Maybe I'm joking again. Here, the dolls are creepy, in that implicitly and slightly inappropriately eroticised way which smacks of seventies tinge. There's a whole lot of 'seventies tinge' about 'Mosquito', and in fact everything feels completely in tune with my mind's ersatz re-creation of the Euro-bloc circa 1977, right down to the spiralling uniformity of a plunge down an office block stairwell. The flip-side of this is the (slightly less effective) 'gothic' of some of the morgue and graveyard sequences. It's all tightly marshalled and boxed in though, and the limited horizons of Pochath's existence - work, bedsit, morgue (shit, gotta say at this point, he's doing one better than I am) - inspire a claustrophobic ambience, which is augmented by direction in the correct Euro-sleaze key of red-lit exploitation and vaguely arty surrealism. It's pretty gruesome... in fact, feels gorier than it is, the rubbish special effects lending a certain tawdriness to proceedings which is confirmed by the feel of the movie overall. What makes it more poignant than a mere low rent wallow is the narrative line which follows the fate of Mosquito's muse, a neighbour whose dreamy innocence parallels his own (sort of, minus the corpse ravaging). I cried at the end! That dancing in the forest! OK, I didn't cry, but I almost cried at 'Bright Eyes' when I was a kid. Anyway, if you dug 'Martin' but thought it was a little too optimistic, look no further. I have a feeling that some or many will balk at one early scene which depicts a quite hideous act of parental cruelty in a way which maybe seems a bit questionable in a statutory sense, but 'Mosquito' is a likely recommendation for weird people who like weird films about weird people.
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