REALLY BUGGED

By RICHARD CORLISS

Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) paces edgily on a deserted New York City subway platform. A brilliant scientist who has recently used genetic engineering to eradicate an epidemic, Susan is not smart enough to realize she's in a horror movie and ought to be wary of approaching a tall, hooded stranger to ask the time. The stranger turns and reveals its hideous face--ewwww, a killer cockroach! It enfolds Susan in its great wings and flies off into the subway's dank underworld.

A great horror moment, like this one in Guillermo Del Toro's Mimic, works as both pulp and poetry. It gets scare shivers tickling the lay audience while connoisseurs nod sagely at the canonical resonance; think of the creature as Dracula spreading its capelike wings and Sorvino as both a Frankenstein whose experiment went bad and a Fay Wray to the insect world's King Kong. The roach and its sibs are Susan's mutant creations; they have the gift of mimicking other species. If Susan's commando crew doesn't Off the bugs quick, New York could become a slightly less fabulous place to live.

"Maybe insects are God's favorite creatures," says an old man to a doting grandchild in Del Toro's fine 1992 Cronos. The same themes and similar characters show up here; the director is apparently buggy for bugs and for strange, trusting children. For its first hour--up to and including that airborne kidnapping of our heroine--Mimic is a suavely creepy essay in entomophobia. Then the film gets a severe case of the stupes. The creatures keep Susan alive (inexplicable unless she is meant to be mated with the king bug), and they stop evolving into humans (so we never, alas, see the final stage of a really uggy bug-man). Horror-film heroines are typically doomed to lose their wits halfway through the picture. This time it happened to the director.

--R.C.