Show Some Love: Sucker aka A Mosquito-Man
This is the first entry in a recurring series for Horror Bound where I seek out the most obscure horror films with the goal of getting more people to watch, rate and review. Hidden Gem wouldn’t be an accurate description as many of these films are basically lost and forgotten, buried under an avalanche of content on the various streaming platforms that grows every day. To find these films, I scoured the deep recesses of Letterboxd which has over 5,000 horror films listed as available for streaming on Amazon, Netflix, Tubi and Shudder. I sorted the films by popularity and went through the bottom 1,000 or so films checking cover art, reading synopses and watching over 100 trailers for films on YouTube to put together the list of films for this series.
This month’s film is the 2013 super hero/body horror film SUCKER aka A MOSQUITO-MAN
Tagline and Synopsis:
Payback’s an itch
Down on his luck an unlikely hero, Jim Crawley is having the worst day of his miserable life. He decides to end it all and even fails at that. An improbable event changes everything and he becomes a half man/half creature.
Stats compared to Similar films:
Letterboxd: 19 views, 2 reviews (Compared to The Fly 107K views)
IMDB: 376 ratings, 13 reviews (Compared to Brightburn 61,000 ratings)
Rotten Tomatoes: NOTHING (Compared to The Manster 679 ratings)
The movie opens with a young girl being chased through an alleyway by muggers when suddenly, a half-man, half-mosquito comes to her aide by sucking the mugger’s blood from their bodies with a giant tentacle that comes from his mouth. The police coroner is played by Fox 2 Detroit local news man Lee Thomas and that's when I was like, “oh shit, this film was made in my home state!” and let me tell you, mosquitoes are a huge issue here. Everyone in Michigan has numerous bottles of bug spray in their homes as well as a collection of citronella candles and tiki torches to ward off the little blood suckers. Of course a Michigan director would make a horror movie about a giant mosquito man.
After a very cartoonish opening credits scene, we are introduced to Jim Crawley, played by director, producer and writer Michael Manasseri, a down on his luck guy who works at a nuclear power plant. Low budget alarm bells may be going off but no, the power plant is not how he turns into a giant mosquito man. Jim loses his job when a workplace rival proposes a 9 point plan to replace Jim’s job with a robot. This scene includes an excellent cameo from low budget, obscure film legend Lloyd Kaufamn as the greedy boss. Jim leaves the office and finds his car towed from the parking lot. On the walk home he finds his wife cheating on him with his workplace rival and finally, it starts raining. Jim, distraught, decides to take his own life by running into traffic, but nothing goes his way and he trips just short of oncoming traffic and is consoled by a good Samaritan, Dr. Dave, but the good doctor’s intentions are not as altruistic as they first seem.
Dave takes Jim to a local bar to drink his woes away and that’s when we find out about the subtext of the movie. You see there is some sort of pandemic going around that is being spread by mosquito bites. The whole thing is so bad that there are nightly curfews and the government is thinking of calling a national state of emergency. Once Jim gets sufficiently drunk, Dr. Dave kidnaps him and takes him to a secret laboratory where he is using Jim as a guinea pig for a new anti-mosquito vaccine. The vaccine has adverse side effects that appear to have killed Jim but it’s later found to have transformed him into a giant, bloodsucking mosquito man with the power to control other mosquitoes. The film progresses with Jim saving his workplace crush Evelyn from muggers, getting revenge on his cheating wife, the security guard at the office, his boss and his workplace rival all the while the police are looking for him as the mysterious mosquito killer.
The CGI used in the film is probably the one indicator of how low the budget on this film had to have been, but it is used sparingly. The make-up and practical effects are on par with many big budget horror films as Jim’s mosquito face is extremely well done and doesn’t look cheap at all. A big shout out to Robert Kurtzsman’s Creature Corps. The acting is also very good in this film. Often times these obscure low budget films are just a collection of friends of the director flopping around on screen, but the actors in this film are very well seasoned and believable which is fantastic. When you watch a low budget film like this, there are many things to take the viewer out of the movie, often times the cinematography appears cheap because it’s digital and lighting is hit or miss, the last thing a low budget film needs is poor acting and a bad script, this film has neither.
Overall, Sucker aka A Mosquito-Man is a fantastic horror film that deserves way more views than the few it has. The premise is unique and interesting without being absurd. The technical aspects of the film, although low budget, aren’t cringey or dull. The special effects are absolutely amazing and the characters are definitely ones that you will care about and enjoy seeing on screen. Check this film out today streaming on Amazon under the name A Mosquito-Man and be sure to leave a review or rating on one of the various platforms like letterboxd or Rotten Tomatoes to Show Some Love to SUCKER.
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