I’d like to take this moment to personally apologize to the Sci-Fi Channel. For years, whenever I saw a particularly poor Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie, I’d say it was ‘Raptor Island’, ‘S.S. Doomtrooper’, ‘Mansquito’ bad… but here’s the thing… I’m ashamed to say that I’d never even seen ‘Mansquito’. I thought I had seen ‘Mansquito’, but then thinking back I believe I had confused ‘Mansquito’ with some other Mosquito movie. Maybe ‘Skeeter’ or ‘Mr. Mosquito’ or something. I can’t remember. Last night I decided to rectify this as my Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie completist quest blindly continues, and we saw ‘Mansquito’, and I have to say… it wasn’t all that bad. In fact, on our sliding Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie scale, we’d probably have to give ‘Mansquito’ a B+. That’s a C for a regular movie, but we don’t grade these against regular movies.

Ray Erickson (Matt Jordon) is a bad dude. Just the kind of dude that doesn’t need to be turned into a giant mosquito, but that’s what’s going to happen to the death row inmate since we need to do some human tests on this new research that will hopefully stomp out the Boolyboo Virus. I can’t remember what they actually called it. This virus, which is killing a lot of the population of Bulgaria… uh… I mean New York City… is passed along via mosquito and hard working virologist Dr. Jennifer Allen (Musetta Vander) and Liz, her sizzling hot assistant (Christa Campbell), think they might have created the mutated strain of a mosquito to stomp out this thing. This is why their scurrilous boss had Ray redirected to their lab for tests. Ray gets free, kills Liz…. NOOOOOOOOO… explodes some stuff in the lab and gets infected with Mansquito Juice. Jennifer is infected too, just not as bad.

Investigating Ray’s breakout is Jennifer’s boyfriend and hard working NYPD detective Thomas Randall (Corin Nemec), the same guy who put Ray on death row so he knows what Ray is capable of. When Tom and his partner Charlie (Patrick Drieikuass) found Ray’s ex-girlfriend all dead and stuff, with a big hole in her face and missing all of her blood, these crack detectives figure something is up. When about twenty more people pop up with big holes in their faces, missing most of their blood, they know something’s up because they’re crack detectives.

Then there’s Tom’s girl Jennifer. This infection that she is unaware of right at the moment has given her a crazy appetite and turned her into a freaky sexual dynamo. Normally that would be cool, but of course the downside is that it’s also gradually turning her into a giant mosquito, which isn’t all that cool. Then Detective Tom met the new Ray who is completely Mansquitoed out, and he was about to do Tom in until Tom tazed him. Mansquito was like ‘Don’t Taze me Bro!’ Okay, so Mansquito didn’t really say that since he’s lost the ability to speak, but I know he was thinking it. Tom subsequently had Charlie put out an APB on an indestructible giant bug. Seriously, he did that, not that it yielded any results since Mansquito’s stealth abilities were simply amazing. You would think a guy that looked like that wouldn’t blend in so well.

Mansquito, who at this point has lost all semblance of his humanity, just wants to feed and find a mate. And oh… does Mansquito feed. Mansquito and his disturbingly phallic proboscis must’ve sucked the blood out of at least two hundred people in this movie. Don’t know why he kept stabbing them in face though. Regardless, it’s come down the this; Mansquito and his retractable proboscis wants to mate, Jennifer wants to avoid being mated, and Tom wants to save his girl from turning into a giant mosquito. Not everybody is going to get what they want.

Directed by Tibor Takacs who has crafted a number of Sci-Fi Originals, this being the best of the ones I’ve seen… sorry ‘Ice Spiders’… ‘Mansquito’ comes off a little like the bastard child of ‘Mimic’ mixed with ‘The Fly’, and if you have to cross a couple of species, those aren’t bad choices to choose from.

One of the things that worked for ‘Mansquito’, which I would normally decry in a movie about a man-mosquito going around eating people, is how darned serious this movie is. Corin Nemec, normally considered a comic actor, was channeling the ghost of Mike Mannix for his role as hardcore Detective Tom with his furrowed brow and clinical approach to his role as the Mansquito Hunter. And sure, we know the concept of a seven foot, 350 pound flying Man / Mosquito is completely ridiculous, but nobody else in this movie seemed aware of this and the film was all the better for it.

You want action? ‘Mansquito’ has that in spades because there is nowhere else you can go to witness a Man vs. Mansquito vs. GirlSquito showdown. You want violence? Did I tell you that Mansquito killed almost everybody in this movie and killed them horribly? Believe me when I tell you that there is no easy way out of the game when you go head up with Mansquito. And this is another clear instance where a dude in a rubber suit trumps bad CGI all day long. You want sex? Well, there’s not much of that but Musetta Vander does walk around in her underwear a bit and looks fab doing it. Yeah, they might some logical issues here or a biological misstep there, but our only real issue with ‘Mansquito’ is I didn’t get the pleasure of seeing ‘Mansquito 2’. I mean they made a ‘Raptor Island 2’, but couldn’t dream up a ‘Mansquito 2’? Especially considering Dr. Jennifer released her genetically altered mosquitoes to the sky to allegedly ‘help us’, when I’m pretty sure each of those mosquitoes was infected with Mansquito Juice which means that the sequel pretty much writes itself. There is still time to do this, but come on… I think Corin Nemec is available.