This one starts out with a young man peering out of his room window at the view of a building behind his house. He is constantly taking pictures of the people in and around the rear of the building and from each of the occupants in the apartments across the yard. From those pictures, he makes a collage on his own wall writing down the names of those people and assigning labels to those still unknown to him, like “The garbage man”, “Ma Bell” (an old lady always on the phone), and “The birdman” (a guy who has a bunch of birds as pets), etc.
This homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window works out pretty good in the beginning. We learn that his voyeuristic tendencies are supplemented by his teenage sister who goes out and gathers information like the real names of the people that he uses to update his ‘wall’ and that he’s also got his eye on one of the pretty young girls in the building he spies upon.
But why is he such a creepy voyeur at all? The man, you see, was one of the kids who survived the Judas plague that made all those kids sick in the first Mimic movie. He’s now a reclusive ‘bubble boy’, largely confined to his room, taking whiffs off a puffer, keeping fresh oxygen close at hand, and hyper allergic to smoke and other strong smells.
When people start disappearing he does not think much of it at first, but then he witnesses some disturbing sights in his field of view. This leads his sister and that young woman (who also has a crush on him) to do some further investigating that will eventually unveil the truth that those nasty Judas bugs are still around.
It took awhile to settle in this movie, being so different from it’s predecessors, but I thought that it was interesting enough, albeit a bit slow. Things pick up a bit with the appearance of cult favorite Lance Henriksen in an enigmatic role but the crux remains on piecing together all the tidbits of information he gathers from the goings on in each of the apartments he spies. He is hampered by a cop who not only does not believe his recounting of the things he has seen that may shed light on the disappearances, but makes then makes matters worse by starting to date his own mother.
An oddly satisfying movie but there are a few leaps of logic that takes away from the whole. The worst part if the disappointing abrupt ending that is so ambiguous I thought they may have missed a complete reel when they cobbled this DVD together.
Lazarus' Lair 