Mimic 2

Mimic 2 is not exactly the sort of release that one has high expectations about. Where can you really go with mutant bugs that grow to giant size and develop human-like disguises? Nowhere except straight- to-video.

Only one of the original cast reappears. Not Mira Sorvino, Jeremy Northam, Charles Dutton or any other name actor, but Alix Koromzay. Who s/he? You can almost imagine the producers going through a list of names, becoming increasingly desperate as they tried to establish some vague connection to Mimic.

Anyway, Alix plays Remi, an entomologist friend of Sorvino's Dr Tyler, who basically vanished from the first film once her plot function had been fulfilled.

Here, she's a biology teacher in a run down inner-city school. Her love life is a mess. She always attracted to the wrong sort of man. But now, everyone she meets seems to wind up dead.

It turns out that some of the Judas breed roaches survived - hardly a revelation - and - rather more surprisingly - have designs on Remi as a breeding queen. Understandably, she's not exactly enamoured with the prospect of some cockroach lovin' when she, a detective and a couple of youngsters find themselves trapped in the abandoned school by the bugs...

There's nothing particularly wrong with Mimic 2, as B-movie monster movies go. It's competently made on all counts. What is lacking, however, is the sense that director Jean de Segonzac has an affinity for the genre - precisely the thing that made Guillermo del Toro's original such a pleasant surprise and lifted it above the rank and file, represented by Species, Lake Placid and this sequel.

Just "another bug hunt", indeed.