13 Nights of Hallowe'en: Night #3 Mimic: Sentinel

Sequels are something in cinema that are often
maligned, especially by critics. The need to compare a sequel to its original is natural but best avoided. A film should stand on its own, or fall on its own to be fair. Tonight’s movie is a sequel. It is the third in the Mimic franchise. For some reason the number is left out of this sequel’s title and it is simply called “Mimic: Sentinel”. While all it takes for a movie to be a sequel is to carry on with some part from the previous movie--a character, a creature, a storyline--sometimes sequel take their own direction, blaze a new trail. This movie falls into that category. At the same time it is not extremely divergent. It is still in the horror vein, and it still has the Mimic bugs, the Judas Breed.

“Mimic: Sentinel” can be described--it is by even the director--as “Rear Window” with Mimic bugs. As funny as this sounds on the surface this is a seriously good movie. J.T. Petty is the writer and director of this film. Comparisons between this movie and “Rear Window” can only be a good thing. It has great suspense, some really nice mystery, and satisfies from start to finish. Some people are going to wish for more material with the Mimic bugs in it, but this one has about as much scene time for the special effects as the original film. It is next to impossible to say if this sequel is better than the first movie in the trilogy, they are very different movies even staying in the same genre and sharing the link that they do. The best that can be said is see this movie and judge for yourself.

Mood: tired.
Music: Spookshow Baby by Rob Zombie off of Hellbilly Deluxe.

Trilogies and Series

Our friends in the Fantasy community are very used to having their tales done in series of books. From the minimal contact I have with that genre I cannot name a single stand alone Fantasy book except for maybe Piers Anthony’s Killobyte, and with a book like that it is a pretty tenuous connection. Still, in horror we have a few series. Notably there is Stephen King’s Dark Tower, there are the multiple sets of books from Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series of series, and there are the series from Anne Rice.

I for one am a huge fan of book series. I draw this huge mental connection between them and television series. There are things that can be done within the scope of more than one book that are, at the least, much more difficult to do within a single novel. The requirements to write a successful series, of which trilogies are just a constricted scale version, are only extensions of what makes a successful novel. The most important of these are of course the characters. The characters that carry on from book to book have to be that much more compelling and able to carry the reader’s interest for that much longer.

The thing that I really admire about series is the ability that they give the author to be more subtle, and to build more intricate plots and relationships. This can be put to most spectacular use when there is an over-reaching plot to all of the books, an undercurrent that can be separate from each single book’s plot. I am speaking of the difference between the type of series that is like a single novel of immense size broken into separate books, compared to the type of series that is episodic with an overarching plot tying these episodes together.

There is also a third kind of series as well. That would be the kind where the books do not have to have characters in common or a plot that runs through them. These series are tied together by different criteria. An obvious first example comes from Stephen King’s Castle Rock novels. They can be considered a series because of their common setting, the town of Castle Rock. In a slightly different vein there can also be a series of books based solely on a thematic connection. I cannot name such an example from what I have read, but I am writing just such a trilogy. I always practice what I preach.

Mood: harried.
Music: 4000 Rainy Nights by Stratovarius and The Edge by Vince Neil.

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