Mosquito the Rapist (1977)

“Mosquito the Rapist” (1977, original title “Mosquito der Schänder”, aka “Bloodlust”, directed by Marijan David Vajda, screenplay by N. Supasi)

Review By Goat Scrote

     The ToG Board of Misdirectors had to have a meeting about this movie, actually. We all watched it. All 13 members of the coven agreed that what we had seen was unusual and disturbing, one of those rare movies that falls outside the usual continuum of “good” to “bad”, and that it definitely deserved a review.

Waitress! More Fiddle Faddle and Diet Slice all around for the TOG board members

     We also unanimously agreed that none of us liked it, didn’t know what the fuck to make of it, really, and didn’t want to see it again. Somebody was going to have to watch it one more time though, and be the one to write the review. I drew the short straw, so to speak. Trust me, you don’t want to know how we actually decide these things, unless you have an unhealthy interest in goat vivisection.

     So here I am. Let’s get this over with, then.

     Some art is meant to make you feel yucky, not to entertain you. “Mosquito the Rapist” is not a recreational good-time movie unless you have some very specific, profoundly dark personal tastes. It’s based on the life and crimes of Kuno Hoffman, the “Vampire of Nuremberg”, a blood-fetishist necrophile and multiple murderer. The movie was made in Germany just a handful of years after Hoffman was caught and sentenced to life in prison.

That Nuremberg guy, Oh yeah I sold him all his tools!

     The best elevator pitch we’ve collectively been able to come up with is that it’s Romero’s “Martin” (1976) meets Buttgereit’s “Nekromantik” (1988), set on the wrong side of the tracks in Wonka Town. There’s plenty of blood, lots of horrible mutilation, and even lesbian sex just like you’d expect from a more entertainment-oriented horror product, but despite the trappings this is no typical gore film. There are some interesting artistic choices in the movie, and it’s not quite like anything else I’ve seen. It’s a grimy, scuzzy, nasty, uncomfortable film which gets grindingly repetitive after a while. It reaches its antisocial climax, and then suddenly halts with a token effort at resolution which brings no sense of closure whatsoever to the whole awful experience.

Mosquito, Oh yeah he got that straw idea from me!

     The main character is deaf-mute and we never even learn his real name, only his criminal signature, Mosquito. We get to know him through his actions and flashbacks to his very troubled past. None of the other characters are ever named at all. Much of the movie has no musical score, and since the main character never speaks and spends most of his time with corpses, all we hear are ambient sounds. The background music, when it’s present, is good. It’s got a psychedelic rock feel and is somehow very fitting for the movie. Much respect to David Llewellyn, who did the score. This had to be a tough one to work on.

     It’s just another ugly day in scumtown. Some ape smacks around women just for the hell of it out on the front stoop. Enter the character we will come to know as Mosquito (Werner Pochath), a reasonably pleasant-looking, somewhat timid young teutonic man in a  shabby brown coat. He puts himself between the attacker and the main victim, gets beaten up, and has his head clobbered into a wall.

I just need to find a necrophiliac Kristin Stewart and it'll be "Mosquito's Twilight"

     From this initial introduction, putting his own body on the line to protect someone else, you’d almost think he was a really decent guy. Then we get a little glimpse inside his mind after he gets bonked on the head. The fight in Wonka Town fades out, and we fade in on a strange looking marble-white corpse with white hair, in a coffin. Mosquito is alone with her. He gouges out her eyeballs one at a time, puts them on a handkerchief, and plays with them.

Freak your friends out with this Mortician's Thing Maker playset!

     The movie is off to a gory and surreal start. The effects are solid and it has already managed to establish a distinctive style. The first time through I thought that this might turn out to be one of those obscure, under-appreciated diamonds in the rough which has just been overlooked, perhaps because it was simply never distributed properly.

     Not… exactly. It’s absolutely an artistic success, in the same way as “Nekromantik”, "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" (1975), “Two Girls, One Cup”, or “Forrest Gump” (1994). It hurts you and it goes on hurting, and when it’s done you want to hurt it back but you can’t. (Damn you, Gump. DAMN YOU!) I took a quick shower afterward and felt a little less dirty, but it’s one of those cases where I’m probably never going to fully scrub the stain away. There is just not enough brain-bleach in the whole world.

     Mosquito works at a desk job doing bookkeeping. His coworkers are jerks who resent having to work with someone deaf-mute. They ridicule and abuse him, sometimes even physically. Not a very satisfying work life, then, either.

There's always Blow-Up sex doll Thurs to look forward to

     Back home in the absolute bleakness of scumtown, ol’ Smacky-fists is up to the usual, beating his wife and daughter and whomever else happens to be weaker and within reach. Mosquito gets in the way again, and enters the wonderful world of brain trauma one more time. He has a flashback to being beaten by his drunken father. Dad knocks him down, kicks him in the balls, and pummels him with a table. Young Mosquito is barely conscious when his little sister wanders in and interrupts… so Father of the Year leaves off beating his son and molests his daughter. Then he beats her unconscious too and crushes one of her dolls spitefully underfoot. Mosquito watches the whole thing, broken and helpless. Through other flashbacks we learn that his father’s repeated beatings are what destroyed his hearing and speech as a child.

     Okay… I am 7 minutes into the movie, and I am sick to my stomach and I kind of want to cry. Have you ever had someone try to remove your soul through your eyeballs? I’m pretty sure that’s what the filmmakers were after, and that’s why I call it an artistic success.

Come On Goaty, don't be sad, here's a chubby baby painting to cheer you up!

     As an adult, Mosquito collects baby dolls in his black-painted apartment and keeps a pet gerbil. He opens the cage… oh no no NO, let’s just not, please. Stop fondling the gerbil. I don’t like this movie anymore please take me back home RIGHT NOW. Oh, thank fucking Crom. The gerbil goes back in the cage and nothing… unsavory… happens. This is the moment when I realize that the only way I’m going to get through the movie is the same way I’d get through being dosed with an entire gram of tainted LSD. I’m going to just sit back and watch the bad trip unfold and remember it can’t actually hurt me as long as I don’t move.

Just go with it man! It'll all be over soon, then you can have some B-12 and Orange slices

     He wanders the street and gets picked up by a hooker. Back at her place, she washes her pussy in a businesslike fashion and lays on the bed for a quickie. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with her and lays his head down on her breasts. Finally she loses patience and throws him out.

German prostitutes all looked like Mrs. Garrett or another house keeper on Different Strokes back then.

     Back home he lays a doll on the bed and smashes it up a little, then licks ketchup off his hand. The motifs of bloody hands and crushed dolls dominate Mosquito’s life until he just can’t take it anymore.

     He borrows some tools from a neighbor and rides his motor scooter to a graveyard, breaks into the funeral home, and examines the bodies laid out out for viewing. He cuts open a woman’s funeral shroud and starts cutting her flesh. then his own, mixes the blood together and has a taste. (I have questions. Wouldn’t she be full of embalming fluid? If she wasn’t, when does the blood of a corpse start coagulating? I bet the internet could tell me, or a mortician, but I think I’m just going to chalk it up to artistic license and move on.)

What's gonna come out, French's embalming yello Mustard ?

     He signs his work in blood on the wall. At work he writes the name Mosquito over and over in red ink. His coworkers mock his doll-collecting and sexual inadequacy. One of the work-jerks gropes an inflatable sex doll in a way that mirrors the attack on his sister. He later has a repeat vision of mutilating the eyes of the white-haired woman.

     Everyone in this town is a total asshole except the cute young woman who lives in the same building (Birgit Zamulo). She gets a warning from her mom to stay away from Mosquito and she immediately does the opposite, dancing and showing off her new dress to him. She seems a little nutty herself but in a gentle and charming way.

Wes Anderson guest directed this segment

     Speaking of gentle and charming, Mosquito has a jar with preserved eyeballs in it at home, which he fondles and leers at really inappropriately. I just don’t think this guy should be allowed to keep a gerbil. He goes out in a nice suit (like it’s a date?) and enters a chapel with a pale, black-haired corpse on view in a coffin. He uses a straight razor to gruesomely decapitate her so he can play with the head. This is the goriest effect in the film and it's both well done and gruesome.

     Soon the ghoulish crimes of the unknown “Mosquito” are the talk of the office and the neighborhood. He continues raiding funeral homes, tagging them “Mosquito” and molesting corpses. He gets interrupted or nearly caught several times. At one point he collects and preserves a new set of eyeballs. On another occasion a night watchman interrupts him. The watchman sees the tag scribbled on the wall but somehow doesn’t make the connection to the string of crimes... or he just doesn't care? He hangs out and eats a sandwich in the corpse-filled room which must reek of formaldehyde and/or rotting flesh. Huh. This guy isn’t as weird as Mosquito, but still.

I'm funkier than a Mosquito's Tweeter!

     Eventually Mosquito’s luck runs out and he’s cock-blocked by a watchman just as he’s perving on a fresh batch of bodies. He throttles the guy and trashes the place in a blue-balls-fueled snit before he runs off. He is obviously getting sloppy. He even leaves his apartment door open while he is napping. One of his neighbors walks inside, wakes him up, and points out the window. The only nice person in his life, the young woman in the dress, is outside dancing on the edge the rooftops. Her parents try to get her to go back inside but she deliriously topples right off the edge and smashes to the ground in front of them all like one of Mosquito’s wrecked dolls.

     At a store Mosquito picks up a hollow glass fork with two points at the end, a glass “vampire straw” which he uses to suck blood out of the dolls and corpses. He plays with the dolls and blood he has collected on an altar decorated with surgical tools and jars of human eyeballs. He was all wrong in the head before, but now even his usual bloody perversions have lost their power to satisfy and he gradually becomes more and more frenzied.

     He goes to a brothel to watch two girls get it on, which is actually just about the most normal thing he has done so far in the movie other than go to work. While they get into it with each other, he hallucinates or fantasizes that people from his past are in the room with them, including his dead neighbor. Whatever he’s trying to get out of the experience, it isn’t working so he gets up and walks out without the two women even noticing. Back home he trashes his room, stabs the walls, tears down his vintage HR Giger prints (YOU UNBELIEVABLE BASTARD!) and dumps his eyeball collection.

Destroy everything else, but for Chrissakes, leave the Giger alone!

     Cut to a funeral procession for his neighbor. He stays in the graveyard afterward, climbs into her unfilled grave, opens the coffin, pulls her out, and takes her rigored body to a bench. He makes out with her and remembers all the good times they had when he would furtively peep at her. In a way he is finally having the perfect moment with his dream girl, she has become a corpse-doll for him, but he is also overcome by grief. He cuts himself and wipes his own blood on her lips in an inversion of his usual vampiric procedure. Then he freaks out and runs away, leaving the body on the bench. Why am I surprised? Was I expecting this guy to show respect for the dead?

     He visits one funeral parlor after another and uses the glass straw to suck blood from women and also dribble it back onto them like he's making a Jackson Pollock painting. (More like Hermann Nitsch, actually, if you're into that kind of thing.) As he scooters around town failing to find happiness, he sees a couple kissing in their car and follows them out to an isolated spot where they plan to make love. He hallucinates his crush again, dancing in her dress. He stalks the couple like a predator moving in on prey until Mosquito is spying on them right through glass. He smashes the window open and kills them both with a knife.

Check out the fun bags on that hosehound!

     Apparently, the double murder finally gets him off. He looks pretty pleased as he covers his face with fresh blood and admires the effect in the mirror. He imagines his neighbor in some lovely soft-focus place with romantic music while he molests and sucks blood from his victims.

I'm Neil Patrick Harris and I haven't pooped in a week! 

     It took some work, but Mosquito is back in his happy place again. He’s so swept away, however, that he ends up leaving damning evidence behind at the crime scene. Later at work, the police show up with his vampire straw, and Mosquito knows he’s finally busted. He just goes back to his mental happy place with the dead girl, running through the woods together, and that’s that.

     Okay, WTF seriously you guys, how come Skunkape got to review "Emanuelle in America" and I got "Mosquito the Rapist"? Fuuuuuck. I thought kinky movies are supposed to be fun. Let's agree never to speak of this experience again. (OK, Goat we're sorry we hazed you with this cinematic punch in the balls, please forgive us-- the editors).

WATCH WITH EXTREME CAUTION!

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