Eight Legged Freaks

How can you go wrong with giant mutated spiders? Watch and see.

2002

Review: December 28, 2005

Director: Ellory Elkayem

Starring: David Arquette, Kari Wuhrer, Scarlett Johansson, Doug E. Doug, Rick Overton

It might help you wring a few more giggles out of this.

THE SETUP:

Spiders in an Arizona town mutate to gigantic proportions then venture forth to kill and kill again.

DISCUSSION:

The idea of giant mutated spiders, second only to giant mutated sharks really, somehow led me to see this movie twice at the theater, and buy it on DVD the other day. Watching the DVD I thought: Why? But I guess I have in my defense that it only cost three dollars.

This movie is a conscious evocation of the cheesy B-movies of the 50s, and as such it ruins a lot of the inadvertent fun by being perhaps a little TOO conscious. When you have a wide release movie winking at its audience, and its audience is 12-year-old boys, it can make for some groan-inducing moments for anyone old enough to shave, but this movie handled it well enough for me to see it twice and buy the fucking DVD for $3, so there ya go. Who’s the fool now?

Anyway, it seems that a barrel of chemical waste accidentally dumped into a pond is causing the crickets around there to get bigger, and since a guy with a spider farm [spider farm?] is feeding them to his spiders [you know, the ones at his farm, his spider farm] and they start getting really big and ornery. Why the town is never menaced by giant crickets or other pond fauna is never explained.

So then the somewhat charming David Arquette returns to town after 10 years and meets up with his chain-smoking Aunt Gladys, and rekindles his romance with the even more charming Kari Wuhrer, who is the sheriff in town, and mother to Scarlett Johansson and Scott Terra, who played the young Daredevil in, you know, Daredevil. I find it a shame that Kari Wuhrer is such a staple of crappy horror movies and TV fare, because she really is quite charming and appealing. I’d love to see her get more to do and get the attention she deserves.

Anyway, since there is absolutely nothing else for the movie to do to pad out its 100-minute running time until the attacks happen, we get some pointless character development, some crap about some mall that’s either running all the businesses out or going out of business itself, I didn’t care to figure out which, and some tepid attacks in which we don’t really see any spiders, all designed to pass time until we get further into the movie.

The first big attack is a somewhat fun thing in which jumping spiders attack teens on motorbikes. It’s kind of silly fun. The filmmakers have given the spiders little gremlin noises akin to the vocabulary of the Hamburgular, which in a way makes the entire movie a giant Warner Brothers cartoon, and in another way is annoying if, say, you’re not a 13-year-old boy. The spiders, especially these jumping ones, are also kind of cute. The movie revels in them getting squished and jumping around comically, and also being evil, and let’s face it, there’s just not enough gleefully evil characters in movies nowadays.

The special effects are pretty good, I thought. If you saw the scene in the second, interminably tedious Harry Potter movie where he’s menaced by a bunch of spiders, you’ve seen the same software we’re talking about here. I would say one of the main appeals of this movie is just in watching the special effects. This movie also features rapper Doug E. Doug as a paranoid bandit radio announcer, who functions as the nutty black character who says really loud inappropriate things, which every film obviously needs. This is one of those movies in which you watch the black guy act like an idiot and comic foil to everyone and everything, feeling embarrassment for the actor who has to scream out such lines, and ask yourself; “Uh, how is this NOT racist?”

After about an hour, the highlight of the film occurs, which is when we have an extended scene of the spiders rampaging through town. We see quite a few people getting munched and grabbed and spun into webs, and also a lot of spider “comedy,” for instance when a spider bites into a stuffed moose head, then spits out the fluff from its mouth. Hoo boy—it’s ALL THAT FUNNY! Though I have to admit that I didn’t find it all quite so tedious on the first two go rounds. It was only this last time, on my $3 DVD [anyone want to buy it?] that I found this movie a real chore to sit through. Even while employing considerable fast-forwarding.

You pretty much know how the rest is going to go, but you may be surprised at how long it takes to get there. I can’t even muster up the energy to bother writing about it any more. It was amusing the first few times, but I guess I’ve matured a great deal since 2002. Hooray for me.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

You could do worse, but I wouldn’t attempt to watch it more than once.