Eight Legged Freaks | Review

No-brainer popcorn flick gets entangled in a web of ennui.

Call it the summer of spiders; actually the first one was a single common denominator crime fighting force to be reckon with, where as these ones are referred to as a town’s worst nightmare. Hitting the screens is Ellory Elkayem’s larger than life tale of terror Eight Legged Freaks the sort of ultra-cheesy popcorn movie flick brings back the notion for the old style of B-flick antagonists in a large dose and form of spiders. Coming at us in the same sort of vein as a Gremlins, you get the ultimate showdown between pest and the easily crushable peasants, integrated with the common action scene-like appearance of a Jurassic Park mode where you get a town full of applicants for the 100-meter dash.

Giant spiders take over the small hick-town where no one has heard of the notion of carrying a cell phone, actually not true, they own exactly a total of one phone and must come up with a way to quickly outrun and outthink there predators. Don’t worry, the film does very little of the-let’s sit down and figure out things. The man in charge, -sorry no Aliens kick ass Sigourney Weaver as the ideal habitant but rather the Forrest Gump heroics of a David Arquette (Scream) character. In a plot that doesn’t spend much time on character development with a very poor first half-hour of irrelevant subplots, we are given a little bit of origin of the spider and the ideology of the typical common folk town, and then the film jets off into the land of shot-gun barrels and slime facials. Arquette would normally never cut it as a candidate to carry any film, but this seems to be the perfect picture formula for the phone commercial nutty theatrics. But unfortunately, the lousy script doesn’t use the actor for what he is worth- we must wait until the film’s end in the climbing the antenna sequence to get treated to his goofball acting talent and the film’s only fun and genuine shriek of terror. How is it that a plot asks for an almost complete annihilation of a population and then have the remaining characters seem to take it all in stride- the main female character Kari Wuhrer (Kissing a Fool) makes it safely behind the metal door, but what happens to all the others trapped behind-no looks of concern and no screams for help behind the door makes me wonder how they can bypass the chaos and confusion? Perhaps I was hoping too much for the old space invaders from outer space 1950’s movies where the shrieks of terror were part of the formula for fun.

You’ve got to be a real fan of this type of genre of ‘monster mayhem movies’ to appreciate a film that keeps the laughs far and few between, that gives us the same bland cast of characters roles and that gives more forgettable CGI flashes like the knocking off dirt-bike riders sequence than the delicious moments that make you want to jump out of your seat. With no new material, no new angles and none of those guilty pleasures of watching a really bad B-movie, Eight Legged Spiders becomes a forgettable experience.

Rating 1.5 stars