Spiders

This movie is so fake. I mean, if this movie was produced in 1975, it would've been a great movie. But with the current (or back in 2000) computer-animated special effects, they could've done it better! Already in the beginning at the part where the space-shuttle exploded, I could clearly see it was fake. Not to mention the spider 'Mother in law' itself... almost hilarious to see. It moved on like it was guided by strings and looked like it was made of plastic. This can be clearly seen in the part where 'mother-in-law' crawls out of the astronaut's body and flees along the walls. The story itself isn't so thrilling either. A spider being injected by an alien DNA in space. God knows where that alien DNA came from. As far as I can tell, it wasn't told in the movie (maybe I fell asleep of boredom). No, next time it appears on television, I'll pass.

The film Spiders does not intend to be mentioned in the same breath as films like Jaws and the Alien series. It has its tongue planted firmly in its cheek and as a result is hoping for the chance to rub shoulders with gems such as Piranha and Lake Placid. Whilst viewing the film you may tut and groan at some of the scenes with tacky dialogue and acting, it is only near the end when you realise that the producers have attempted to have as much fun as possible, at the expense of all those X-files/Dark Skies/Millennium style conspiracy shows, with a bit of monster movie digs in for good measure.

Nu Image pictures and Hollywood DVD was a combination that would send a shudder down the spine of any British movie fan old enough to remember the turn of the century and advent of DVDs. This isn't because of suspenseful horror movies, on the contrary because of awful ones.

One of their more admirable, a term I'm perhaps using loosely, cooperations was in unleashing Nu Image's game attempt at bringing back the Creature Feature. Spiders was the one I was immediately drawn to, being something of an arachnophobiac.

The movie follows college reporter Marci (Lana Parilla) who is treated as the joke of her paper due to her obsession with aliens and conspiracy theories. Following an encounter with 2 people who claim to be aliens, she drags her sidekicks Slick (Oliver Macready) and Jake (Nick Swarts) to 'Area 21' to try and find out some secrets. This coincides with a space shuttle crashing there following a freak meteor shower interrupting their experiments splicing alien dna into a funnel web spider.

As the wannabe news team look on, shadowy FBI agents led by Agent Grey (Mark Phelan) load the astronaut bodies into a wagon and destroy the shuttle, inadvertently stowing away, they find themselves in a secret underground lab where it transpires the experiments certainly weren't without end result - giant mutant spiders hell bend on breeding and getting bigger by the minute! Can Marci, joining forces with rogue Agent Murphy (Josh Green) stop the spiders before they escape the facility and reach humanity?

Making a B-Movie in the 2000s was a treacherous endeavour. You can play it completely straight and run the risk of being no fun, or wind up being too wink wink nudge nudge 'Aware' and just be eye-rolling (see: Sharknado) but Spiders actually manages to find that sweet spot where it knows it's a silly B movie, but instead of trying to show how smart and 'knowing' it is leans into all the tropes of that. It's not good by any metric, I mean the plot is littered with holes, characters act ridiculously and generally this could have been written in the 50s, but, in a weird way it's all the better for it. It starts off a dark warehouse B movie, it morphs into a giant monster movie, and never even contemplated trying to rationalise the change.

The acting is...well it is what it is. 15 year old me had the biggest crush on Lana Parilla in this. So forgive my weakness on her here. She's not pushing the boundaries but a perfectly capable lead for this time of picture. I was pleased to see she went on to a solid career. Green is workable as a supporting player, and the villainous Mark Phelan is...well he's the double of Willem Dafoe and basically playing a low budget version of him. I couldn't call it 'good' but it's certainly entertaining.

Being made in 2000, the movie landed right as the cusp of a big change in special effects. While it does use some terrible CGI, it's more for smaller, supporting things like explosions. There's some obligatory bad green screen, but most effects are practical, and while I'm not gonna attempt to call them very good, they are better than any cheap CGI spiders that would have been used had this been made even 5 years later. The model spiders are actually quite well done for rubber monsters on a budget, though their use isn't always great - one of the things that freaks me out about spiders is the way their legs move, and this makes the often made mistake of not remotely capturing this, when these walk they sort of animatronically 'March' instead of sinisterly crawling. There's also a scene when the smaller spider is jumping up at a window, and it's clearly swinging on a string.

End of the day, Spiders is what it is. It's not a good movie by any conventional metric, but it knows what it is, takes that ball and runs with it. It's silly, it's cheesy but it's all in good fun. It finishes with a 50s rock n roll song, just to add to its Drive-In feel.

Is it aliens? Is it space spiders? Is it government experimentation? Well this college student reporter is going to find out! Was this on Syfy? Was this rejected by Syfy? Were the producers strung up in a web and given 40 lashes? Do you really want to find out? No.

You would think that statistically speaking, one day I will watch one of the 'Hollywood DVD' series and it turns out to be quite a good film. But after watching this one, I'm still waiting (although at a measly £1 for 4 films, I can't complain too much).

Of course you don't need a massive budget to make a good film. You don't even need a Pulitzer winning script, but Spiders suffers the exact same problems as all of these cheapy sci-fi films. The scened rate scripts barely carry the film along, until the special fx come into play, which are always so bad you either sit there laughing or turn off. Take Aliens for example - a brilliant tension filled film, which barely ever shows the actual aliens.

Story involves a nosy journalist from the college paper coming across a crashed space shuttle, complete with hideously deformed astronauts. They stow away in a truck and manage to get into some kind of secret military installation (seemingly populated by 3 scientists). Without giving too much of the the plot away the arachnids are soon let loose, first in the base then back in town.

I can't write a review without mentioning the ending however. Nasty government man flies in to college in his helicopter (with a rocket launcher on the back seat, obviously) and no one bats an eyelid. Big momma spider also grows from the size of a football to the size of a house in all of 30 seconds. So to sum up; poor scripts, poor effects, poor characters, poor film. But hey, at least it was cheap.