Camel Spiders

I am a person who juggles my many music commitments with some free time, which I use to watch movies and listen to music. Save a few tolerable ones, a lot of the SyFy movies are terrible. Camel Spiders is no exception, in fact it is one of SyFy's very worst.

As bad as Titanic II, Mega Piranha, 2010: Moby Dick, Battle of Los Angeles and Quantum Apocalypse are, and they are, awful even, Camel Spiders makes them award-worthy in comparison.

To begin criticising Camel Spiders would be difficult as there is so much wrong. Let's start with how the film is made, Camel Spiders is one of the cheapest looking of all the SyFy movies right down from the slapdash filming to the gimmicky way the gore and such is used.

Camel Spiders completely fails in the script and story too. The script contains some of the worst dialogue I've heard, it was all very forced and cliché-ridden. The story isn't engaging in the least, it was to me a silly premise anyway, but the story itself was bland and predictable with too much time wasted on some of the least interesting story ideas of the movie.

The characters I felt indifferent too, they are annoying and underdeveloped and the camel spiders of the title are not menacing at all and laughable in their design. The direction is sloppy, the soundtrack is forgettable, the sound effects sound distorted and are misplaced and the pace is inconsistent with both rushed and pedestrian moments. And need I mention how wooden across the board the acting was? Overall, a terrible movie and one of SyFy's bottom-of-the-barrel type movies. 0/10 Bethany Cox

A captain and sergeant (Brian Krause and Melissa Brasselle) bringing home the body of their comrade from Afghanistan unwittingly unleash several camel spiders in the Southwest desert that terrorize the people. C. Thomas Howell plays the sheriff, but is unrecognizable.

I'm an unabashed fan of Grade B creature features, but "Camel Spiders" (2011) is Exhibit A on how not to write a script. The movie starts with an action-packed sequence in Afghanistan (shot at Vasquez Rocks, just north of Los Angeles in the high country), but the filmmakers make the mistake of showing the oversized camel spiders right out of the gate, which destroys any sense of suspense. This isn't helped by the cartoonish spider CGI.

How did these creatures get so huge? In real life the largest species grows to about 5-6 inches, including legs (although a rare few might grow larger). They're nonvenomous, although their bite can be painful. Basically, they're relatively harmless to humans. So how did they get so malevolent and fatal? The flick never explains.

The story then switches to the American Southwest wherein the captain & sergeant are curiously delivering the corpse via an Army truck (from the Korean War era). If you blinked you would've thought they were still in Afghanistan. Needless to say, the creators should've made it clearer that they were now in the USA.

From there the story becomes somewhat entertaining for a Grade B monster flick with a dash of black humor. The desolate Lone Pine area locations are magnificent (located in south-central California, about an hour drive from the Nevada border, which I point out because the film looks like it was shot in Nevada). Meanwhile the cast gives their best effort, but the characters are underdeveloped and so you don't know them or much care about them.

Speaking of locations, the characters plainly say the events are taking place in Arizona, but the license plates all read 'California,' including the sheriff's car. Glaring mistakes like this don't make for good movies.

There are a couple good-looking females (e.g. Jessica Cameron as Ashley), but they don't make "Camel Spiders" worth seeing.

The film runs 1 hour, 19 minutes.

GRADE: D+/C-

Well, what can I say. Every now and then I love to watch a silly and bad B-horror flick. And really, for the lovers of bad, cheap cinema, there is plenty to still enjoy in this movie!

And there is a big difference between a just plain bad movie and a movie that is being just so bad and silly that it actually becomes fun to watch. I feel that this for most part is being the case with "Camel Spiders" as well. No matter how bad and silly this movie gets at times, it still remains a pretty fun experience to watch.

Of course the story is totally stupid and doesn't make much sense but basically all of these sort of movies feature the same type of story anyway. It simply delivers exactly what you could and would expect from it, nothing more, nothing less. So really, if you are into these type of movies, by all means watch it and chances are you end up enjoying it, for what it is.

The characters are stupid but at least they aren't annoying (well, expect for the little girl perhaps but children always annoy me in these sort of movies), which really is a positive thing to say, for these sort of movies. Not that you ever feel involved with any of them. None of them are fleshed out and basically you already know how most of them are going to end up. At least if you are somewhat familiar already with these sort of movies.

No, this movie really doesn't hold any surprises and it progresses in an extremely formulaic way. But hey, that's how Roger Corman works and this certainly has its charm to it as well and make sure that these sort of movies are always still better to watch than those coming from other cheap working studios.

The special effects are some of the worst you are likely to see in a modern horror flick. It's also one of those movies that prefers to use CGI gore over practical effects. This is definitely something disappointing and it lets the movie look all the more fake and cheap.

Only watchable to those who can enjoy and appreciate a big, fat, cheap, silly, fake looking Corman flick.

3/10

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This movie should be avoided - the fact that people made some effort with such a terrible movie is really regrettable - don't compound that by watching it!

However if you are going to persist with it make sure you have something else to do at the same time.

The filming is poor, so much so that blood from the spiders splashes on the camera lens on occasion, the special effects - i.e. the spiders - are very poor and the acting is to be honest a waste of the actors' time. They will hopefully get better acting roles in the future.

For any prospective viewers, if you don't like the fun of looking at really poorly made movies, then maybe go for a walk ... just avoid the killer spiders!

I had relatively low expectations going into this one (what do you expect with a $500k budget?!), so I'm happy to report I was pleasantly surprised to find a low-budget, fun, monster movie buried in this straight-to-DVD feature.

Granted, there are no groundbreaking special effects or acting, but the writing and story was not nearly as bad (i.e. boring) as some of the other current movies in this league. Paraphrasing, my favorite line: "If sarcasm worked as well as bullets on these bugs, I'd contact you first." My biggest complaint is with the bad CGI effects. Money should have been better spent on spider puppets and buckets of fake blood. The CGI looks like something 15-year-olds create for a YouTube video.

In the spirit of Tremors and Eight Legged Freaks, Camel Spiders should be remembered has one of the better low-budget, Sci-Fi Channel feature.