Spider Attack - Achtbeinige Monster

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.

Unrefreshing, unintentionally funny, trite, campy, but overall a fun no-brainer of a flick, Spiders is a B-movie that doesn't try to be anything else, and, thankfully, doesn't take itself seriously at all.

When a space shuttle testing mutant spiders gets knocked back into the Earth in a freak accident, three college students discover a government project designed to use spiders as warfare weaponry.

Part X-Files, part Aliens, part Men in Black, this amalgam of unoriginal writing, wafer-thin characters, unimpressive, pedestrian special effects, and unknown cast members actually are quite charming. The most fun scenes are when the spider runs amok outside the lab. At this stage in the film, it's easy to see that the production was given quite a hefty budget to work with, so why not use it to build sets instead of making high school classrooms pass for government labs? And how about a few extras to guard this super-secret facility?

Despite its plot-hole writing, less-than-believable visuals, and amazingly cheap looking first three-quarters, the chaotic ending and likeable young cast keep this otherwise unredeemable, derivative film pure camp pleasure.

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.

I think most people who have commented on this movie have watched it with the wrong attitude. Get real; What do you expect from a flick blatantly named "Spiders", apparently featuring some generic monstrous arachnid creatures wreaking havoc on people? Unless you're an easily amused teenager with poor judgment, you instinctively steer clear from these kinds of pictures when looking for chills and thrills. There are quality films that offer just that.

I thought I was about to watch a really bad movie, with unintentionally comedic elements and worthless cast, storyline and directing. I was wrong. This movie quickly reveals it's true nature for the perceptive. Taking for granted that the movie was "bad" on purpose, I could actually appreciate the cheesy dialog and all the self-irony that it displays. The characters make illogical decisions, use stupid reasoning and don't try to take themselves seriously. The way in which the plot unfolds and how the main characters figure it out is an obvious parody of the genre, and there are so many details which contribute to that feeling in the dialog and some of the scenes; a guy holding the spider's teeth like bull's horns, making DNA-enhanced mutant spiders from hell seem like a an ordinary casual case of lively struggle, quotes like "This is so creepy. Its like a bad sci-fi movie." and "I mean what the hell is this place?" -"I don't care what this place is, what the f-ck are *we* doing here?" etc. made me at least chuckle at times, because they often raise valid points regarding the absurd setting of the film, and do it with subtlety.

The CGI was decent at times, yet laughable in some parts (especially when the spider was running around walls etc). The spider looks gory enough in close shots. The physical webs are composed of thin rope and you can see the knots tying together the intersections, which to me was a funny detail (c'mon, they could have easily avoided that, would they had cared for realism).

The pacing is fine; There is enough action to keep the viewer at least semi-entertained, assuming they can appreciate other aspects of the film also (I'm not a big fan of "irrational abominable creature vs. bunch of dumb people" films).

All in all, this is definitely not a serious movie, so you should not watch it as one. If you are in a humourless mood looking for some horror, then this movie will probably only make you angry. As a compensation for all the bad ratings this movie has received on IMDb, I have to give it 8/10. I'd dare to say it is more self-aware and intelligent than most people realize.