Arachnoquake

This is a horrible movie but it can be horribly fun if you watch it with friends, and you just make jokes and laugh about how stupid the movie is, which I'm pretty sure is exactly what the intention of the film's producers was.

Basically this movie is about a huge earthquake which somehow opens up a sinkhole in the earth but it also simultaneously somehow awakens a colony of ancient and incredibly dangerous, deadly poisonous and aggressive spiders.

That really sums it up. The story doesn't really have any surprises and all the shocks and scares you will see coming a mile away. But there are a lot of fun moments and so bad they're funny death scenes. Pretty much every possible way you could picture spiders killing someone is covered in this movie.

Stupid, mindless fun.

I do not mind low-budget movies at all, in fact some are entertaining. However I do dislike it when a movie comes across as so cheap and literally brainless that you are annoyed by it. Sadly that was the case with Arachnoquake. It is not SyFy's worst, not by a long shot, but it is really not one of their more tolerable ones either. There is one redeeming quality however, and that is the decent, if not great, performance of Tracey Gold. The remaining actors give the impression that they don't want to be there and don't show much if any chemistry with one another. That is especially true of Edward Furlong who spends his screen time looking stiff and bored, and with his shockingly bloated appearance time has not been kind to him. In all fairness though, they are not helped by the characters they play. I don't mind if a character is clichéd, as long as they are well-written. That wasn't the case with Arachnoquake, every single character here is shallow and made to do stupid things that makes you annoyed with them fast. The only exception is the Superman imitation, which was actually quite fun, but little moments like this are like sprinkles of fun in a vast sea of truly horrible. Nor are the actors helped by the script, which even for SyFy is so cheesy that it becomes too much and in the end doesn't give them much to do, or the story, which is very thin, unsurprising and lacking in any kind of atmosphere. The film even manages to look cheap, with the editing very hackneyed and the spider effects crude and artificial in look. The spiders are lacking in any kind of presence, let alone menace, that if you want to be scared, enthralled or even have your phobia of spiders cured then you may want to look elsewhere, as Arachnoquake manages to do neither. All in all, very poor, cheap, intelligence-insulting and badly written and acted. 1/10 for Gold and the Superman imitation. Bethany Cox

Arachnoquake is good for a SyFy movie but that's not saying much. The acting is atrocious by all and Edward Furlong was probably the worst, the storyline is nonexistent, and the spiders look like they were designed and created by a 6 year old.

It receives 3 stars because a couple of lines and moments gave me a good laugh (I don't know if it was intended or not) and the sister was super sexy so she gave me something to look at when the other actors were spewing out one garbage line after another.

After saying all that, Arachnoquake is still one of the better SyFy movies I've seen recently which is saying something for how awful these movies can be.

After surviving a viewing of this, my impression is that this is one of those movies that was filmed simultaneously as the script was still being written - you know, "Okay, we're done with Scene 10... hurry up and finish writing scene 11... we begin shooting it tomorrow." This explains why characters seem to drop into the story with no explanation or background, like when the National Guard just happens to be on the scene of a spider attack... did somebody call them or were they just driving through the area at the time?

There are too many "conveniences" in the plot. Tracey Gold's character just happens to be an expert on arachnology, the Guardsman's daughter just happens to be aboard the bus they are trying to rescue. Add to this the hammed-up acting and what you get is a cast of cardboard characters you have no empathy for.

And what is it with that background music? The generic "scenes of peril" film score runs at full volume throughout the majority of the movie!

Since the IMDb ratings system only allows whole numbers, I give this a "1." If it were possible I would award it an extra half point for (unintentional) comedic value for the scene of the final showdown with the giant cheap-CGI spider.

In short, this is another movie I highly recommend...

...that you avoid.

Arachnoquake (2012)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

The latest film to debut on the SyFy channel has New Orleans being hit by an earthquake, which causes the ground to crack open and soon large, pink spiders are attacking people. Those expecting a fun monster mash are going to be disappointed because this film is pretty bad from the word go and it never picks up any speed. You know, I understand that horror films need dumb characters to do dumb things but there's a certain line you shouldn't cross in terms of dumbness and this film crosses that line and makes it's own new line. I really couldn't believe how stupid all of these characters were. So, you see a giant pink spider coming at you so what do you do? Well, of course, you pick it up. There are six or seven small spiders about the size of a baseball card coming after you so what do you do? Step on them? You'd think so but the characters here just jump around like little children. The entire film pretty much doesn't have an ounce of brains going for it and this doesn't cause any "fun" but instead it makes you grow more and more aggravated because the characters just become annoying. Tracey Gold gives a decent performance here and it's a shame her character wasn't a lead. Edward Furlong from T2 fame is on hand here playing the father (!?!?) of two teenagers. He really doesn't give a "good" performance but it was fun seeing him again. ARACHNOQUAKE is pure dumbness from start to finish but there are a few good moments with most of them being the bubble, explosion and gore that happens when a spider starts to come out of a human body. It's a shame that the director and writer didn't exploit this a little bit more and given fans more bang for their buck. The CGI effects are obviously very cheap but I thought the design of the spiders were nice. Still, this is certainly a film that can be skipped as there are much better killer spider movies out there.