Arachnicide

I found the cover/poster for "Arachnicide" to be alluring, and I must admit that I am a sucker for movies that include monstrous or gargantuan versions of creatures of any kind. So naturally I sat down to watch "Arachnicide", especially since there is just something fascinating about huge spiders.

But often it turns out that creature features tend to be questionable and cheesy. "Arachnicide", whether it was one of those movies, I can't really say. Why? Well, because I just managed to sit through 26 minutes into this ordeal. I gave up out of sheer and utter boredom, and also because in all that time there had been no indication or viewing of any kind of spiders.

The movie turned out to be boring and pointless, to be brutally honest and frank. And as I gave up, I can honestly say that I have no intention whatsoever to return to "Arachnicide" to view the rest of the movie.

From what I saw in terms of acting during the 26 minutes I managed to sit through, just color me unimpressed. You know exactly what you will get here, especially for a movie such as this.

Now, I didn't see any special effects from what I sat through, and that was also a deal breaker, because a creature feature should have good effects to make it convincing and realistic. But of course, that would also require that you had actually seen some creatures - which hadn't been there for those 26 minutes.

"Arachnicide" scores 2 out of 10 stars from me, managing to rise above a rating of 1 solely because there are worse movies out there.

ARACHNICIDE is an absolutely dreadful TV movie, made in Italy and dubbed into English for western release. It's about a squad of special forces soldiers who are sent to Albania and discover the results of a sinister experiment that has terrifying consequences for them all. It's one of those films where the DVD cover art is actually better than the film, this is so cheap and awful.

There's no characterisation here, not even much in the way of dialogue, just incessant low rent action. The opening sniper sequences do promise a little but the film quickly falls flat with endless dark and boring inaction. The CGI effects are appropriately awful, but the spiders don't appear until the second half and until then the film is near unwatchable. Then the spiders do finally show up, it just becomes very silly and largely pointless. I'm surprised the budget was as big as is listed because this looks like nothing more than a shoestring joke.

Following their successes around the world, a multinational commando team is gathered together to lead an operation on one of the largest drug trafficking organizations in the world, but when they arrive at their target they find the area overrun by massive spiders and try to get away alive.

This here was a generally awful genre effort. Among the many problems here is the fact that so much of the film's running time is spent on areas outside the field of interest for genre fans. Those exploits of the military team take up far too much of the film here, seeing them first take out the drug runners in Mexico before going to the jungle commandoes getting into position to take out the random headquarters in the jungle serve as fine low-budget action scenes but to segue from those into one of the most drawn-out, pointless exposition means on a worldwide drug conspiracy organization just makes this one feels so boring and uninteresting during this section. None of it has anything to do with the creatures and has very little of any interest in watching people sit around a conference listening to pseudo-scientific jibberish about the organization while it shows the drug-dealers listening in on their meeting only to follow it up with another military meeting bringing everyone together. The other major issue with the film is the generally cheap and underwhelming look that comes off here. The low-budget here is apparent with bland and unappealing settings featured for the endless scenes of the team engaging in their strategy meetings, the laughably awful background plates for the sense of scope that means people are placed into obvious CGI scenes for no reason or the dark and confined laboratory that never comes close to looking like the massive facility used to house a major drug-trafficking ring. That also leads to the other bad CGI work for the giant spiders themselves, which is quite a shame with them being on-screen for so little but their scenes are inept and badly handled where the distortion is obvious, the movement is completely wrong and they behave nothing like general spiders while they're growth scenes are as believable as a cut-scene video in a video-game. Altogether, these make for a decidedly cheap and cheesy genre effort. As mentioned, the lack of time with the spiders is a major issue here with them being supposedly at the heart of the film and what ties this into being part of the genre. There's no mention of them at all and just randomly appear in the film nearly an hour into it with no warning, setup or explanation for what happened, why the drug-traffickers are using them or how they turn into gigantic beings the same size as the soldiers around them which really make for quite a few problems here. Still, the film has a fun action-movie charm in the scenes with the soldiers shooting away endless rounds at the approaching hordes and seeing the spiders get blown to pieces as a result, and with the confrontations taking place in extremely dark rooms there's a nice atmosphere to be had here when they're confronting the creatures as there's a highly enjoyable energy to this section of the film as well as the thrilling escape attempt which is about all this one has going for it.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Language.

I know the title probably seems weird since that's usually half the appeal of Z grade movies but it's a real nose dive after the titular spiders appear in this movie.

It's got a lot of good points for a laugh:

• a dub where there are 7 people dubbing at least 20 characters so there's a very funny scene where a sniper and his spotter have the same voice.
• a confusing and silly plot that's still incredibly predictable.
• somehow every scene of the soldiers walking from more than 2m away has CGI soldiers.
• really embarrassing attempts at romance and flirting.

The bad point is solely the spiders. The second they come into this movie (admittedly about two thirds in) the movie just slows down. The graphics are all dark and muddy so you can't even laugh at the poor cgi, there's a scene of soldiers standing on a staircase shooting incoming spiders which lasts roughly 5-10 minutes straight where you see the same camera angles at least 20 times each. It's slow, poorly paced and just gets incredibly dull until the movie just suddenly ends after a little bit.

I'd still recommend it for a laugh or two but if you're in it for the "creature feature" part, you're barking up the wrong tree.

40 minutes of troops firing automatic weapons at spiders. It's too much even for an action film. Poor dialogue, bad dubbing. There are pretty good effect here, it's a pity that they are serving a bad film. Looks more like a videogame. At a certain point there are soldiers that are too much CGI. The films started out well but ended very bad.