Arachnoïde

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.

This is definitely the best SyFy movie I have seen. It has all the usual things these movies have, a useless military, a female scientist, a hot girl and the hunky star. Unfortunately, about half of the movie has no reason to exist. They run their boat onto the ground and abandon ship, implying that the boat wouldn't move. After running from spiders for an hour they go back to the boat and leave. Still not bad for this type of movie.

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.

Another entry in the trash of SyFy flicks. I only gave it a shot because Edward Furlong was in it, you know, the young dude from Terminator 2 (1991). From the beginning the spiders are on-screen and that was rather okay because the action came in from the beginning. But on the other hand it looked ridiculous due the CGI used.

In the beginning the spiders are rather small and believable but once they are throwing fire (CGI) towards humans it becomes laughable. After that the spiders become bigger and bigger and it all ends with a King Kong situation.

The story if there was any was stupid and the acting wasn't convincing at all. If you pop up a beer with friends then you will laugh a lot but further this doesn't give us anything at all.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 1/5 Story 1/5 Comedy 0/5

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