SPIDERS Well, it's better than Crocodile I'm a sucker for seeing people get cocooned, so after seeing the box cover for this movie, I couldn't wait to check it out, even though I figured it would probably suck anyway. While it isn't quite as bad as it could have been (or, alternately, is just more ENJOYABLY bad than it could have been), Spiders remains a pretty middling movie that, while not without its moments, is more or less representative of the recent spate of direct-to-video killer-animal movies. Lana Parrilla stars as a reporter for a college newspaper, the kind of girl who, when her space-aliens story is ditched in favor of something about clandestine experiments, complains "This is not hard news!" Blessedly, she spends most of the movie in an increasingly wet and grimy white tank top, so acting, schmacting. Even Fox Mulder doesn't believe in aliens THIS much; without any apparent evidence, this girl interviews a couple of self-professed aliens (in extremely convincing human guises) and takes them completely seriously. Anyway, up in a space shuttle, somebody's working on injecting a spider with something, but a solar flare knocks everything out and the spider gets away and bites people and people's faces start boiling...so the big bad "agency" guy down at mission control (Mark Phelan) orders this shuttle to be crashed. And yet, he's the guy who'll spend the rest of the movie doing absolutely anything to secure the safety of the spider. Uh-huh. Anyway, the girl and two tagalongs (I was never clear on just who these guys were, but they sure say "Dude!" a lot) happen across the "crash" site during the investigation of her new assignment, and lots of man-vs.-spider action ensues. Now, the script for this movie is just fucking terrible. But some of it has fun with being terrible. Sure, we get a lot of the predicted, lame moments. Somebody says "I'll be back!" like Arnold, and somebody else says "This is just like a bad sci-fi movie". Lots of scenes which recall Aliens, and lame semi-wisecracks like "I didn't sign up for this bullshit!" I guess in an attempt to explain a way where a computer hacker guy (yeah, there's a computer hacker guy) easily hacks into the lab computers, the script has him saying "For a secret government agency, their security is weak." The girl actually says "You guys can laugh if you want...I'm telling you, there's something out there!" When an alarm is tripped in the research lab because of course the spider has escaped, that agency guy says it's "probably just a malfunction in the system." Yeah, when you're doing research on a giant mutant spider downstairs, that's the exact time that security alarms are most likely to go haywire. It's so, so easy to tell in these movies when somebody is only PRETENDING to be electrocuted. And I have no idea whose decision this was, but yes, that "itsy-bitsy spider" song does figure its way into the score. I realize I've listed this movie's lame moments at length. Believe me, I could go on a lot longer. My point is, despite all of this, there are occasionally some inspired moments. Driven mad with spider-power at the end of the movie, the agency starts talking about the giant-spider army he wants to raise, and how "the ground would shake underneath their mighty footsteps!" Ah, not enough people use the word "mighty". While I know "That spider is a killing machine! We've got to stop it!" is a terrible, terrible line, I laughed anyway, though I'm not convinced that was screenwriters' intention (two of the three were responsible for the script for Tobe Hooper's terrible Crocodile, and the other guy wrote The Mangler). My favorite has to be when this giant spider starts stomping around the city, peeling open cars like cans of tomato paste and sucking out the goo (read: humans) inside, basically killing everybody who doesn't outrun it, and the girl says "The sun's gonna set...and spiders hunt at night!" Mind you, some moments are just baffling. Like one scene at mission control where we're overhearing the space shuttle crew working on the malfunctioning manipulating arm; "Where was this arm built?" "Canada." "That figures." Okay, they're making a dig at Canada, my Canadian ego is not so fragile that I can't take a moment to chuckle at this...but then, down at mission control, somebody says "The shuttle is now passing over Canada", while we see a finger point at Italy on the map. Okay, now I just don't get it; is the joke just that Americans are even stupider than Canadians? Uh, we already knew that (gentle poke at Yank readers). The spider effects are either adequate or kinda hokey, but they're usually hokey in an enjoyable way, instead of an insultingly lazy way. It's mostly animatronic until the end, where the spider takes on gigantic, car-crushing proportions and stomps around town, then it looks like CGI, which is well-done in the sense that it looks solid, but its movements are pretty basic. The makeup on the humans (who get either eaten, or radioactively fried, or whatever) are slimy and disgusting, but in a fun way, and the first scene where the spider is "born" (crawls out of a guy's moth, and it's about as big as a good-sized turkey) is a hoot. Later on, the spider gets to be "born again" (so to speak), and it's even more bloodily goofy. And I swear to God, this movie has exactly the same dead alien fetus as was in Carpenter's Village Of The Damned. I'll bet this dead alien fetus has been in more movies than Gary Oldman. Director Gary Jones has some fun with the hilariously stupid script, though he can't quite pull it all the way out of the muck (thank you, I've seen the "Bad guys striding confidently away from the explosion they've caused" shot enough times to be quite tired of it by now). But for very undemanding moods, Spiders might do it for you, since it's reasonably fast-paced, has a lot of man-vs.-spider action, and hey - wet grimy tank-top. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE