Film Review: Spiders (2013)

SYNOPSIS:

Eight Legs Three Dimensions One Disaster.

REVIEW:

You can’t get much more “too” the point with a movie titled: “Spiders”. “Spiders” I have been hearing about now for the last year, mostly due to an aggressive marketing campaign. I went into the film knowing that it did have a decent production and budget and in some cases even made a theatre run.

Heck, let’s be real, it’s a movie about spiders, and then a few big spiders to boot. Now if I were to sum up the “Spiders” experience I’d have to say somewhere between a “Godzilla” movie meets Arachnophobia” meets “Starship Troopers“. “Spiders” is indeed a horror film with minimal science fiction, however these things often move and remind me of those “warrior arachnids” from the “Starship Trooper” films. The Godzilla portion comes later, but that’s not really a spoiler seeing that the movie poster boats a gigantic spiders tromping thru town. Special FX on this 1? Not bad…and from what I could tell a valiant effort at animating CGI spiders in a “somewhat” realistic way. What I tend to look for rather than the spiders themselves is the action/reaction that the set and actors feed off of these imaginary film spiders. So in all it seems to work.

The films stars Patrick Muldoon as police officer Jason with actress / model Christa Campbell taking the lead role as his ex-wife (or soon to be) Rachel. How does it all begin? Well, look no further than a Soviet space station incident that crashes into a New York subway tunnel bringing along a few space spiders with it. The story picks up pretty quick with just enough meat to get us to the main objective here…spiders.

The spiders themselves have been designed to appear slightly different than the spiders we are used to. I atoned this aspect to them coming from space, but what will really make audiences chuckle is their fondness for screeching and growling (not something you’d “expect” from spiders). I accepted this hilarious little add-on knowing that if they didn’t, well the sound effect department wouldn’t have much to work with.

Back to the story…. Jason, investigates a co worker who was found dead after being assigned to looking into the crash. Soon, its revealed that his co worker was bitten, electrocuted and made a host for some nasty spider eggs (mainly the queen herself). As these spiders quaintly escalate in size and aggressiveness they seem to be ramping up to one purpose…to see the birth of the queen.

To heighten the drama, the military have stepped in to declare Marshall law with the hidden agenda of wanting to use the queen’s webbing for some sort of bio weapon armor (ya something like that). This creates a “Batman Rising” style of militants taking over the city and disposing of those who are connected to the initial spider eggs controversy. As a center piece drama, we have Jason and Rachel trying to rescue their daughter from the spiders and the evil militants who set them to quarantine.

That’s all good and dandy, but what we really want to see are spiders attacking soldiers and one big ass spider marching thru the city. You’ll get plenty of that reminding us of the retro days when campy situations were more accepted by the movie viewers than maybe they are now. Do I think everyone will love this? No, as being in this business as long as I have, I tend to realize that you should expect a smattering of bad reviews (because everything is under scrutiny in the horror genre).

What I will say is that I really enjoyed “Spiders” as a campy fun film exploiting those hairy little crawly things that tend tp give us the creeps. “Spiders” is simply a blast for fans of big movie monsters films. As stated before, I believe if you liked “Starship Troopers”, you can really make the connection here and have fun with it…for the rest of the viewers…hey, it’s a movie about big spiders, what did you expect? (Take a look at the cover, as that’s what the finale spider looks like)

Spiders (2013) is now on bluray per Millennium Entertainment

Spiders (2013)