...lightweight fluff, to be sure, but it combines enough tension, laughs, and genuine shocks to keep its audience involved most of the time.
Tools:
Send to a friend »
If spiders and other creepy crawlers give you the heebie-jeebies and you love to be thrilled, "Arachnophobia" may be just down your dark alley (or darkened cellar). The film is lightweight fluff, to be sure, but it combines enough tension, laughs, and genuine shocks to keep its audience involved most of the time.
In the film's introduction a professor of things spidery, Dr. Atherton (Julian Sands), is looking for a new species in Venezuela. Unknowingly, he ships a venomous specimen home with the body of an expedition member, and it winds up in a small California community. Enter a new young doctor in town, Ross Jennings (Jeff Daniels), his wife, Molly (Harley Jane Kozak), and their kids. He is terribly afraid of spiders so, naturally, the newly arrived arachnid takes up lodgings in the doctor's barn. In its new habitat, the vicious South American spider mates with a common house spider to produce a swarm of deadly offspring that terrorize the townsfolk.
Logic and reason are not the film's strong suits. The farcical tone is set by John Goodman as a local, gung-ho pest exterminator. What he can't destroy with his poisons do not escape the soles of his shoes. Still and all, a comedy of this sort--one that asks us to take its frights seriously--needs some point of reference in the real world, and "Arachnophobia" isn't always so well grounded. For instance, Dr. Jennings moves his family to a place he's never been before and buys a house sight unseen, all on the word of a local doctor (Henry Jones) that he met only briefly who promised to retire and turn over his practice to him.
When Jennings arrives, the old doctor tells him he's decided not to retire, and Jennings is up a creek. How'd Jennings ever get through medical school? Later, Jennings is surprised to find that the house he has just bought is riddled with wood rot. Sorry, in California such a building would never have passed inspection before being sold. Then the husband and wife find a cobweb in their barn that stretches about ten feet across, and they think nothing of it. You'd think they'd at least enter it in the county fair.
Average user rating (1-5):