...good for a few laughs and a couple of hearty thrills.
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Maybe you had to have been there. The fifties, I mean. After several decades of traditional monsters like the Mummy, the Wolfman, and the Frankenstein creation, viewers were looking for something new, and they got it in the form of beasts either from outer space or from the corrupted science of our own world. In the midst of the Cold War, the atom bomb and its attendant fallout made a perfect excuse for the mutation of all kinds of animal life into gigantic monstrosities, from giant ants to giant tarantulas to giant scorpions to giant humans, and everything in between.
"Eight Legged Freaks" tries to recapture some of the spirit of those old fifties' flicks by providing a host of giant spiders to dwell on. Some of the movie succeeds; some of it falls flat. But you can't say it doesn't try to live up to the corny reputation of sci-fi in the mid-twentieth century.
The movie is the brainchild of Australian director and writer Ellory Elkayem, based in part on his earlier, short, black-and-white film about a woman who is terrorized in her home by a gigantic spider (a bonus item among the DVD's extras). The short film was brought to the attention of filmmakers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day," "Godzilla"), who saw Elkayem's potential for making the longer movie.
The screenplay for the picture follows the time-honored tradition of giant-bug stories, starting with the accidental dumping of a barrel of toxic waste into a stream, which in turn affects the nearby insect life. Seems that spiders eating the altered insects begin to grow enormously, and when the owner of a spider store realizes what's happening, he's delighted to grow his arachnids as big as possible. Of course, ten-foot beasties are not exactly what he had in mind, nor their getting loose and turning on him. Needless to say, the giant freaks begin to wreak havoc in the nearby town, slowly at first so as to build suspense and tension, and then in full-scale assault.
All of this happens in the middle of the Arizona desert, naturally, where all things paranormal occur. Go Roswell! And in the true spirit of old sci-fi flicks, all of the people in the film act like idiots, including their staring in stunned disbelief every time they see a giant spider coming their way instead of hightailing it in the other direction.
The movie could have been even more fun, though, had it not been for two shortcomings: its tone and its characters. The story is neither a straight-out parody nor a straight-out drama. Instead, it plays it down the middle, attempting to be a tongue-in-cheek thriller but not providing enough humor or enough thrills to be either. Nor are most of its characters anything but nondescript ciphers, devoid of personality or charisma. The result is a film that often looks good and sometimes delivers high adventure bordering on camp, but it doesn't do these things nearly often enough.
The stars are David Arquette as Chris McCormick, a man who returns to the small Arizona town of his birth in order to reopen his dad's abandoned gold mine. Arquette as McCormick is a sweet, well-meaning fellow who just doesn't give us much to root for. Maybe he's purposely meant to be dull, but it doesn't help the movie. Kari Wuhrer plays Sam, the beautiful local sheriff, who inevitably becomes a romantic interest for Chris, an involvement that does little for the audience except provide a momentary distraction from the more important goings on. Scott Terra plays Mike, a nerdy kid about twelve or thirteen, who first discovers the secret of the mutated beasts. He looks and acts a lot like Harry Potter, but we never get to know him as well as we do Potter, and we never get to feel much concern for him. Scarlett Johansson plays Mike's older teenage sister, Ashley, the compulsory defenseless female; and Rick Overton plays Pete, the compulsory dim-witted deputy. The only person in the film with any distinctive character or flair is Doug E. Doug as Harlan, a DJ who's obsessed with alien conspiracy theories. Maybe he should have been at the center of the picture instead of Chris.
I wanted to like "Eight Legged Freaks" a lot more than I did. I was hoping the modern special effects would add enough reality to the vintage plot lines that they might seem fresh and new again. But maybe some things are better left alone. There was a sweet innocence about the clunky old wire-frame, papier-maché monsters of old that was probably a part of their charm. Not that the new computer-animated graphics aren't good; perhaps they're just too good. A brief clip from "Them" showing on television during one scene is perhaps an unfortunate reminder of how much better that old film was, regardless of its inferior special effects.
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[release]10534[/release]