Review by Ray Garton

EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS
2002
Directed by: Ellory Elkayem
Written by:
Ellory Elkayem (story & screenplay)
Randy Kornfield (story)
Jesse Alexander (screenplay)
Starring:
David Arquette - Chris McCormack
Kari Wuhrer - Sheriff Sam Parker
Scott Terra - Mike Parker

The Arizona desert town of Prosperity has very little of its namesake. After the big mall was put in, the planned freeway was cancelled. Now jobs are few, money's tight, and "Everything Must Go" signs are all over the place. The mayor is ready to sell the entire town to a company that wants to fill the nearby abandoned mines with toxic wastes.

And speaking of toxic wastes, a battered old truck carrying barrels of the stuff swerves to miss a bunny rabbit and one of the drums bursts through the rickety wooden slats holding it in the bed — yep, that's all that's holding these barrels of toxic waste on this truck — and it rolls down into a river. As a result, the area grasshoppers get pretty big and juicy. Eccentric spider farmer Joshua Taft (Tom Noonan) feeds those grasshoppers to his spiders. After giving brainy kid and spider-lover Mike Parker a spider tutorial on how his pets kill and eat — a tedious and obvious set-up for things to come — Mike leaves, one of the spiders bites Joshua, and he does a ridiculous dance of pain and agony all over the place, knocking over every single tank and releasing all of the spiders. Before you know it, Prosperity is under attack by countless giant spiders of all varieties.

Kari Wuhrer plays Mike's mom, Prosperity's sexy sheriff, Sam Parker. David Arquette is an engineer local boy who returns to prosperity to pursue a relationship with Sam, for whom he's been carrying a torch for years.

Let me go through that again. Kari Wuhrer is a sheriff and David Arquette — quite possibly the most irritating human being working in Hollywood today — is an engineer, and our hero.

Yeah. Right.

I do not want to give the inaccurate impression that I sat down to watch Eight Legged Freaks with my mind already made up to dislike it. Quite the contrary. I was hoping for the best (even in spite of the presence of Arquette). I am a life-long fan of the big bug movie, a subgenre rich with history and tradition. I grew up chomping popcorn in front of movies like Them!, Tarantula, Black Scorpion, The Spider, and others. Some were damned good while others were pretty laughable, but somehow, they all managed to be entertaining. They were, after all, about giant bugs, and it's hard not to be entertained while watching giant bugs chomp on people, cars, buildings, and whatever else might be in their path.

At least, I thought it was hard not to be entertained by that. The trailers managed to pass Eight Legged Freaks off as an affectionate homage to those great old big bug movies. But while watching the thing, it's difficult to believe that anyone involved in the production ever saw one of those movies. One of the good ones, anyway.

For one thing, the town of Prosperity is populated entirely by idiots. There isn't a single person in the city limits with half the good sense God gave a head of lettuce. There's no one to root for, no one to root against. People become spider food all over the place and it's impossible to give a damn. After awhile, it becomes difficult not to cheer on the spiders.

For another thing, the CGI spiders are not convincing for a moment. Even when they look okay, they make cartoon sounds that resemble the creatures in Gremlins, sometimes even giggling and shrieking like hellish Munchkins. It's bad enough that the spiders make these ridiculous sounds once they've become the size of SUVs, but when we first see them in their natural size, they make little mouse-like squeaking sounds. When was the last time you heard a spider squeak?

There is one all-too-brief scene that manages to invigorate the movie, if only for a moment, in which jumping spiders chase dirt bikers through the desert. For that brief moment — and it is that moment alone for which the movie gets the single bloodshot eyeball I've given it below — we get a glimpse of the movie it could have been in more capable hands.

Director Ellory Elkayem plays the entire thing for laughs. The only problem with that? It's not funny! You might expect a little tension, some suspense, but there's not a bit of either. The movie just sails along with lots of screaming and running around and shooting and spiders spurting goo, but there's never a tense moment, nothing to make you jump in your seat or chew on a nail. Not only is it easy to assume that Elkayem has never seen a good big bug movie, it's difficult to imagine he's ever seen a good movie period.

Ron Underwood's 1990 giant worm movie Tremors was a genuinely fond nod to those old monster movies of the past. It featured a cast of eccentric but intelligent characters who stand up to the challenge of the "graboids" with resourcefulness and wit. It was funny without ever being a joke. The secret of its success was that it was not afraid to laugh with — not at — its characters while taking its monsters seriously. Eight Legged Freaks, on the other hand, laughs at its monsters while being contemptuous of its characters and, ultimately, of its audience. If you want to see a fun, frightening, suspenseful movie that remembers how enjoyable those old monster movies were, rent Tremors. Eight Legged Freaks deserves nothing more than a good long squirt from a giant can of Raid.

[Out of a possible four Bloodshot Eyeballs.]