Review: Spiders 3D / Cert: 15 / Director: Tibor Takacs / Screenplay: Joseph Farrugia, Tibor Takacs / Starring: Patrick Muldoon, Christa Campbell, William Hope, Sydney Sweeney / Release Date: October 14th
It’s been a while since we’ve had a decent giant spider movie; there was a brief outbreak a few years ago with the likes of Arachnophobia and the underrated Eight-Legged Freaks and there have been numerous nasty straight-to-DVD efforts (yep, that’s you, Camel Spiders) which were about as welcome as… well, an Autumn spider home invasion. But here they come again. As a prelude to December’s Big Ass Spider (honestly, go and look it up) here’s a Nu Image TV movie which, as they say, does what it says on the tin. This film has spiders in it and, if you have the technology, you can watch it in 3D.
Debris from a Russian space station/research laboratory crashes to Earth, dumping its cargo of mutant spiders (DNA recovered from a crashed spaceship spliced with that of our favourite eight-legged lovelies) in a New York underground tunnel. They start to grow and multiply and before long they’re making their way up to the city streets and not even the combined might of nearly six soldiers can fight them off. Subway control chief Jason (Muldoon) and his scientist ex-wife Rachel (Campbell) are reunited – ahhh – as they try to save their teenage daughter who’s trapped in her home in the quarantine zone.
Look, you don’t care about the plot; you just want to know if the spider FX are any good. Yeah, they’re not bad. They don’t look a lot like your common-or-garden domestic spider – they’re all different colours and they roar like lions – but that’s explained away by the alien DNA plot device which allows them to do everything normal spiders do and a lot more. And let’s face it, everyone’s creeped out by spiders so they only need to be animated halfway decently for them to give us (i.e., this reviewer) the heebie-jeebies. To be fair, the talented Mr Takacs (previous credits: Meteor Storm, Megasnake) has crafted a perfunctory, workmanlike story populated by zero-interest humans – the acting’s terrible – and convincing-most-of-the-time scuttling spiders which leap on their victims who are variously ripped to bits and disembowelled. Eventually the big queen spider gets loose and the real low-budget carnage begins. There are some decent action sequences, especially a chase around a deserted storage warehouse, along with an explosive denouement and the inevitable promise/threat of a potential sequel.
Inoffensive and rubbishy, Spiders 3D can’t help but provide a few cheap thrills, but if you’re looking for a classier, crazier kind of spider movie, 1955’s black-and-white Tarantula is still the one to watch. You can probably find it on the Web.
Extras: Making of / Cast interviews
