Featured Creature: The one that's the best giant spider movie

 

Title: Eight Legged Freaks

What Year?: 2002

Classification: Parody/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

As I write this, it’s the second week of the month of Halloween, which is when I’m usually in high gear plowing through anything and everything monster/ zombie/ horror related. This time around, I’m still recovering from some big changes, and I have been debating whether to take it easy. I decided I owed it to myself to try to fill out the lineup with at least a few posts every week. I also got off to a head start watching a movie I have meant to get to for a while. For this feature in particular, there was one that was always going to be here. I present Eight Legged Freaks, the best 1990s monster movie that technically didn’t come out in the Nineties.

Our story begins with a ranting conspiracist who occasionally makes sense, introducing a story that we are apparently expected to take at face value. We then meet our cast, who will have less to do with him than anyone else: A drifter returning to a dying Arizona town; the lady sheriff and her geeky son and spunky teen daughter; the token corrupt mayor; and an exotic pets breeder with a collection of spiders. While the drifter and the sheriff play will-they-won’t-they, a toxic waste spill spreads through the ecosystem, causing a proliferation of enlarged crickets. (Wait, why did we never get a killer-cricket movie?) When the spider enthusiast feeds the crickets to his spiders, the rapidly enlarging arachnids promptly lunch him and spread through the town. Soon, the spiders have grown to low-end kaiju sizes, still able to climb, run and even leap. As the arachnids go into full rampage, the sheriff and the drifter must rally the townspeople at an outlet mall. But the deadliest of the creatures is already lurking right beneath their feet!

Eight Legged Freaks was a 2002 science fiction/ horror comedy directed by New Zealand filmmaker Ellory Elkayem from a script cowritten with Jesse Alexander, based on Elkayem’s short film “Larger Than Life”. The film starred David Arquette and Kari Wuhrer as the drifter and sheriff, with Scarlett Johannson (see Jojo Rabbit), 17 at the time of the film’s release, as the teenager. Other cast included comedian Doug E. Doug as the conspiracy theorist Griffith, Leon Rippy (see… Maximum Overdrive?) as the mayor and Tom Noonan of Robocop 2 as the spider breeder. The score was composed by John Ottman, also known for 2013’s Jack The Giant Killer and several films in the X-Men franchise, with a song “Itsy Bitsy Spider” sung by Joey Deluxe in the final credits. The film was shot mainly in Glendale and other locations in Arizona. Footage from the famous 1950s monster movie Them! is played during the film. The finished film was distributed by Warner Bros. It was a possible commercial failure, earning $45 million against a $30M budget. It received comparatively favorable reviews, including a positive one from Roger Ebert, and gained in popularity on home video and streaming.

For my experiences, this is a prime example of a film that people would probably have expected to make a lot more of an impression than it did. I saw what I now know to be the end of the film on TV (and dear Logos, the song…), and rented it somewhere around 2005 after hearing favorable comments about it from a friend. I don’t recall if I looked it up again until I bought a tape during the great wave of video store liquidations. With more leisurely viewing, I came to appreciate it far more, above all as a showcase of the very best 1990s-early 2000s CGI monster effects. As for the movie itself, it is a pretty good film that just about makes it to actual greatness.

Moving forward, the central reality is that this is a polished film that encompasses what is both good and bad in that description. The cast and acting, in particular, clearly represents far too much money and talent not to be satisfactory. The story and dialogue are likewise too solid to fail, without ever quite delivering the outright subversion that it hints at. Even the effects are, on a certain level, successful simply because nobody was trendy enough to mess with what had actually worked in the preceding decade: The creatures look like actual, functioning organisms; the action sequences are linear and coherent; and there’s enough goddamn light to see what the Hell is going on. What pulls things up are the peripheral skirmishes in the apocalyptic onslaught. It is here that things get genuinely unpredictable. Likeable characters can die where villains live. All the more impressively, at least one character set up for nothing better than a telegraphed self-sacrifice actually pulls through. The proceedings are greatly helped by the music, which perfectly fits the intended mood; it may be cliches, but they are livened by a sense of mischief.

Then there are the spiders, and this is where people might be surprised by what I find good, bad or unobjectionable. To start with, many/ most of the spiders look to be about the same mass as a human, which I am willing to grant as within the bare minimum of plausibility. (How could I not plug the Evil Possum Vs Eurypterids?) Further credit is due that the much larger spiders seen later do not replace their more compact counterparts, or make them less threatening. The tarantula that is the biggest we see serves as nothing more or less than a battering ram for the others, while the end-boss queen owes her menace first and foremost to her mastery of her own hostile environment. The biggest hole in the biology is that the film unquestioningly copies the cliche of spiders gathering in swarms (see also, of all things, The Beyond), which in reality makes about as much sense as using feral cats to run the Iditarod. Even then, there is at least a sense of a hierarchy that might or might not be sustained under other circumstances, as witnessed by one hapless specimen that the tarantula seemingly stomps be accident. Meanwhile, any further objections are easily overruled by the surreal high point of the jumping spiders, who are neither mutually hostile nor coordinated but simply focused on the chase as they each leap after a suitable prey.

Now for the “one scene”, in all the wealth of material (honorable mention has to go to the conspiracist mentioning L. Ron Hubbard), I’m going to go with a deleted scene that I know well from my old tape. In the final act, we find the main characters underground in a mine that the drifter keeps reminding them is full of explosive gas. There’s a distant scream (one more thing I was meaning to rant about on the biology), and then a swarm of tiny spiders rush in that I swear I remember seeing in here somewhere. (I now suspect that effects shots were interchanged with an earlier gross-out sequence that undeservedly made the final cut.) Alas, in the version of the scene I could find, we see literally nothing even as the cast react quite convincingly. After they draw back, the leads start stomping. Then the jerkiest of several jerk teenagers steps forward and begins squashing in bulk. He remarks that these are much less intimidating than the ones we and they have already seen. The geek abruptly warns them to stop, and when questioned, says succinctly, “They’re babies.” Then the scream is repeated, and he adds the hypothesis that it is the mother. And my whole point in including it here is that this is just the stuff they cut out of this one.

Now I come to the rating, and this is one where I kind of changed my mind. My plan going in was to give this one no more or less than 3 out of 4, and that is probably about what it would deserve entirely on its own merits. But further viewing convinced me that this is a movie better than the sum of its parts. The decisive consideration was that this is indeed a comedy, and as such subject to hits and misses that can come down to simple taste. Yet, with due allowances, it lives up to the tradition of Dark Star and Galaxy Quest as a parody that is at least as good as many “straight” examples of the genre it is supposed to be making fun of. On a sadder note, it also proved to be one of the last gasps of an era that reinvented the monster movie without leaving the Hollywood “mainstream” any wiser about how to make a good one. This is one time where “good enough” is more than enough. “…Okay, he did all right…”