Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS

After a drum containing toxic substances accidentally finds its way into a river, a sleepy generic US town is where it stops. When an eccentric local 'spider farmer' makes his discovery of an overabundance of crickets appearing in the water known to his precocious twelve-year-old friend Mike Parker (Scott Terra), things begin to happen. The farmer says he's been feeding his spiders the crickets with tremendous effects: the spiders are growing exponentially in size.

We then meet Mike's mother, Sam Parker (Kari Wuhler), who also happens to be the town sheriff. She obviously does not want her son lurking around with a spooky old man. Yet something seems awry when townsfolk increasingly report missing pets. Her son soon cracks the mystery (the spiders have mutated to dinosaurian proportions) and bumps into local repat Chris McCormick (David Arquette), who has returned to reclaim his father's abandoned mines-luckily for him he has the right qualifications!

It goes without saying that the protagonists are soon mushed into the only secure structure at their disposal: the dismally vacuous Prosperity Mall, erected by the lecherous mayor. Yet not even the Mall's doors can keep the giant tarantula from entering, so the people are forced into the vast mines below, a place the spiders have coincidentally made their nest. The way the people overcome this supernatural threat can be predicted fairly early in the piece, so telling it here would be pointless.

Writer/director Ellory Elkayem's attempted homage to '50s horror/sci-fi flicks brings to mind numerous pictures from the era. One redeeming feature is the reflexive humour: by laughing at itself, it implicitly laughs (with affection) at the movies it's alluding to. When Mike Parker, the kid, says: "You gotta listen to me... no one ever listens to the kid" you know that you should sit back and let Eight Legged Freaks speak on its own terms.

Though I am not a fan of excessive special effects (the same team as Godzilla's is at work here) and though these spiders look terribly artificial in most cases, their presence presents an interesting twist to contemporary on-screen monsters. Seeing the talented Scarlett Johansson (Ghost World) playing the sheriff's daughter is a treat, as is the often heavy-handed humour of paranormalist radio announcer Harlan Griffith (Doug E Doug). This movie is guaranteed to entertain and so makes a lazy weekend afternoon kind of cinema excursion worthwhile.

Andrew Staker

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