Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

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There seems to be a cinematic spider renaissance every 25 or 30 years. The first occurred about 50 years ago, with films like Tarantula (1955) and Earth vs. the Spider (1958), and the second followed two decades later with offerings like 1975's The Giant Spider Invasion (with the Skipper!) and 1977's Kingdom of the Spiders. The new and - please, God - hopefully short explosion begins with Eight Legged Freaks, a film silly enough to fancy itself an homage to the campy spider films of yore, which were typically so well-made that they often found themselves lampooned by Mystery Science Theater 3000.

It's one thing to satirize a particularly bad genre (they did a great job with Wet Hot American Summer), but instead of being witty in their send-up, Freaks' filmmakers follow the same blueprint popularized by its B-movie brethren (save the high-tech special effects). The spiders are actually inconsequential to said blueprint - they could have been anything from ants (Them!), to worms (Tremors), to produce (Attack of the Killer Tomatoes), to pocket-sized Asian critters (Gremlins).

Freaks, which was originally titled Arac Attack but changed for fear moviegoers might think it's "Iraq Attack," takes place in Prosperity, Arizona, and the whole zany spider situation begins when a barrel of toxic waste is accidentally jettisoned off a truck and into a small pond near Taft's Exotic Spider Farm. The waste affects the crickets in the pond, who are fed to the spiders, which causes them grow into creatures the size of a Buick. And when there are no more toxic crickets to munch on, the spiders start hunting humans.

Freaks' two big "stars" (David Arquette and Kari Wuhrer) don't have any more screen time than any of the film's other characters, which are about as developed as a 10-year-old girl. Arquette (See Spot Run) is Chris McCormack, the heir to the near-bankrupt mine that once employed the entire town of Prosperity. He's been gone for 10 years but has finally returned to profess his love for Sam Parker (Wuhrer, Sliders), now the local sheriff. Sam has two kids - nerdy spider expert Mike (Scott Terra, who will play the young Matt Murdock in the upcoming Daredevil film) and rebellious teen Ashley (Scarlett Johansson, The Man Who Wasn't There). I'm not sure which is freakier: Wuhrer playing a sheriff or the mother of a 17-year-old.

Though I haven't yet encountered spiders this size, I'm almost certain they don't make sounds like those heard here. That's part of what makes Freaks fun to watch. But reruns of Diff'rent Strokes are fun to watch, too - that doesn't make 'em good, though. Freaks plays more like a cross between Starship Troopers, Wild Wild West and Dawn of the Dead than the '50s flicks it's supposed to be parodying. Producers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot) have bestowed upon us another brainless action flick, only this time it's disguised as sci-fi homage, so I guess we're supposed to cut it some slack. Okay, then here's my pull quote - "Freaks is the best movie since whatever crap came out last week!"

Since it's supposed to be a throwback to those campy B-movies from the '50s, wouldn't Freaks have been better without the expensive special effects? I'd rather Devlin and Emmerich had cut corners on the effects budget and instead invested in a wittier, tongue-in-cheek script that called for fashioning the spiders out of pipe cleaners and egg cartons. Incidentally, Doug E. Doug's paranoid conspiracy theorist isn't nearly as funny as the same character played by Dave Chappelle in Undercover Brother, another spoof that got it right. Freaks does not.

1:39 - PG-13 for sci-fi violence, brief sexuality and language

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X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 739262
X-RT-TitleID: 1114810
X-RT-SourceID: 595
X-RT-AuthorID: 1146
X-RT-RatingText: 4/10