Review: Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence, brief sexuality and language

Score: 3 out of 5

Eight Legged Freaks is a self-conscious throwback to '50s monster movies that does the job it sets out to do perhaps a little too well. It's the kind of movie you'd imagine American International Pictures themselves (the Blumhouse of the '50s and '60s) would've made back then if they had a big budget and modern CGI technology to spare, a film that gets right up in your face with all manner of icky arachnid goodness that it takes every opportunity it can to throw at the screen, and even though the effects may be dated now, it still works in the context of the lighthearted B-movie that this movie is trying to be. It's a movie where, as gross as it often is, going for an R rating probably would've hurt the campy tone it was going for. Its throwback to old monster movie tropes is a warts-and-all one, admittedly, especially where its paper-thin characters are concerned, such that it starts to wear out its welcome by the end and could've stood to be a bit shorter. That said, it's never not a fun movie, especially if you're not normally into horror, and it's the kind of film that I can easily throw on in the background to improve my mood.

Set in the struggling mining town of Perfection, Arizona, the film opens with an accident involving a truck carrying toxic waste accidentally dumping a barrel of the stuff into a pond that happens to be located right next to the home of a man named Joshua who runs an exotic spider farm. He starts feeding his spiders insects that he sourced from the pond, and before long the spiders start growing to enormous size, eating Joshua and eventually threatening the town, forcing its residents to start banding together for survival. I could go into more detail on the characters, but most of them fall into stock, one-note archetypes and exist mainly to supply the jokes and the yucks, elevated chiefly by the film's surprisingly solid cast. David Arquette's oddly disaffected performance as Chris, the drifter whose father owned the now-shuttered mines and returns to town in order to reopen them, manages to work with the tone the movie is going for, feeling like he doesn't wanna be in this town to begin with and wondering what the hell he got himself into by returning to the dump he grew up in. Kari Wuhrer makes for a compelling action hero as Sam, the hot sheriff who instructs her teenage daughter Ashley (played by a young Scarlett Johansson) how to deal with pervy boys and looks like a badass slaughtering giant spiders throughout the film. Doug E. Doug got some of the funniest moments in the movie as Harlan, a conspiracy radio host who believes that aliens are invading the town. Every one of the actors here knew that they were in a comedy first and a horror movie second, and so they played it broad and had fun with the roles. There are various subplots concerning things like the town's corrupt mayor and his financial schemes, the mayor's douchebag son Bret, and Sam's nerdy son Mike whose interest in spiders winds up saving the day, and they all go in exactly the directions you think, none of them really having much impact on the story but all of them doing their part to make me laugh.

The movie was perhaps a bit too long for its own good, especially in the third act. Normally, this is the part where a movie like this is supposed to "get good" as we have giant monsters running around terrorizing the town, and to the film's credit, the effects still hold up in their own weird way. You can easily tell what's CGI at a glance, but in a movie where the spiders are played as much for a laugh as anything else, especially with the chattering sound they constantly make that makes it sound like they're constantly giggling, it only added to the "live-action cartoon" feel of the movie. The problem is, there are only so many ways you can show people getting merked by giant spiders before they all start to blend together, and the third act is thoroughly devoted to throwing non-stop monster mayhem at the screen even after it started to run out of ideas on that front. There are admittedly a lot of cool spider scenes in this movie, from giant leaping spiders snatching young punks off of dirt bikes to people getting spun up in webs to a tarantula the size of a truck flipping a trailer to a hilarious, Looney Tunes-style fight between a spider and a cat, and the humans themselves also get some good licks in, but towards the end, the film seemed to settle into a routine of just spiders jumping onto people. It was here where the threadbare characters really started to hurt the film. If I had more investment in the people getting killed and fighting to survive, I might have cared more, but eventually, I was just watching a special effects showcase. The poster prominently advertises that this movie is from Dean Devlin, one of the producers and writers of Independence Day and the 1998 American Godzilla adaptation, and while he otherwise had no creative involvement, I did feel that influence in a way that the marketing team probably didn't intend.

The Bottom Line

Eight Legged Freaks is a great movie with which to introduce somebody young or squeamish to horror, especially monster movies. It's shallow and doesn't have much to offer beyond a good cast, a great sense of humor, and a whole lot of CGI spider mayhem without a lot of graphic violence. Overall, it's a fun throwback to old-school monster movies.