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Date Posted: Mon, Apr 19 2004, 12:52:35
Author: shadeshark
Subject: It's your lucky day--a two-for-one spider movie review!

And the dreck goes on, badadodidodo.

I took notes and times, as always. Let it not be said I'm inconstant.

We start with a little presentation called, “Arachnia”

13: Argh! Country-rock!

At 1:59 you can see the special effects through the plane. “They’re flying Wonder Woman’s transparent plane, I see.”

At 2:44 I don’t like anybody. This is not like “Reptilicus” where I am filled with loathing and disgust every time someone walks onstage, but it’s bad. There’s a pair of “twins” *cough cough* who flirt with everyone in sight and say stupid things.

At 4:38 I pick my Finalists. There is one black girl who is the only possible romantic interest for Pilot Boy.

At 5:16 I note that one flashy light and a case of poor acting aren’t cutting edge. I don’t want to be too mean to Minority Girl; she tried; but if you’re looking at something falling you don’t stare straight ahead.

At 5:40 I duck the Chunk of Exposition coming my way.

At 6:18 a meteor lands. “One of those atomic meteors.” Because there’s a BOOM shockwave.

At 6:32 the plane dives into the thick cloud cover. Never mind that we clearly saw the meteor landing.

At 7:51 the Lecherous Smart Alec does some terrible acting. I suppose this is meant to be funny.

At 8:06 a special effect shows white clouds rolling from the back of the plane. “In event of emergency, this cloud will become a fog machine.”

At 8:29 I decide Mr. Evil Lecherous Smart Alec will be first on the dinner menu when the spiders show up.

At 8:44, lightly shaking someone will arouse them from unconsciousness.

At 10:25 the Evil Lecherous Smart Alec doesn’t die. Oh, woe!

At 10:35 the ELSA moans in agony. I write “the Old Cow Died.”

At 11:17, poking someone fully clothed is a good substitute for First Aid.

12:07 it just doesn’t ring.

At 12:28 they leave the brightly burning wreck, a nice obvious signal beacon to rescuers.

At 13:06 we see the Spider-Cam. Basically, the screen goes red while someone grunts into a mike. What’s really bizarre about this is that we see the spider. What, did it find a mirror?

At 13:25 everyone overacts happiness at seeing a beaten-down house with the lights off.

At 14:14 I realize that Minority Girl has gone on an entire expedition braless.

At 17:02 the Spider-Cam finds another mirror.

Eventually a Crazy Old Coot stumbles into the party, defies Gun Safety, goes in the next room where a Twin is bathing, and tells her to stand up for no reason whatsoever. She does. Har har. He takes them into the barn and shows them a dead giant spider.

At 19:03 the snobby professor is still stuck in arrogant-creep mode.

At 20:02 the level in the jug they’ve all been drinking from is still the same.

At 21:53 I am unamused.

At 22:07 I write, “behold the rubber spider! That is baldly, boldly, flagrantly a rubber spider.” It’s one of those fifty-cent tarantulas with plastic hair. They didn’t even bother to glue two of the legs down!

At 22:56 the camera is zoomed in on the character’s faces. So close that it’s gotten fuzzy.

At 22:17 the camera is aimed at people’s chins, cutting off most of their faces.

At 26:40 I write, “don’t set the rules and allow your beastie to break them without a good reason.”

At 31:04 we get this progression:

“Did you ever do it with another girl?” asks Twin A.

“I don’t think so,” says Twin B.

Sax.

Ewwwww. Another producer who needs to have his Olsen Twins tapes stolen.

At 32:10: Crickets stop! What subtlety! I’m almost impressed!

At 32:54 the monster goes behind a building, to the sound of my cackling.

At 33:05 the Crazy Old Coot aims and fires at nothing. Literally.

At 33:21 we learn that it’s a three-shooter double-barreled shotgun.

At 37 minutes, instead of taking the people who’ve had no food since yesterday to civilization, Final Boy and Crazy Old Coot head off to the meteor site in COC’s truck.

At 38:18, one of these climates is not like the other. One of these climates doesn’t belong. . . The group stumbled through winter woods: leaveless trees with no snow. There was snow outside the cabin. And around the meteor site, there’s no snow. . . And the trees are lush and green.

At 40:22 we learn that Our Hero, while investigating the meteor site where COC says another giant spider might be, leaves his gun in the truck. And leaves COC in the tunnel to go get a flashlight.

At 41:22 the giant spider has cloth tube legs. Maybe it’s wearing hose. Anyway, scratch COC.

At 44:16 the Lecherous Smart Alec gets in the truck with the keys and won’t let the Final Boy, who’s still carting his gun around, get in. Look, if I ever see a giant spider kill a Crazy Old Coot right in front of me, and I’m responsible for the safety of three girls, and an adult gets in my only means of escape and locks me out and makes faces at me with only a pane of glass between us, and I have a gun. . . That’s really all I’m saying.

So anyway, two giant spiders hop on the truck. One gets Lecherous Smart Alec out of the truck, while the other one stands on the hood beating it in--look, I don’t direct ‘em, I just views ‘em. Eventually the two giant spiders tear Lecherous Smart Alec in two.

SUGGESTION: if you don’t have the budget for one real turantula, you don’t have the budget for gore.

All right, Lecherous Smart Alec appears to be solid red on the inside. And has no entrails of any kind. Then a spider bites *coughcough* theclothdummy’s*coughcough* arm off. Then it sort of bowls off his head.

At 45:58 the Final Boy tilts a chair and puts its back under the front doorknob. Oh, THAT’S gonna help against creatures that can easily tear a man in half.

At 48:21 we learn that it was really an accident. They actually wanted him alive. Those klutzy spiders!

At 50:02 the Final Boy goes into the barn and sits with his back to the open door.

At 50:26 he chucks around a box of dynamite of uncertain age.

At 51:14 the two Finalists bury Lecherous Smart Alec. They dig a hole about a foot and a half deep and chuck three pieces of him in. Let’s count:

Upper body: 1. Lower body, 1. Head, 1. Arm, 1. Uh, that’s four.

Then they decide they’re done. They didn’t even cover him up!

At 52:49 three of them have cell phones.

Wait--WHAT? WHAT!? So their plane crashed and none of them thought it was important enough to tell anyone? The movie has the intelligence of its characters.

I’m going to skip the FG’s call to her daddy to tell him that the Arrogant Professor attacked her and she’s stuck in a house in the woods. (We learn that Daddy is in the Air Force.)

Instead, I’ll mention their first line of defense: they dig a trench around the house and fill it with gasoline.

Well, it evaporates in two hours and when the spiders come at night they can’t set fire to the trench. Right? No? Bah.

At 58:57 I note that if it weren’t pitch black those would be some useful binoculars.

At 59:30 FB decides spiders won’t sneak up on him.

At 1:03:18 the spiders attack and clever FB, sitting on the roof, can’t find a one of them. I think we’ve established that he’s useless.

At 1:04:58 a spider knocks the chainsaw from FB’s grip. He is the weakest link!

FB chucks a lit stick of dynamite to the spider. It blows up without damaging anything else, like FB or the roof it’s standing on.

At 1:07:40 the Air Force has spent the entire night and half a day sitting on its hands and Twin A has been stolen by spiders the group runs off to rescue her. The professor stays outside, where, to nobody’s surprise, he dies explaining to spiders that creatures of their size cannot exist.

At 1:15:30 there’s a Spider Queen. My notes read: No, no, no, no, NO!

At 1:17:48 the group lands in Mock the Stupid for causing a great ruckus while they’re trying to rescue Twin A. And there’s an “Alien” ripoff.

At 1:20:40 the Air Force shows up, with an explosion superimposed over the shot for no good reason.

At 1:21:30 it starts raining, adding another weather phenomenon.

At 1:23:21 that’s where the superimposed explosion came from.

And the twins and FG and FB survive.

You may be saying, “wow, you should like this movie! The Minority Girl survived!” Hah. Well, so did the incestuous pseudolesbians. Although this doesn’t seem to have an Unfair Racial Cliché Alert, here’s the kicker: FG’s father is white.

You may be saying, “yeah, but so? She could have a white parent and still have skin that dark.”

She explains, “I’m ADOPTED!”

So basically she survived by being, if not white, of the white clan. Barf.

Also, the Air Force runs into the Spider Cave and slaughters them all, wearing white suits that make them look like death-dealing Teletubbies. The Father explains that if there’s more spiders, they’ll kill them, too. So much for scientific curiosity! And I’m assuming that all the scenes of exploding spiders are supposed to make me happy or excited or something.

Having ripped off scenes from “Alien,” (spiders bursting from host) “Jurassic Park,” (hero waving flare to hypnotize monster) and “Evil Dead” (the chainsaw) and one more I can’t think of, the movie ends. So then we go to:

“Arachnid”

Or, “What the Flipping Flip?”

This isn’t a. . . BAD movie. It was better than “House of the Dead.”

No, it was another movie that fell into the “WTF?” category. Lucky, lucky me.

Let’s sum up:

An alien shipwreck (a CGI explosion! Oh the digitality!) causes giant spiders, giant insects, and giant everything else to overrun a small island. How? Got me. We see the ship, see the alien, and see giant spiders. My guess is that he was making a delivery to a zoologist and crashed on the wrong planet.

A group of people (two doctors a couple marines some natives an arachnologist and a pilot) heads off to help the natives, who are being overrun with beasties. I find FG and FB and the two have a Big Misunderstanding.

At first it’s a game of Spot the Plastic Spider. Then ooze drips from a cliff onto the arachnologist’s hat, reminding us of the “Alien” series, and suddenly turns acidic. Ooookay. A marine shoots hell out of the cliff. Something from a nightmare of mine a couple years ago flops onto the sand. It’s roughly the size of a volleyball, but they don’t notice it.

They set off. On the way, a trio of “giant venomous ticks” leap out of a tree and onto one of the people. They burrow their way under his skin when the doctors try to remove it. They eventually dig their way through his body and out of his mouth and eye. The eye shot lifts this fimly above the realm of B-movies. The black guy shoots him, since the doctors can’t help.

The Low-Budget Lara Croft Final Girl, or “Loran,” falls into the tunnel of a giant trap-door spider. They get her out, but she lost a boot to the spider’s clutches. Webbing sticks her and FB’s shirt together and they both have to take off their shirts, because it’s in the script. Final Boy gets her boot by shoving his head and arm in the hole. Hello? Take a long stick, put webbing on the end, and boot-fish? Then the scientist comes and sticks his head in the hole. And the spider doesn’t get any of them. That is one ineffectual spider.

They find the native village, play “Split Up and Die,” scratch one native.

The find giant poisonous stinging millipedes. I like millipedes! They eat vegetation--rotting, I believe. But these are carnivorous and poisonous. I think they meant centipedes instead. If you’re confused, millipedes are the big slow wormlike ones you find in forests that smell bad when they‘re scared (or in the basement, but very small,) while centipedes are the fast low leggy ones that tend to lurk on basement walls and in bathtubs.

At 54:47 the black guy is off by himself singing about how he’s gonna see his girlfriend back at home.

They play “Split Up and Die” some more, taking out the arachnologist, the Male Doctor, and another native.

At 1:14:47 FB, LBL, and Female Tarzan Doctor are by themselves in a hut. Everyone else is dead or far away. Female Tarzan Doctor, who has been an Amazon up until now, suddenly gets a bad case of Lambertitis, turns into a panicky frantic woman, and runs into the monster and dies. Since she spent years and years surviving in varied jungles seeing the effects of Ebola, this is so far out of character you can’t hit her earlier presence with a missile launcher. FB and LBL escape through a tunnel that turns out to be the monster’s lair.

At 1:18:06 It was Only a Dream.

At 1:24:31, Black Marine comes face to face with the monster, shoots a couple times, stops, and lets it attack him. Uh, if you’re already shooting and realize there’s a horrible beast that’s your target, why would you stop? And in case you were wondering, he dies.

*A-HEM.

Note for whoever comes across a giant spider tunnel strung with webs: Spider silk burns. Find both entrances and set them on fire. Spider silk burns so quickly that the flame probably wouldn’t hurt the creature--but I doubt such a large beast would do well in a smoke-filled, enclosed tunnel. Especially once the dried corpses and the spider’s eggs caught.

Finding both entrances will be easier if you’ve already BEEN THROUGH THE TUNNEL ONCE. Or you could set the entire woods on fire and camp out on the beach in a site ringed with flame. That ought to bring a rescue party. Sheesh.*

Anyway, they eventually kill the monster in a way that makes me wonder why the natives didn‘t do it, since it involved a natural native weapon. One Native Boy, LBL, and FB set out to shore. This isn’t so much an ending as “we ran out of time.” And I would have taken the monster’s head with me. Nothing like having a pair of long, poisonous knives on hand in case of emergency.

Especially since nobody guaranteed that was the only giant spider.


Now, the movie did say that the monsters didn’t evolve in a planet with our gravity. If we’re assuming that it evolved on a light planet that supported its bulk, that would mean that the creature wouldn’t do very well here. It couldn’t move quickly, it couldn’t jump as well, and one large injury--ONE--and its system would be ruined. But we just kept seeing chunks getting shot off the creature’s head and back. This isn’t like the movie “Arachnia,” which told us the creatures were impossible and expected us to buy the monsters anyway--which would be a stretch even if they had a stellar reason, considering the rubber fangs and cloth legs of said beasties.

I repeat, this isn’t a BAD movie. Out of my categories: “Buy,” “Just BAD,” “Fun,” “Infamy!” and “WTF?” it’s a “WTF?” It joins “Swimming Pool.”

And: A NATIVE SURVIVED! If they’d had five more minutes, he would have died, but a minority lived to the end of the film!

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