A lightweight homage to the B-movie giant spider movies of the 50's, EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS is loaded with great special effects and more than a few laughs.
Set in a fictional Arizona mining town (and filmed in Superior and Glendale for those Arizonans keeping track), our humorous tale starts as so many in the genre do. A big barrel of radioactive toxic waste falls off a truck and lands near a spider farm (who knew?) breeding thousands of giant spiders.
David Arquette generates plenty of laughs by playing it straight as Chris, who has come back to town for a funeral, but ends up staying to romance the beautiful town sheriff Samantha Parker (Kari Wuhrer, fresh from "Anaconda" about a giant snake. she needs a new agent...)
Anyway, all the stock small town characters you expect are here, including the bumbling deputy, the smart kid who knows all about spiders and a young Scarlett Johansson as the sheriff's beautiful and resourceful daughter.
It's a ton of fun in a very "Starship Troopers" kind of way, as thousands of giant arachnids attack the town. The spiders look great and very realistic, but the gore is kept to a minimum and replaced with jump scares and laughs.
As the townspeople all end up holed up in an abandoned shopping mall in a lazy reference to "Day of the Dead" the film starts to run out of steam and get repetitive, but you have to give it credit for keeping the action coming non-stop.
Finding a middle ground between the dreck of a "Sharknado" and the classic style of "Gremlins", EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS spins a slight yet enjoyable nostalgic trip back to the sci-fi spider flicks of the 50's and gets a B-.
Watch out for those orb spinners the size of a Volkswagen.....
Comments