Spiders [DVD] [2000]

Well.... Its an entertaining film. In comparison to other B movies I have reviewed its much better than Piranha II - Flying Killers [DVD] [1981] but not as entertaining as Hood of the Living Dead [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC].

This film is very entertaining but it has lost stars mainly for the CGI. It looks awful at times other effects look great.

This may contain a few spoilers...

So basically the spiders are taken into space to be injected with X... I spent half the film asking why? why take spiders into space to inject with X when you had a perfectly good underground military base? Well it turns out X is alien DNA and ummmm in lower gravity it was more likely to work or something equally silly. Now the question is why? Well to create a bio weapon! Why not? Giant spiders = amazing bio weapon and after they have eaten your enemy, you only have to deal with a great number of giant spiders that are nearly unstoppable. It seems to borrow quite a bit from Aliens, which is not a bad thing as I love the alien movies and alien rip offs. Carnosaur 2 [DVD] [1994] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC] being one of the best rip off of Aliens I have ever seen.

Now when the spider kills and eats, it grows bigger and its off spring are larger... Now this eventually leads to a giant spider attacking a city. Now this is a weakness of the film, if they had not attempted this, we could have had a better funded CGI in the underground base. The underground base did make me smile, with the secret service coming in to rescue their bio weapon. This is highly entertaining as they are aiming to capture not kill, so they arm everyone with non lethal weapons to capture it... wait no they have a bunch of troops with guns who all pair off and roam around in the dark until they are all killed.

Its an entertaining film and well worth checking out for a few quid. I would not recommend watching the trailer it seemed to be the last 20 minutes of the movie compressed down to two minutes, spoils the ending. I feel the film was over ambitious and could have been done without the city scenes and the helicopter. I feel this film would have been far more successful if they had focused more on the underground military base and used real special effects rather than CGI, I was quite disappointed when it said the special effects team who "created From Dusk Till Dawn (2 Disc Collector's Edition) [DVD]" but the non CGI effects look excellent. I am not saying all CGI is bad, it can be very effective, in films like Shaun Of The Dead [DVD] [2004] for example.

Well to summarise:

- Its a success in terms of entertainment.
- Its an interesting story that does borrow from aliens.
- Some of the CGI is just awful, not the worst I have ever seen but enough to spoil parts of it for me.

I will also include one thing I learnt from this movie:
- Giant man eating spiders that grow larger as they multiply and feed equals great bio weapon to kill your enemy. The only down side I see is that you replace your enemy with an army of giant spiders which you then have to kill or if worse comes to worse would then spread. It could potentially wipe out humanity but on the bright side at least your enemy is dead. Its the same question that I wondered about how they could possibly use the Alien as a bio weapon from the Alien films, as it just seemed almost suicidal to do so.

It's not art but it is FUN. The video version of junk food - you know it's bad but you still indulge. Non-stop FX, some very good, some not but relentless in number and ambition. How they got so much for the budget is quite an achievement. How it got a 15 certificate in the UK is also a surprise as the violence levels are high. It's a 50's throwback film, pretty plotless but very much a thrill ride. If you like pure monster fun, rampaging creatures and not much else then give it a go. Bit of a bargain at this sort of price. Picture quality is good, better than VHS by far and sound is clear. Remember it's for FUN nothing more and really doesn't try to be.

The acting was not that bad, not great either but still good! The Plot A DNA experiment on a rare breed of spider is taking place on a NASA space shuttle, when a freak meteor shower engulfs the shuttle, causing everything to go horribly wrong. One survivor is found on the ship and watched over in a secret location deep in the California desert. The problem continues, as the survivor isn't alone, as another deadly spiders climbs out of him and goes on a rampage around the ship. Curious reporter Marci Eyre (Parrilla) must now survive, escape and warn everyone before the spider reaches outside the desert.

Most scenes worked very well and some scene was laughable! But I still had fun time watching this movie and what I really liked was the gory deaths in this movie were great. If you like cheesy movies, don't miss this!.