Spiders (2000) User Reviews

Horror spiders film with an incredible makeup and formidable special effects

[ma-cortes · 5/10 · 19 April 2004]

Monster film plenty of thrills , chills , spectacular scenes , frenetic action and overwhelming spider attacks . It's an average spooky terror/monster movie . It is a blending of the monster movies of the 50s such as 'Tarantula' and modern American production plenty of C.G.I. The thrilling screenplay is a bit yawn-inspiring but nifty special effects will keep you from dozing off , with nice creatures designers, created by means of Animatronics and computer visual effects .

The actors are unknown , Parrilla ,Greene and others must be one of their first films . The FX are extraordinaries , the giant spiders are breathtaking, they have been made by means of computer generator visual effects and Animatronics. The technicians set up the creatures effects supervision were the prestigious Robert Kurtzman , Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger and they made it pretty well . Although nothing which haven't been seen before, this is not the picture to watch if you are scared of spiders , however the movie is quite entertaining . Utterly arachnophobia people must flee this film.

The production is quite good , it was realized by Nu Image now called Milennium , a production company formed by brothers Danny Lerner , Avi Lerner , and Boaz Davidson along with Trevor Short . The motion picture was professionally directed by Gary Jones with rather too much camera movement and there are also lots of low-angle shots of people hanging around waiting to get bitten by the carnivorous spider . Rating : Acceptable and passable.

Other movies about this Spider sub-genre are the followings : ¨Tarantula (1955)¨ by Jack Arnold with John Agar ; ¨Tarantula: the deadly cargo (1977)¨ with Claude Akins ; ¨Kingdom of spiders (77)¨ by John Budd Cardos with William Shatner , ¨Arachnophobia(1990)¨ by Frank Marshall with John Goodman ; ¨Arachnid¨ (2000) by Jack Sholder with Chris Potter , Jose Sancho , Neus Asensi and ¨Eight Legged Freaks¨ (2002) by Ellory Elkayem with Scarlett Johansson , Kari Wuhrer , and David Arquette

Eight-legged nonsense

[capkronos · 4/10 · 3 January 2006]

Marci (Lana Parrilla), a college student working for a student newspaper about extraterrestrials and other supernatural phenomena, plus two male co-workers (Nick Swarts and Mark Phelan), head out into the California wilderness following a report of alien sightings. There they witness a spaceship crash, see a scientist being shot by a corrupt military man, stow away on a truck that's loaded down with corpses (from the ship), and end up trapped in Majestic 12 headquarters; a military bunker/lab way underground (you need to take an elevator to get down there) where unorthodox experiments have been taking place. Some scientists have injected a tarantula with some alien DNA, said spider laid an egg inside one of the astronauts and said egg has hatched; resulting in a large, web-shooting spider monster with cell-regenerative properties that sinks its fangs into most of the supporting cast. The monster also grows bigger and bigger from one generation to the next, so at the finale we get a house-sized giant spider going on GODZILLA rampage on a college campus and through the city. It's up to Marci and a buff military dude (Josh Green), both in their matching white tank tops, to stop the monster. Not to spoil the ending, but our heroine ends up hanging out of a helicopter on a rope trying to shoot a missile out of a bazooka (that looks like it was made by Nerf) right into the monster's mouth. As one character says early on, "It's like a bad sci-fi movie!" Well, I've seen a little worse. The story and stock characters have been worn clichés for at least 40 years, the dialog is laughable ("We need bug repellent, not guns!"), the acting is bad to fair and the special effects are highly uneven (there's a pretty good animatronic-model spider by KNB and some lame, but scantly-used, computer fx at the end). There's also a sequel.

Oh, What A Tangled Web

[darkjosh · 5/10 · 15 January 2001]

Unrefreshing, unintentionally funny, trite, campy, but overall a fun no-brainer of a flick, Spiders is a B-movie that doesn't try to be anything else, and, thankfully, doesn't take itself seriously at all.

When a space shuttle testing mutant spiders gets knocked back into the Earth in a freak accident, three college students discover a government project designed to use spiders as warfare weaponry.

Part X-Files, part Aliens, part Men in Black, this amalgam of unoriginal writing, wafer-thin characters, unimpressive, pedestrian special effects, and unknown cast members actually are quite charming. The most fun scenes are when the spider runs amok outside the lab. At this stage in the film, it's easy to see that the production was given quite a hefty budget to work with, so why not use it to build sets instead of making high school classrooms pass for government labs? And how about a few extras to guard this super-secret facility?

Despite its plot-hole writing, less-than-believable visuals, and amazingly cheap looking first three-quarters, the chaotic ending and likeable young cast keep this otherwise unredeemable, derivative film pure camp pleasure.

Undoubtedly poor by most standards,but taken as a simple B-Movie more enjoyable than you may have read

[DrLenera · 2 August 2006]

Not many people have much to say about this movie that is good,which is maybe to be expected. However,what do they really expect from a tiny budgeted movie about killer spiders starring nobody you've ever heard of,which went straight to DVD? I bought this film for £1 from my local Tesco. I knew what I was going to get and got it. Solid B-Movie fun,no more,no less.

Most of the first hour is set in an underground base,which obviously saved on the budget,but the endless scenes of the heroes creeping around or running from something get monotonous and make the film resemble a very old Dr Who episode padded out to feature length. Still,the actual mechanical spider effects are pretty good and in some ways no less realistic than some of the CGI you see everywhere in big budget films. As for the dreadful CG explosions in the film,I've definitely seen worse in recent films where there is probably less of an excuse for them to be bad. Somewhat disappointingly,there are only two spiders {my DVD back cover at least implies there are loads}.

The climax of the almost Kong-sized second spider rampaging through Los Angeles really isn't badly done considering the budget the filmmakers had to work with. The silly climax,with the heroine hanging out of a helicopter with a bazooka,is quite exciting. Obviously,script,direction and acting throughout are mediocre. There is little real atmosphere,in fact most of the film looks flat and TV-like. But honestly,as I've said before,what did people really expect from this? Watch it for what it is,a B-Movie for the uncritical,and you might quite enjoy it.

A truely awful work

[douglasp · 1/10 · 19 August 2001]

This is a truly wretched work.

A girl who might be a truly hot babe and has a thing for UFO's drags her two boy-toys to a secret government lab where she gets her glasses knocked off by a mutant spider and becomes a truly hot babe after which she waists no time getting the spider to off her two boy-toys then she does a wet t-shirt dance and wins the heart of a hunka hunka burning MIB(Man In Black).

Then, on their honeymoon, the hot babe and the MIB steal a secret government black heliocopter and blow up the giant spider that brought them together.

Its every great sci-fi movie you've ever seen and less. If I ever have to see this thing again I will pluck out my eyes and use them as earplugs.

A Horrific Experiment Gone Wrong

[Uriah43 · 3/10 · 27 January 2016]

This movie essentially begins with some astronauts on the space shuttle who are in the process of conducting experiments on spiders while in space. Suddenly a solar flare hits the space shuttle and causes an emergency situation prompting an immediate return to earth. However, since the experiments they were conducting were highly classified, the space shuttle is reported to have been burned up upon reentry--when in all actuality it has crash-landed in the Californian desert. Then, as luck would have it, a college reporter named "Marci Eyre" (Lana Parrilla) and two of her friends by the names of "Jake" (Nick Swarts) and "Slick" (Oliver Macready) just happen to be at the same location investing possible aliens when they observe the space shuttle's descent. Rushing to the site they see three dead astronauts with injuries incompatible with the crash and another astronaut who is clearly suffering from some kind of severe illness and on the verge of death. All of a sudden some government agents arrive accompanied by military personnel and the three reporters subsequently hide in a truck to avoid detection. They are then transported to a secret government facility which is located underground. Upon quietly exiting from the truck they investigate this facility and discover all kinds of evidence pointing to some really horrific experiments. But the worst is yet to come. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that I had hoped for a film containing some good suspense and horror. A key component of that would also include some good CGI. Unfortunately, although the suspense was adequate enough, the horror and special effects were not very sharp at all. Additionally, the attempts at humor weren't very effective either and only served to give the movie a rather cheap quality. In short, I was somewhat disappointed in this film and I have rated it accordingly. Below average.

Oh boy, they just couldn't focus.

[jmbovan-47-160173 · 3/10 · 10 April 2020]

Is it aliens? Is it space spiders? Is it government experimentation? Well this college student reporter is going to find out! Was this on Syfy? Was this rejected by Syfy? Were the producers strung up in a web and given 40 lashes? Do you really want to find out? No.

"This is like a bad sci-fi movie."

[TheSonomaDude · 2/10 · 31 January 2014]

Oh, the irony.

To be frank, I only sought after this film because of how much I adored Mosquito, another giant bug movie from the same director, Gary Jones. Let me tell you, this is no Mosquito. Not even close.

Spiders has some cool aspects. For example, the climax of the film is surprisingly enjoyable and the animtronic effects look somewhat decent half of the time, as the DVD cover proudly boasts "from the same effects team as Army Of Darkness, Spawn, and Wishmaster!" But the compliments end there. Porn stars would be facepalming in embarrassment at the lack of acting ability present at the set, but I'm not sure who to blame; the actors or the abysmal script.

This has got to be one of the worst screenplays I've ever seen translated into film. Every line of dialog is clichéd and laughable, with laughable line delivery by the elementary school play actors to top it off. Yes, Mosquito had some terrible acting too, but it had good acting to even it out. There is only one good actor in Spiders, and he says two lines before getting shot. Excellent casting guys, bravo. It also doesn't help that the characters are written with zero likability as they make dumb decision after dumb decision after dumb decision. Truly, the characters and actors are what subtract so many stars from the rating.

Gary Jones made Mosquito with only $200,000 but created an enjoyable and extremely entertaining B-movie with lots of gore and high rewatch value. Gary Jones made Spiders with $2 million, but created an embarrassing, appalling mess with little to no redeemable factors.

Totally fake

[outerspace-4 · 4/10 · 13 January 2008]

This movie is so fake. I mean, if this movie was produced in 1975, it would've been a great movie. But with the current (or back in 2000) computer-animated special effects, they could've done it better! Already in the beginning at the part where the space-shuttle exploded, I could clearly see it was fake. Not to mention the spider 'Mother in law' itself... almost hilarious to see. It moved on like it was guided by strings and looked like it was made of plastic. This can be clearly seen in the part where 'mother-in-law' crawls out of the astronaut's body and flees along the walls. The story itself isn't so thrilling either. A spider being injected by an alien DNA in space. God knows where that alien DNA came from. As far as I can tell, it wasn't told in the movie (maybe I fell asleep of boredom). No, next time it appears on television, I'll pass.

Not 1/2 bad

[jeny03 · 7/10 · 23 January 2001]

I watched this movie with my boyfriend, whom thought this movie was ridiculously stupid. I thought it was pretty good. I hate spiders naturally, and I was scared in the movie for the people the spider was going after. There are many moments, the flick seems totally unrealistic. Overall, I thought it was pretty good. It kept me interested, I didn't fall asleep, and the suspense kept me watching. Not bad, give it a chance!

Makes Hercules In New York look like a Masterpiece.

[fuzileer · 2/10 · 29 November 2006]

Starting off as a tense and reasonably scary movie, in the end it just gets, as simply as possible, stupid. The movie starts off with three nerds who decides to sneak into nowhere for some reason, and then a space craft hits the ground (when I say space craft, I mean a cheap 99p rocket bought from the Early Learning Centre) and they see a mutated crew member who was impregnated with a spider, which was mutated by, yes, you guessed it. Radiation. Original. Chumps. Then, the 3 members of geek-squad somehow get inside an underground base, and the spider hatches out of the crew member who they found in the shuttle. (Don't worry Alien fans, the spider crawls out of the mouth, not the highly original chest-burster.) Then you get to the part where the thing starts to chase everyone around, killing for no reason what-so-ever, and slowly, the scary-o-meter (1 being tellitubie scary, 9 being Alien and 10 being Napoleon Dynamite) drops from 5 to 4, and eventually, the main evil guy gets impregnated. The geek squad falls from 3 to 1 (you can guess which one survives from the very start) and once the last geek-member escapes with her new friend, the scary-o-meter goes from 4 to 2. Once outside, they both bump into the evil guy, who some how managed to break away from being completely wrapped in web and from the spiders layer and never tells us how, and he blows up to reveal a medium sized spider(think of Eight Legged Freaks spiders, but a bit smaller) and now the scary-o-meter reaches -4. As soon as the spider is on the loose, the two "heroes" go outside to see the helicopter that the evil guy was on, just parked in car park with people just walking past it, despite having a top-of-the-range bazooka with live ammunition on the back seat, which has no door what-so-ever, and the keys miraculously still in the ignition. Then, they fly over the city and an anti-climax follows where the spider gets blown up and then the film immediately finishes when everyone goes "yay".

What really lets the movie down is that it thinks it can be a comedy/horror/action film all in one, a mixture that takes a master of a director to get over, this film would only be really good if Spielberg would have trouble of doing this piece of garbage. The actors are totally uninspiring, and in one scene, the woman geek's hair style changes when shes in a lift.

Therefore, I would like to end this review on this final note:

Thank the lord I bought this for only £1.99

Decent fun with clever references to genre clichés.

[tabor-ukhodit-v-nebo · 8/10 · 17 June 2007]

I think most people who have commented on this movie have watched it with the wrong attitude. Get real; What do you expect from a flick blatantly named "Spiders", apparently featuring some generic monstrous arachnid creatures wreaking havoc on people? Unless you're an easily amused teenager with poor judgment, you instinctively steer clear from these kinds of pictures when looking for chills and thrills. There are quality films that offer just that.

I thought I was about to watch a really bad movie, with unintentionally comedic elements and worthless cast, storyline and directing. I was wrong. This movie quickly reveals it's true nature for the perceptive. Taking for granted that the movie was "bad" on purpose, I could actually appreciate the cheesy dialog and all the self-irony that it displays. The characters make illogical decisions, use stupid reasoning and don't try to take themselves seriously. The way in which the plot unfolds and how the main characters figure it out is an obvious parody of the genre, and there are so many details which contribute to that feeling in the dialog and some of the scenes; a guy holding the spider's teeth like bull's horns, making DNA-enhanced mutant spiders from hell seem like a an ordinary casual case of lively struggle, quotes like "This is so creepy. Its like a bad sci-fi movie." and "I mean what the hell is this place?" -"I don't care what this place is, what the f-ck are *we* doing here?" etc. made me at least chuckle at times, because they often raise valid points regarding the absurd setting of the film, and do it with subtlety.

The CGI was decent at times, yet laughable in some parts (especially when the spider was running around walls etc). The spider looks gory enough in close shots. The physical webs are composed of thin rope and you can see the knots tying together the intersections, which to me was a funny detail (c'mon, they could have easily avoided that, would they had cared for realism).

The pacing is fine; There is enough action to keep the viewer at least semi-entertained, assuming they can appreciate other aspects of the film also (I'm not a big fan of "irrational abominable creature vs. bunch of dumb people" films).

All in all, this is definitely not a serious movie, so you should not watch it as one. If you are in a humourless mood looking for some horror, then this movie will probably only make you angry. As a compensation for all the bad ratings this movie has received on IMDb, I have to give it 8/10. I'd dare to say it is more self-aware and intelligent than most people realize.

I didn't think it was that bad!

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 14 June 2012]

I personally wouldn't go as far as to call it a great movie, the special effects are wildly inconsistent, sometimes decent but also sometimes very superficial and the film, despite the fact it has the feel of a parody, can get very derivative and predictable at times and the editing could have been a little sharper, at times there was too much of a 60s-70s TV movie feel to it. However, the costume and set design were reasonably good, I enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek dialogue with its embracing of the genre clichés and the spiders do have a certain menace to them. There is also a nice mix of fun and scary moments, including the wonderfully chaotic ending, the characters are admittedly clichéd but I have seen and heard far worse written characters before in far worse movies that had no excuse to be as bad as they are and the young cast are very likable. Overall, not great but could have been far worse. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Big scary monster thing

[swifty77 · 1/10 · 22 June 2016]

'This is...like a bad science fiction movie'

I was expecting this to be absolute rubbish, so imagine my surprise when I found the first half hour of this movie intriguingly watchable with the majority of problems being poor dialogue...but no worries, then the spiders appear! I breathed a sigh of relief as I could begin to laugh at the shoddy effects and all-too-pathetic deaths thrown in amongst a myriad of plot-holes that I literally can't even begin to pick up on. This was a monster movie that should have known it wasn't going to be good, which made it more disappointing when it seems that the director here was thinking they had the next 'Alien' franchise on their hands. An all too serious movie that should have taken the mick out of itself a LOT more.

1/10

(Will I watch 'Spiders 2'? Probably yeah.)

Never to be taken seriously

[DoubleJack · 9 February 2001]

The film Spiders does not intend to be mentioned in the same breath as films like Jaws and the Alien series. It has its tongue planted firmly in its cheek and as a result is hoping for the chance to rub shoulders with gems such as Piranha and Lake Placid. Whilst viewing the film you may tut and groan at some of the scenes with tacky dialogue and acting, it is only near the end when you realise that the producers have attempted to have as much fun as possible, at the expense of all those X-files/Dark Skies/Millennium style conspiracy shows, with a bit of monster movie digs in for good measure.

Painful to Watch

[patrick-green · 2/10 · 23 May 2010]

Spiders, a title that conveys the movie's subject quite well since it is about those small, eight-legged arachnids everyone has already seen in their home or garden. But the spider, for there is only one spider in this film, is not the small, garden variety spider. For one, it is god awfully huge, something that will make any amateur entomologist go into a bout of annoyed tutting (that thing would die of asphyxiation blabla).

But let us not be bothered by the unhappy grumblings of amateur entomologists, ie bug lovers, and look at the spider and the film in which it is set. The film starts out with a bunch of geeky kids whose leader, a young woman whose name I cannot remember, is fascinated by aliens and conspiracy theories. The girl does an interview with someone who claims to be an alien, and who is the object of a lot of painful, unfunny comedy such as drinking condensed milk(get it? condensed milk is for coffee! Haha...ha...what).

After this delightful episode, the gang travels to an old base in the desert where they witness the rather fake and unimpressive crash of a space shuttle...which was, unfortunately for everyone, the space borne center of a strange experiment involving a live tarantula and the injection of alien DNA into said tarantula. Why they didn't choose a mouse or a rat like normal scientists would is uncertain, although a film about a giant man-eating mouse might not have the same appeal as a giant arachnid on alien steroids.

The men in black or CIA agents or whoever they are promptly arrive to mop up this atrocious mess and retrieve the spider, but the poor creature is ungraciously stepped on by one of the tuxedo'd, sunglass-wearing government agents. Much to the chagrin of their leader (maybe he was an entomologist?).

But fear not, for the spider laid an egg in the entrails of an unfortunate astronaut who survived the crash, and the arachnid's ugly, fat, rubberized prop of an offspring is subsequently vomited out by the unfortunate rocket man and escapes into the sinister realm of a top secret underground base.

What can we say? For one, the spider is atrocious and looks like one of those cheap toys you'd find in the bottom racks of the toy section of your local supermarket. The eight-legged beast is pictured using cheap, stiff puppets and some ugly CGI effects that would make even the old Atari console's graphics look like a masterpiece. There are no animatronics in this film, do not be fooled, you'll just see a stiff rubber spider being pushed against/thrown at people.

The actors are also horrible, with acting talents ranging from rubber duck level to sock puppet level. The main human antagonist, who looks a lot like a botched Mr Smith clone, is good for a few "what" moments as he passionately defends the ugly spider with a lot of laughable over-acting and fugly world conquest delusions. The leading actress is also risible, and falls in love with a man in black after a quick session of water-wrestling (I'm not joking).

All in all, the film is pathetic. Monster Flick lovers might recognise a kind of 1950s monster movie atmosphere to the whole enterprise. In fact, the movie should be viewed as a light comedy to watch with friends and a copious supply of alcohol.

Incredibly hilarious!

[Aussie Stud · 1/10 · 24 October 2001]

I haven't watched a 'horror' movie like this and doubled over with unintentional laughter since the 1980's!

This movie was recently shown on the Sci-Fi Channel much to my delight as I really didn't want to rent this when it came out on video because the box cover made it look like cheap straight-to-video trash. Nonetheless, this film turned out to be cheap straight-to-cable trash, not that I was expecting anything else!

The non-existent plot in this tripe is paper thin and looks like it was scrapped together after its creators watched a few episodes of 'THE X-FILES' and 'ALIENS'. They took the premise from the X-FILES episode where Mulder's father investigates the man who seems to have had a spider surgically planted in his body which crawls out of his mouth only to kill other people by crawling into their mouths and suffocating them. Then they took the old 'ALIEN' approach by having broken pipes suddenly break loose spewing 'steam' as a 'scare tactic' for the viewer, but really only succeeds in blowing dust kittens in your direction with a long silent yawn. It seems like they also took a bit of the plot from 'TICKS' by having the spider implant an egg into the body of the dying astronaut which results in having a 'mutated' version of the spider escaping from his body. One of the most hilarious scenes happen right here - when a 'computer-generated' leg of the spider comes out of the man's mouth. It looked so fake, I don't even think the director of this film cared about it at the time.

But, the special effects in this turkey are the most hilarious things about this movie. They're cheaper than what's featured in a regular episode of "BATTLESTAR GALACTICA" or the UK classic, "RED DWARF". The space craft itself looks like it was made out of cardboard. The close-up shots look like one of those toy space crafts that hang by a piece of string in some toy-store window display against a cardboard space galaxy background.

The second hilarious thing is the spider itself. When it 'mutates' after it comes out of that man's mouth and runs around the walls, my stomach muscles nearly split from laughter!! This huge plastic-looking Halloween prop was skittling around the walls, and when the three kids are hiding in that room and the spider starts banging on the other side of the window in the door, I swear I could see the stick holding it up!!!!

The third hilarious thing is the incredible 'acting' given by all those involved with the film. Check out the female scientist who gets attacked by the plastic spider and is screaming as it sprays its web onto her face, and then she runs out the door, only to find herself pulling herself along the floor as the shadow of the spider comes closer... scene cuts to a fade out with a long scream(!!!).

The rest of this movie basically takes place in a secret underground Government facility where the three 'heroes' try to escape from the spider which makes food out of other Government personnel by spinning them into webbed cocoons.

Personally, I have arachnophobia, but after watching this film, I think spiders are one of the most friendliest creatures on this planet!

If you want to watch a genuine comedy - RENT THIS MOVIE!!!! Laughs are guaranteed!

2/10

Hey, eight legged giant spiders, a kid with glasses, 2 million dollars. What more do you need?

[sam_carss_1992 · 5/10 · 3 January 2009]

Spiders (2000)

Nearly everybody you come across will have seen a monster movie at some point in their lives. If you've met somebody who hasn't seen one, sue me. Spiders, i believe lives up to it's expectations. I mean with a two million dollar budget your not exactly going to get an Oscar winning performance. Your going to get something which isn't quite up to scratch as 'Them' and 'War of the Worlds' but your going to get something delightfully cheesy and gory, with a few nice twists thrown in. Spiders delivers exactly what a good B-movie should. The acting is o.k, although it can be a bit lackadaisical at times, its fine. The SFX are good for the budget and the animatronics work is fine. It's a fair direction as well. The only thing i would say is have a more good looking female character, it makes the men care more for the characters if you know what i mean.

Overall, Spiders lives up to what a good B-Movie should be, with it's gruesome spiders, foaming at the mouth scientists, trigger happy soldiers and nail biting computer nerds it certainly delivers a Sunday night thrill! Whether your laughing or hiding behind a cushion, Spiders is for all Sci-fi/Monster movie lovers.

I give Spiders 5/10. Good but lacking character.

Spiders - Rated R/15 for sustained gore and violence. All rights reserved to owners of the film and it's sequel.

I'm sure that even people with arachnophobia wouldn't be terrified.

[philip_vanderveken · 3/10 · 5 November 2004]

A large percentage of mankind is afraid of animals like snakes, spiders... In the fifties horror movies always contained giant insects, probably because the creators thought this was the best way to scare the audience. But times have changed and so have people. We aren't afraid of giant insects on the silver screen anymore. That's why I thought the genre was already long death, but apparently I was wrong.

"Spiders" got bad reviews and I really don't know what made me watch this movie anyway. It was probably the fact that I wanted to have a good laugh. That's right: a good laugh, because the spiders in this movie are so huge that it makes you forget that you should be scared. I'm sure that even people with arachnophobia wouldn't be terrified.

The most frightening thing about this movie is perhaps the lack of a good story. A young female student is interested in UFO's and ET's and writes articles about it in the local college paper. She has done a lot of research and she has found a secret site called "Area 21" where the government is doing all kinds of secret stuff (no, I'm not making this up). It appears to be a site where scientists are experimenting with inserting the DNA of aliens into spiders to make giant killers.

In the beginning, the movie looked promising (when the spiders were still small), but as it progressed it got worse and worse. It's just a mix-up of different stories which we all know all to well. Take scenes from Arachnophobia, Ticks, Alien, even King Kong together with some episodes from the X-Files and you know what you can expect. Well no, because than it might still have been quite good, but the directors made such a big mess out of it, that you can only laugh.

My advise to everybody: don't rent or buy it, but watch it when it is shown on television. It's like a fifties horror movie, but than in color and there aren't many comedies that make you laugh more than this "horror" movie. I gave it a 3/10.

above average ? or not ?

[PeterKurten911 · 5/10 · 6 November 2004]

Broadcast here as part of a series of giant monster flicks, SPIDERS had a mission. The giant monster genre knew a revival in the late nineties, but the quality of most releases varies from poor to absolutely zero. So, SPIDERS was supposed to represent the better half. I'm not sure whether it lives up to that task. The campy fun overcomes the flaws, but nevertheless it didn't strike me as above average. Now, usually I refuse to rap my comment around a synopsis, but this time it's the easiest way, since SPIDERS is divided in four neat acts, just like a play.

The events in Act I eventually lead to the basic situation of having a monster on the loose. A fictional space shuttle crashes due to a solar flame near a top secret military base, the kind where illegal aliens both dead and alive are given shelter and therefore appropriately named Area 21. The live video images of the shuttle crew are amateurish, the crash looks like a toy was thrown in front of the camera and the whole idea of aliens with New Jersey accents is never developed in its silliness.

Act II gives us the lead characters. Our semi-attractive heroine is a reporter who, together with her nerdy environmentalist companions, plans to sneak into Area 21 to inform the public on … whatever secrets hidden there. Then there's an MIB-like agent called Gary, who is precisely the kind of inhuman bastard a government needs to handle situations in the order of alien tourism and secret spaceships malfunctioning. I dug him; he reminded me of both the cop on DEUCE BIGALOW and the second lieutenant on TERMINATOR, which proves his Agent Smith act fails in the end. His assistant eventually switches sides and becomes the clumsy hero. The rest of the cast plays a mix of shallow doctors, nervous soldiers and brave yet helpless police officers most of whom are destined to the slaughter throughout the movie.

In the third act, the 30' spider is born out of the mouth (!) of a surviving astronaut, finishes off a scientist and escapes to the basements of the base. This scene has really good special effects, and the CGI preserves its quality throughout the whole hunt in the basement, which reminded me in particular of the cargo bay chase in JASON X. This part is about the best of the entire movie, with frozen Apollo 18 crew members, a Mexican standoff, an original monster disposal and 'Gary's best scene.

By the beginning of Act IV, the movie has little over a quarter left to find a way to resurrect the spider, have it start a rampage in the big city and give us a big heroic finale. It takes place on our heroine's campus, by the way First the XXL-spider bursts out of Gary ( I'm not spoiling anything, you will see it coming ), then chases a crowd of desperately random fleeing students, takes its first cop in a re-enactment of BEAST FROM 20.000 PHANTOMS and chases more people in the big city before the Heroic Twosome finishes it off with uranium grenades (?). Whatever gore made the first kills bearable is absent here, both the CGI ad puppet work on the spider don't work above the 10 feet perimeter and the Shootout Phrase 'suck on this, bitch !' is obsolete.

In conclusion, taste the quality in the line 'if you weren't one of them, I'd like you.'. There have been worse opening phrases to intimacy ( though the pace doesn't permit the heroes to be intimate ).

Saved by an Third Act and Decent Effects

[hmckiel · 7/10 · 14 January 2007]

SPIDERS could have been another No-Flash, Even Less Bang DTV horror flick. But about halfway through, the writers got smart and made the final fifteen minutes something that monster movies fanatics the world over would of cheered in an immaculate chorus if they saw it in a movie theater for. Problem is, no one would've had the patience to stay up until then.

The plot is simple: The government injects a spider with alien DNA, it lays an egg in someone before it dies, the offspring hatches in a decent gross-out scene, and crap happens. It takes a while to get going, and even once it does nothing cool ever happens until the finale, which involves yet another spider, this one bigger than a large sports car, getting loose in Los Angles. It really is quite the spectacle, one that I thought saved the film from being a total snoozefest.

Everything else is average or below-average, except the puppetry effects used for the spiders (there's only three in the entire film). There is one part where the creature is obviously just a prop on the end of a stick, but other than that the practical effects are outstanding for this kind of film. Now about the CG, well, its terrible for the most part.

Overall, SPIDERS makes for an okay weekend rental. Don't expect much, and you shouldn't be too disappointed.

Crappy Movie, Cool Effects, Very Crappy Movie

[zarby · 1/10 · 29 December 2001]

Basically this movie sucked. The major flaws was that it's story and characters were not even good enough to be called "B movie" actors. The lead character played by Lana Parillia was annoying at best and down right aggrivating most other times.(Lana who? don't worry no one else know who she is either!)The special effects were kinda cool but a total waste of money when combined with this lame half witted story. I gave it a 1 and would have given it a zero if I could have.

Okay, predictable, but great fun!

[mindgap007 · 8/10 · 21 October 2001]

Well, having sat through countless low-budget monster flicks in my time, Gary Jones' SPIDERS is like a breath of fresh air. Okay, it's all very predictable, with the old conspiracy style "government creates some kind of horrible hybrid monster via experiment that goes wrong" storyline being utilised in the same old way countless movies have before. However, it's to Nu Image's credit that they've produced such a fun, energetic monster movie, which more often than not actually manages to betray it's low-budget origins very successfully.

Even the performances are all pretty good, at least as far as these "B" movies go, although the script gets progressively more desperate as the movie goes on, particularly during the excellent TARANTULA style finale when the giant spider wreaks havoc in the city. Indeed, despite the sometimes laughable dialogue, SPIDERS succeeds where it might have failed, in that the special effects are quite superb. Okay, we're not talking top of the range Hollywood here, but the KNB guys have produced their magic again with some very impressive animatronic effects sequences. The CGI spider also comes across very well, and I was hugely impressed with the finale, where I couldn't believe so much had been achieved on such a low budget.

No, it's nothing ground breakingly original, but then it never pretends to be for one minute. SPIDERS is pure and simply a "fun" and at times "creepy" monster movie, and comes highly recommended.

Despite shortcomings, it's energetic "big bug movie" fun

[hippiedj · 6/10 · 10 October 2001]

Man, people here on IMDb and Amazon.com have been cruel to this film. Granted, it's got major flaws and lame dialogue ("That thing is a killing machine!!"), but it's far from a complete failure. Is it a great film? NO. Was I entertained? YES, and quite a bit more than I expected to be. When you have so many horrid horror/sci-fi films getting more attention (the fact that Mick Martin's Video Guide gave Leprechaun 4 In Space three out of four stars shows that ERROR in judgment can exist), just because Spiders could have improved itself doesn't mean it should be easily dismissed.

Yes, it has a story that could easily have been carefully edited to make a two-part X-Files episode, the dialogue was poor, and frankly, Marci's friends weren't sorely missed later because I couldn't stand hearing them call each other "Dude" all the time. Some of the smaller spiders were pretty lousy too. HOWEVER, the CGI effects were no worse than most of the praised syndicated sci-fi series on TV, and the KNB effects were quite gruesome.

Linking the story with possible actual aliens in the beginning was a nice touch, and the entire film kept a nice, energetic pacing that never lagged for a minute. There was a lot of running around in sub-basements, but the cobwebbed darkened corridors were a bit creepy. Two scenes stand out remarkably well: the elevator shaft scene and when one giant spider bursts through a college campus building. The quick editing kept that campus scene going well, and those watching Spiders on DVD will definitely find themselves hitting slow-motion on the remote when the spider tears open a police car. I showed that sequence to an expert on 1950s "big bug" movies, and he was actually impressed by the effort put into it.

It's true that the makers of Spiders could have fine-tuned this film, but with its obvious budget limitations I think it fared well. It has the creepiness of the 1988 classic The Nest and the sense of homage and whimsy of the underrated 1987 film Blue Monkey. Those films were better, but this one has that essence and isn't a waste of time to watch. This is kind of like one of those B-grade monster movies from the 1950s and 60s, with a bit more cussing. The bad guys are obviously bad and get what they deserve, and the good guys make it out fine. Spiders is one that I could watch repeated viewings of and even has the kind of silly "hero about to destroy the monster" delivery line that some day will make it into a montage of lines--you know the kind: "Eat this/Suck on this, you A) F'er , B) B*tch " and then the missile or rocket is fired into the gaping maw of the creature.

You're given the idea at the end that all's well that ends well, but remember, the secret military base still has a bunch of cocooned bodies, and with what the spiders did to them , well.........

Don't brush this film off entirely until you see that there are so many worse Hollywood big budget teen flicks that exist. Take this one with a grain of salt and you'll find it's a kicker indeed!

Just Awful

[jeaustin-48593 · 2/10 · 13 October 2022]

I couldn't tell if this was supposed to be a real horror flick or a parody but it is generally terrible...and I watch a lot of bad horror movies. When people are making a movie like this aren't they at least trying to have a script that is, gee...maybe just a little bit believable?? The beginning wasn't that bad. And the lie about the shuttle landing secretly and the government lying about it burning up...ok, that was kind of interesting. But then it goes straight down the tubes. A secret government location where you put an injured astronaut and then leave him completely alone in a room so that the journalists can find him!? Then the Men in Black guys...all two of them. And why was the woman able to get out of the web but the guy couldn't? Come on. Try just a little bit harder writers.