| Arachnid Released: 2001 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Super Monster Nuts and Bolts: A bunch of jackoffs flop around in the jungle trying to figure out why the big plastic spider is trying to kill so many people. Summary: Okay, we have this air force pilot guy named Joli Mercer. Jolly Joli is flying his stealth bomber over an island in the South Pacific. But what Joli doesn’t realize is that there’s somebody up there who’s just a tad bit more stealthy than he is. Joli crashes into an invisible alien spacecraft and they both crash-land into the jungle. Now both of these shmucks are pretty fucked up, but before the alien can pick up his first Reeses Pieces, a giant spider jumps on his back and spikes the shit out of him. Now since it is a known cosmic law that all aliens are more hearty and durable than our pussy-ass flesh bag Earthlings, it’s not a far stretch to believe that Joli doesn’t last much longer after seeing the alien get aced. Now lets flash forward 10 months later. A scientist in Guam named Doctor Samuel Leon has discovered that some native has been flown in to his hospital exhibiting bizarre bite marks across his chest. Leon’s associate is an unintelligible woman named Susana Gabriel. Now Leon and Susana decide to charter a plane to go the island and find whatever it is that fucked dude up (The native’s name is Toe Boy by the way if you can believe that). In comes Loren Mercer and Lev Valentine. Mercer is a female commercial pilot and Valentine is a Ramboesque marine Valentine has also brought along his two muscle-bound brickheads Pablo Reyes and Bear. Rounding out the cast is a colorblind fashion victim named Doctor Henri Capri. Capri is (of course) a specialist in spiders. He creams his drawers every time he gets the chance to talk about them. So these losers pile into Mercer’s plane and head off towards the island. For some reason the instrument panel craps out and she is forced to crash the plane on the beach. So now they have a busted plane and they can’t even get a strong enough radio signal to send out an SOS. So everyone starts bitching at one another while they start to set up camp. Now Valentine and Mercer are instantly set up to become lovers, but Mercer rebuffs him right away. Capri meanwhile goes fucking off studying mucous and bugs and shit. A nasty little critter hidden in the trees drips some acidic venom down on top of Capri’s hat. Bear jumps in and tries to shoot the thing out of the trees, but it apparently gets away. The group argues some more and then goes to sleep. The next day, they are all trekking through the woods when a funky mutant tick attacks Pablo. It borrows under his skin and begins crawling all over the place. Leon and Susana try to help him but hell, these guys are from Guam. It’s not as if they have the latest state of the art medical training. Meanwhile, Mercer has to go and take a shit. After she gets done wiping her sweaty ass, she walks on back towards the camp only to fall into a hole. She slips down waist deep and Valentine has to pull her out. Now while she is struggling to extradite herself, another wicked-nasty begins squiggling around at her feet. Apparently the hole she fell into is honeycombed with spider webs. Somewhere else deep in the jungle a mutant spider bursts from its cocoon. Oooooh. Scaaaary. Valentine and Mercer regroup with the others and they manage to find Toe Boy’s village. Now by this point, the killer mutant Tick has managed to burrow its way up into Pablo’s face. The thing starts chewing its way out and Bear is forced to shoot Pablo (Which is a shame, because I think the killer mutant tick was doing just fine on its own). A short while later, this funky snake-bug thing attacks one of the natives. They try to chop it down, but that does little good. Valentine tries shooting at it, but it just skitters away into the underbrush. Valentine returns to the camp where he begins talking more with Mercer. Mercer reveals that her brother is the pilot from the beginning of the flick who crashed his stealth bomber into the jungle. She volunteered for this expedition because she wants to find him. She says the Air Force gave up their search for him after three months. Now I can’t help but feel that that’s a load of bullshit. These F-18 fighter jets don’t come cheap. I have a hard time swallowing the idea that the military would just let a multi-million dollar piece of technology disappear without conclusive evidence as to what happened to it. Anyway, night passes into day and the whole shebang starts all over again. Bear and one of the natives take point and begin trekking northwards in the hopes of reaching an altitude where they can get a radio signal back to the mainland. Valentine leads the others deeper into the jungle. Before long, they come upon the skeletal remains of Joli Mercer. Loren buries him and the group share a moment of silence. Doctor Capri on the other hand manages to get his dumb ass caught in a spider web. The thing is huge and begins insinuating itself into his vital organs. The group finds him but there is no way to cut him down. They just sit meekly horrified as the big spider thingy comes down and lunches on Capri. The group begins unloading its weapons on it, but the spider dashes off back into the shrubbery. They try running away but get tangled up in another one of Spidey’s huge ass webs. The spider manages to pounce on Doctor Leon however and spends several minutes ejaculating all over the good doctor’s face. I’m pretty sure that when Leon woke up that morning he didn’t think that by lunchtime he would be taking a shot in the mouth. Valentine, Mercer and Susana break free of the web and manage to barricade themselves inside of an old Japanese hut leftover from World War II. The spider tracks them down however and begins executing guerilla warfare against these losers. Susana opens the door and the spider pulls her outside and eats her. Valentine is injured during the affair. So Mercer and Valentine leave and they run down to a cave. Yeah, yeah I know. How stupid does one have to be? You’re on the run from a giant mutant spider and a CAVE is the best sanctuary you can find? Why don’t you just dive inside the fucker’s mouth next time he appears? Anywho…once they arrive there they reunite with Bear and the token native. At this point, they discover that the cave they are in is actually the spider’s crib. Spidey jumps out and attacks Bear while Token jumps back and forth slinging blow darts into the thing. Valentine and Mercer try to help, but their attacks do nothing to this thing. The spider finishes Bear off and begins chasing Mercer down the dark caverns. At one point the thing crawls along the ceiling of the cavern and begins spraying Mercer down with gobs of white gooey good stuff. I’m talking about SPIDER WEBS you perverts! Mercer tries pulling free but the spider ain’t letting go. Finally she gives the web line a good ole victory tug and the spider comes tumbling down. He lands on top of a pointed stalagmite, which kills him instantly. Mercer, Valentine and Token walk off into the sunset. Acting/Dialogue: Chris Potter plays the part of Lev Valentine, and in truth he is the only character that I can really get behind. He does the macho thing pretty well, but he’s also reasonable enough that he’s not a total asshole. Basically, he’s your stereotypical Sci-Fi channel inspired action hero. He’s really not all that different than O’Neil from Stargate SG-1 or Reynolds from Firefly. Alex Reid plays Loren Mercer, and here is where the troubles begin. First off, she’s not that good of an actress. Secondly, she’s something of a bitch. And third, she’s ugly. Now I’m not one of these guys who demand that every leading lady in a film is a silicon-filled supermodel bombshell, but when you are talking about a movie as overwhelmingly stupid as this one, I see no reason why they shouldn’t exploit B-grade actresses the way they were meant to be exploited. Let’s face it. This is not a film about integrity. But the real trouble comes from our Latino scientists. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them from an acting standpoint aside from the fact that I can’t understand a goddamn word either of them has to say. I actually had to put the movie on close-caption just so I could translate their babble. But in truth, it doesn’t really matter. Nothing that either of them says bears any weight on the enlightening plot of this film. The best actor is probably the tattooed native whom I like to affectionately refer to as Token. Token has a wide range of thespian abilities. We see him giving us the ‘serious’ face as well as the ‘concerned’ face. Then of course there’s the obligatory ‘scared shitless’ face. But on some occasions he even manages to smile and groove to the beat of hip-hop music. Why Token was passed by at the 2001 Academy Awards is beyond me. Gore: The gore is pretty light. Most of the death scenes are fairly bloodless and the only real gore that we see is when the tick critter is biting its way to freedom via Pablo’s face. That was pretty wild. Guilty Pleasures: I don’t think there was any nudity in this film. The version I saw was off the Sci-Fi channel and that was naturally edited. What? You didn’t think I actually paid MONEY to watch this piece of crap did you? According to www.filmratings.com, this movie was given an R-rating due to language and creature violence. So I think its safe to assume that there were no titties involved (Not that you would really want to see any considering this cast, but you get the point). The Good: I’ve seen shittier. Historically, giant bug movies have never really been regarded as grand pieces of artistry. Even the big budget cheese fest of 2002 known as Eight Legged Freaks is but a mockery of the nuclear family atomic horror freak movies of the 1950s. But I’m a sucker when it comes to a good jungle adventure. There’s just something magnanimously unsettling about a group of civilians trapped within the clutching arms of a sweaty smelly jungle environment. There is always a feeling of claustrophobic anxiety that haunts these particular foreign locales. I suppose this stems from the fact that you are in an environment where you are forced to be completely cognizant of your surroundings at all times. It’s the opposite of sensory deprivation. It’s actually sensory overload. You get so wrapped up worrying about bugs, rain, heat, disease and quicksand that your brain doesn’t stop to warn you when there is a thirty-five foot fricking giant mutant spider hiding within a bush not two feet away. And of course by that time, it’s already too late. Now let’s talk about the spider itself. This guy isn’t nearly as shitty as I imagined he was going to be. But considering what I am sure was a shoestring budget, the little fucker doesn’t look all that bad. I at least applaud the FX team in the fact that they chose to go with an animatronic model rather than CGI. Now this is not to suggest that this guy is really all that convincing looking. I’m just saying that the end product proved to be greater than what I initially imagined it would. But the most crowning achievement presented in this film is the fact that it breaks several different modern horror filmmaking molds. The most evident of which is the fact that the black guy buys it. There’s an old joke within the horror community that suggest that the black characters always die in horror films. Now this is something of a biased and dishonest viewpoint. I have found that the black to white ratio of human victims in horror movies have been fairly equal over the years. It just becomes more noticeable to see a black character die because there are usually only one or two per film. In recent years however, it has become practically a political taboo to kill off the black character if there is only one representative of this race present in the film. HOWEVER, if there are more than one black characters in the movie, then it is politically ‘okay’ to whack as many as you want, so long as at least ONE exists to see the ending of the film. Two great examples of racial death equality would be Deep Blue Sea and Friday the 13th Part V. (SPOILER WARNINGS for both films) In Deep Blue Sea we have two notable African American actors; LL Cool J and Samuel L Jackson. One of them gets eaten by the shark while the other manages to survive. In Friday the 13th Part V, Reggie the Reckless survives even though his older effeminate brother is turned into sushi. But as I said earlier, it is practically verboten to kill your only existing black character. Now this is where Arachnid dares the unthinkable. Bear is the only brotha in the entire film. Now he makes a pretty good showing I’ll grant you. But in the end he gets turned into Spider food along with everyone else. This is a pretty ballsy move on the part of the producers I must say. Now this is not to suggest that I want to see every black guy get massacred on film. Don’t even think that. But I always champion movies that seek to go beyond the realms of good taste and political correctiveness. The second stereotype that is cast to the four winds in Arachnid is presented by the fact that the token tribal native SURVIVES! Yay! You think the black guys have it bad in action movies? They live the sweet life compared to token tribal natives. Pretty much if you are cast to play the part of a token tribal native, you can set your watch by how long it will take before your dumb ass is eaten by the monster. But this is not so with Arachnid. The people’s champion himself, Token the Mighty not only survives the monster attack, but also does a pretty good job at giving the creature a little what-for. This guy is just too fucking cool for words. I hope they make a sequel to this movie just so we can see Token kick some more ass. The Bad: Now while there is still some fun to be had with this creature-feature, at its core it is really nothing more than a dumb peace of schlock driven cow shit. The characters are uninteresting, the acting is uninspiring, the story is paint-by-numbers and the creature itself is not exactly something you fear might be lurking underneath your bed late at night. Even the little mutant snakes and ticks looked kind of dumb. Now I realize that I gave props to the FX work up above, but in all honesty I was just being generous. While the spider monster doesn’t totally suck, I doubt that he would be any more intimidating than the plastic monsters at Universal Studios’ Jurassic Park adventure-ride. In fact, the JP robots actually look a tad more convincing than this eight-legged wanker. What makes the spider so lame looking is the fact that they could have used some relatively cheap gimmicks to make him appear more authentic. They could have kept him in the shadows more or used lighting to highlight certain features. Maybe they could have slicked him down with more of that gelatinous goo stuff they use. Gelatinous goo stuff always goes a long way towards making your monster appear more realistic. I’m also troubled by the origin of this thing. In the beginning we see Joli collide with the invisible alien ship. The ship crashes and it APPEARS as if the spider lunches the alien. Now are the aliens responsible for the island’s mutations? Have they been conducting secret anal probes beneath everyone’s noses? Or are the spiders a product of an alternate source? Maybe the alien was just unlucky and decided to crash on the ONE island in the whole South Pacific infested with mutant spiders. Either way, the alien proves to be a pointless plot motivator and the director would have been better nixing E.T. from the script altogether. The director also doesn’t seem to understand the difference between ‘character development’ and ‘wanton bitching’. None of these clowns like each other, and they all go to great lengths to illustrate their point. But through it all there’s no real growth. Doctor Leon starts off a pretentious jerk, and he’s a pretentious jerk even when the spider is coming all over his face. Susana is a real bitch too. For some reason however, her attitude does a complete 180 about ¾ of the way through the film. There’s no catalyst for this dramatic character change other than the fact that she knows she is going to die soon. A bullshit romance is hinted at between Valentine and Mercer. It’s actually suggested by the fact that Mercer wants absolutely nothing to do with Valentine whatsoever. So the only natural way to progress this subplot is by having the characters hook up right? WRONG! The sexual tension between the two goes absolutely nowhere. Which I suppose is for the best, but then again I hate it when the director tries to manipulate the audience by throwing in these trite little bullshit romantic interludes. Save that crap for When Harry Met Sally. I want to see horny giant spiders dammit! At the end of the day, you will probably wish you had spent the evening setting your kid sister on fire than watching an hour and a half of a movie called Arachnid. But then again, mutant spider movies only come along maybe 3 or 4 times throughout the course of our lives. We have all eternity to burn our siblings. Great Lines: “Nothing with an external skeleton has an internal one as well. Nature would never be so blatantly redundant.” --Doctor Capri commenting on the strange biology of a mutant beetle that he finds. Overall Rating: 4 out of 10 severed heads. |
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