EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS (2002) It's better than Tremors 3 Eight-Legged Freaks wants to be nothing less than the second coming of Tremors, something that we perhaps need less than ever now that we've had two Tremors sequels and a short-lived TV series. A lot of things are done right (the spiders' first victim is Tom Noonan!), but there's a lightweight, Sunday-matinee kind of charm to it, but it's fluffy and forgettable and pretty much cinematic fast food. That having been said, it's not at all bad for fast food. In the economically bottoming-out Arizona desert town of "Prosperity" (what was the town in Tremors...Perfection, I think?), toxic chemicals pollute spider-food and the spiders grow to be as big as, well, giant spiders. David Arquette stars as Chris McCormack, who left town ten years ago (smart idea) but now returns (not so smart) for reasons I don't recall, but he's got the hots for sexy sheriff Kari Wuhrer, who is still single for reasons unexplained, but Scarlett Johannsen plays her daughter. If you saw Lost In Translation and were unable to remember where you'd seen her before, it might have been in this, or it might've been Ghost World. She had more to do in Ghost World. The cast almost all hit the right notes of going a little over (not too far over) into camp and never taking any of this too seriously. But I didn't like Doug E. Doug in the least as the conspiracy nut - his wacko theories are very easy, very been-there-done-that. They're not even a running joke, just a series of pop-(conspiracy)-culture references without actual jokes attached, the kind of thing you might hear in an Adam Sandler movie. He might be annoying to me, but he's too obviously the crowd pleaser, and you just know the filmmakers aren't going to let anything happen to him. Like in Tremors, there's lots of gross-out slime and splatter, but like in Tremors, it's all from the bugs; little grue comes from anything with two (or four) legs. The worst it gets for that is when an unseen spider does battle with a cat in an amusing scene which shows the loser repeatedly pressed into relief in drywall. The lightweight score often works, with a generally light and cheerful tone, though there's a goofily doomy take on the "Itsy bitsy spider" song in there. It's never oppressively scary, and probably wouldn't be for even the smallest children (any kid who could get through the spider scene in the second Harry Potter movie will find this a breeze), just easy to take and almost entirely forgettable popcorn fun. Complete with yet another ending where the heroes outrun a fireball. Lots of perfectly acceptable CGI spiders, action scenes where they kill old people and dirt bikers, and shots of them going splat - Eight Legged Freaks delivers exactly what it promises. If Tremors had never happened, I might even be able to get behind this enough for an unconditional recommendation, but I have to hold back, since it feels too much like a Tremors knockoff when Tremors has already been knocked off plenty. BACK TO THE E's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE