Oh, What  a Tangled Web

Spiders Dir: Gary Jones Starring Lana Parilla Josh Green Oliver Macready Nick Swarts 2000 R, 94 m RATING: 5 out of 10

ARACNOPHOBIA: An overgrown spider tests Ford toughness in this lastest entry into the B-movie horror genre.

Unrefreshing, unintentionally funny, trite, campy, but overall a fun no-brainer of a flick, Spidersis 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.

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