ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

I saw this one as a streaming video from Netflix and I was quite entertained by it. It's well written and well directed. It starts out with some nice shots an old Russian space station in orbit, with dead bodies in spacesuits floating around and spiders crawling on the walls. I guess spiders could still crawl on walls in a weightless environment. They certain don't have any trouble crawling on walls or ceilings under normal gravity.

I didn't really know anybody in the cast, but they did a fine job with the spider aspects of the story and the dramatic subplots as well.

The spiders start out regular sized and are very aggressive. They begin by killing the rats in the New York subway, and when transit employees and exterminators go down to find out what's going on, one of them is attacked and covered by a swarm. The exterminator pumps insecticide foam all over the struggling, spider-cover man — but it doesn't affect the spiders.

The spiders don't suddenly become gigantic right away (the way they would in a low-budget production). And we find out that the Russians created the spiders in an experiment at the space station before the fall of the Soviet Union and the de-funding of the space station. The soviet scientist who designed the experiment is working with U.S. government authorities who also know about the experiment, and they're doing secret things, too.

No surprise there, eh?

I know that sounds like a cliched plot device, but it's handled well here without Real Evil Government Agents that we're all certain the spiders will kill in the climax.

The spiders bite people and leave eggs inside their stomachs. The story plays out as a well-written "outbreak" story, with the spiders presenting a plague-like threat to New York. A few dozen captured spiders are confined, and the scientists determine that they are growing at a rate of six inches per hour.

Fortunately, there's no excess of scenes in which terrified people run screaming from nasty, oversized, CGI spiders. Instead we get several subplots which involve government intrigue and escalating danger.

Just to keep things fresh and imaginative, the spiders have and extra-terrestrial connection that I was impressed by.

The FX of the spiders are just as good as they need to be. This is a $7,000,000 production and it looks like one. There are a few nice battle scenes showing soldiers vs spiders in the streets of New York, and they're pretty well done. This movie is everything we wanted from Eight Legged Freaks but didn't quite get.

The music by Joseph Conlan is good, especially in the tense scenes of the male and female leads trying to avoid capture by the authorities who want to prevent them from telling the public the truth about the spider invasion.

By the end of the movie the queen spider (remember, there's an alien connection here) does get very big, and the scenes of her in New York reminded me of the 1998 Godzilla (a movie I adore.) Even the sound which the queen made seems to have been borrowed from Godzilla.

I highly recommend this movie. It manages to deliver thrills and chills with very little gore — a rare thing these days.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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Here's the trailers for Spiders. Looks good, doesn't it?

______________________ Spiders 3D - Trailer


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)