Arachnophobia (1990)

Wonderful character development!

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Arachnophobia is the fear of arachnids, spiders, but there's really nothing for anyone out there to fear, because these sweet little guys are oh so cute, oh look at him, and oh so sweet, they have lots of eyes, but they're all still so adorable and completely and utterly harmless. The big furry ones, like tarantulas, cannot hurt you and they're way more scared of you then you of them, but fortunately for this forever classic, Arachnophobia, there's a new breed of deadly South American spider that's been isolated and unchanged for millions of years, and is quite toxic, and quite sneaky, so game on, BUT, real life tarantulas are sweet and harmless. They cannot seriously hurt you, unless they like bite you in the eye or something that would probably suck but they wouldn't even want to do that because they're all really so smart and so sweet.(Great Cast --> Jeff Daniels, I really love stunning Harley Jane Kozak, and John Goodman's really memorable as the exterminator --> Great Movie --> Great Villain --> Great Spider Shots)

Arachnophobia is pure late night entertainment,IT'S another childhood classic of mine that i always remember being on t.v on a Saturday night & i watched it every time i loved it & still do!!! This is a true classic movie with the great Spielberg producing it you know this is going to be a BRILLIANTLY made suspense Thriller & it is.The music is beautiful throughout,the small American town is beautiful & the cast is Amazing especially JEFF DANIELS & JOHN GOODMAN!!! The spiders are terrifying & the film has a real magical fun tone mixed perfectly with really suspenseful scary moments & silly fun bits but all goes perfectly together!!! A true old school CLASSIC that deserves it's place up there with films such as JAWS,POLTERGEIST,GREMLINS & other beautifully made/produced Spielberg greats

Arachnophobia, a very creepy unsettling film for people who are very scared of Spiders in General incredibly brilliant Directing from Frank Marshall who adds lots of suspense & terror when the spiders are shown on screen along with Trevor Jones music score very creepy & Haunting I had to fast forward/skip certain scenes actually.. Jeff Daniels is ideal for this role, playing the cowardly but stand up doctor to a T. Even though I didn't have a love match with Goodman's character, he played it like he was born for it. Julian Sands - who I'm also a fan of - does what he can with the role. He's usually more...err, hard to think of the right word - maybe mesmerizing or stand outs (if the last is even a word), but here his character is more blah and drags him down with it. All others do a very good job, but nothing award winning, especially the kiddies. The spiders never miss a beat.This is a fun movie to watch. The acting, especially by John Goodman as exterminator Delbert McClintock, is excellent, and the plot, while suspenseful at times, does a good job of blending in some humor as well (Goodman's "That's right, I'm bad" line after squishing an unsuspecting spider is a good example). I highly recommend this movie. Watch and get a good scare and laugh at the same time.Overall rating: 7 out of 10.

The directorial debut of Frank Marshall, otherwise known as the producer of everything you ever loved from the 1980's, Arachnophobia is a creature-feature that was heavily marketed as both a comedy and a horror film. It is one of the better regarded disaster films from the 1990's, the decade that saw a dramatic resurgence of the genre, with a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. At best, it deserves a low 60.Strangely for a 90's disaster movie, Arachnophobia's acting and screen writing are both quite sturdy. The reliable Jeff Daniels plays a dry-witted but rather pleasant urbanite GP called Dr. Ross Jennings, who has arrived from San Francisco with his family (all of whom are played reasonably well). Jennings, who (big surprise here) suffers from arachnophobia, clashes with the colourful locals before having to confront a sodality of aesthetically displeasing arthropods from the rainforests of the Amazon. The plot is largely logical and believable in its progression, bar a few inexplicabilities here and there. While it is all rather run-of-the- mill, it is competent, enjoyable, and at times even clever.But where the film thrives on writing and performance, it falls pathetically short of the mark on matters of tone and technical ingenuity. For being an individual with the titular phobia, I found this film profoundly flat and pedestrian. You'd think that if Alfred Hitchcock was able to instil blind terror with the mere sight of a flock of disgruntled birds, then Frank Marshall would be able to at least quietly unsettle with the image of spiders invading a living room. It would be unfair to say he did not manage to extract any terror from those scenes, but where Marshall could have spent a nice chunk of his 103 minute runtime building a pronounced aura of menace, he instead tries to crack jokes so tepid a late 80's sitcom wouldn't dare touch them with a ten-foot pole.The film, quite simply, should not have been a comedy. Besides the Sam Raimi-esque camp of the climatic showdown between Jennings and the boss spiders, the jokes just do not work. Some of them are even downright grating. Halfway through the film, the arach-attacks start taking centre stage, and the narrative is given a sudden surge of suspense. What does the film do then? Why, it devotes an inordinate amount of our time to a stupid comic relief character called Delbert, because that makes sense. It's not as though there's infinitely more interesting material to be followed up about extremely venomous spiders; no, what we all need – nay, what the 90's needed – was an insect exterminator (played by John Goodman) whose entire humorous conceit is that he's fat, has a weirdly effeminate voice, and may or may not be very good at his job.Worse still, the production values have a television film vibe about them, particularly the music. Composer Trevor Jones gets some nice strings and brass involved in the climax, but otherwise the whole thing sounds more dated than the incidental music for 'The X-Files'. Delbert's leitmotif is the undoubtedly the worst offender. You could overlay it on the 'Too Many Cooks' video and it would be a perfect fit.The film's best moments are its scenes of rather understated horror. There's no grey-blue style Platinum Dunes lighting, few grating musical stings, and the actors never play fear as some grotesque pantomime of terror. It's subtle and it's sincere. In conclusion, Arachnophobia is an enjoyable but forgettable creature feature that might serve as appropriate viewing for a rainy Sunday afternoon, but little else.