Spiders (2000)

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Following up on a story, a reporter and her crew accidentally uncover a secret government project that turned a spider into a towering giant and must stop its rampage through the city.Overall this one turned out to be quite the decent creature feature. One of the biggest factors to this one is the rather cheesy atmosphere here, as there's quite a large amount of time here not only with the incredibly goofy nature of the human-sized spider running around as well as all of the silly special effects which accounts for a really fun, cheese-filled time. The action furthers the cheese here as the concept of scenes such as the attack in the morgue, the assault on the guards in the basement or the rather cheesy and deliciously corny finale in which the monster-sized spider runs amok throughout the city after escaping from the local college which are just as incredibly cheesy yet ultimately rather fun part of what makes this one so entertaining. This one really seems to revel in the cheesy tones and outlandish scenarios within these scenes since it not only manages to get quite entertaining throughout these on a silly level but also manages to keep the film filled with action so it never lags or becomes boring. This is also a chance to show off the impressive amount of practical effects for both the spider and the gore which is really nice and sticks out against the really obvious CGI that's featured here. The CGI is among the few flaws as there's a lot of scenes that are quite badly ruined by the CGI for either the scene or the effect looks distracting and obvious here. The shuttle crash and the transformation are set-up to be important parts to the film but the horrible CGI in these scenes does manage to look really bad. This does play into the film's other big flaw which is the cheesy feeling and atmosphere throughout this. It's pretty hard to take this one seriously with all the actions, plot-points and special effects all being quite goofy which really undermines this. It manages to hurt this a little but not enough to really hinter this one much.Rated R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

This is a Nu-Image film so you know what to expect right? You put the film on, keep your head down, and hope that you're not going to be too bored by the end. However, Spiders manages to rise head and shoulders above the rest as an honest b-movie full of little quirks and plenty of gore, stupidity, and geeks firing rocket launchers from helicopters at rampaging giant spiders.Our heroine Marci is a reporter for some college paper who believes in UFOs and Aliens and keeps dragging her two colleagues to news stories that never pan out. After getting a tip off from an 'alien' that a certain place is controlled by a secret government agency, she heads out their with her mates just in time to see a space shuttle crash right in front of her! Inside the shuttle, they witness the aftermath of some horrific event and get to talk to a swollen up pilot, but not before some G-men turn up and whisk him away to an underground bunker. What are the government trying to cover up?Well, the title might give you a clue. If you try and analyse this film on any level, then a) you'll be disappointed and b) why are you trying to apply intellect to something like this? Spiders is just an excuse for daftness, gore, giant spiders flipping over cars, with loads of little references thrown in for giggles. Apparently this facility has JFK and Jim Morrison's body in storage (keep an eye out for them). I liked this one. No pretensions. No dull spots. Nice bladder effects and the corpses of the astronauts reminded me of Luigi Cozzi's Contamination. Also, there was a spider bursting out of a guy's body with such force the guy just exploded - How can you hate a film that has that in it?

I think most people who have commented on this movie have watched it with the wrong attitude. Get real; What do you expect from a flick blatantly named "Spiders", apparently featuring some generic monstrous arachnid creatures wreaking havoc on people? Unless you're an easily amused teenager with poor judgment, you instinctively steer clear from these kinds of pictures when looking for chills and thrills. There are quality films that offer just that.I thought I was about to watch a really bad movie, with unintentionally comedic elements and worthless cast, storyline and directing. I was wrong. This movie quickly reveals it's true nature for the perceptive. Taking for granted that the movie was "bad" on purpose, I could actually appreciate the cheesy dialog and all the self-irony that it displays. The characters make illogical decisions, use stupid reasoning and don't try to take themselves seriously. The way in which the plot unfolds and how the main characters figure it out is an obvious parody of the genre, and there are so many details which contribute to that feeling in the dialog and some of the scenes; a guy holding the spider's teeth like bull's horns, making DNA-enhanced mutant spiders from hell seem like a an ordinary casual case of lively struggle, quotes like "This is so creepy. Its like a bad sci-fi movie." and "I mean what the hell is this place?" -"I don't care what this place is, what the f-ck are *we* doing here?" etc. made me at least chuckle at times, because they often raise valid points regarding the absurd setting of the film, and do it with subtlety.The CGI was decent at times, yet laughable in some parts (especially when the spider was running around walls etc). The spider looks gory enough in close shots. The physical webs are composed of thin rope and you can see the knots tying together the intersections, which to me was a funny detail (c'mon, they could have easily avoided that, would they had cared for realism).The pacing is fine; There is enough action to keep the viewer at least semi-entertained, assuming they can appreciate other aspects of the film also (I'm not a big fan of "irrational abominable creature vs. bunch of dumb people" films).All in all, this is definitely not a serious movie, so you should not watch it as one. If you are in a humourless mood looking for some horror, then this movie will probably only make you angry. As a compensation for all the bad ratings this movie has received on IMDb, I have to give it 8/10. I'd dare to say it is more self-aware and intelligent than most people realize.

Starting off as a tense and reasonably scary movie, in the end it just gets, as simply as possible, stupid. The movie starts off with three nerds who decides to sneak into nowhere for some reason, and then a space craft hits the ground (when I say space craft, I mean a cheap 99p rocket bought from the Early Learning Centre) and they see a mutated crew member who was impregnated with a spider, which was mutated by, yes, you guessed it. Radiation. Original. Chumps. Then, the 3 members of geek-squad somehow get inside an underground base, and the spider hatches out of the crew member who they found in the shuttle. (Don't worry Alien fans, the spider crawls out of the mouth, not the highly original chest-burster.) Then you get to the part where the thing starts to chase everyone around, killing for no reason what-so-ever, and slowly, the scary-o-meter (1 being tellitubie scary, 9 being Alien and 10 being Napoleon Dynamite) drops from 5 to 4, and eventually, the main evil guy gets impregnated. The geek squad falls from 3 to 1 (you can guess which one survives from the very start) and once the last geek-member escapes with her new friend, the scary-o-meter goes from 4 to 2. Once outside, they both bump into the evil guy, who some how managed to break away from being completely wrapped in web and from the spiders layer and never tells us how, and he blows up to reveal a medium sized spider(think of Eight Legged Freaks spiders, but a bit smaller) and now the scary-o-meter reaches -4. As soon as the spider is on the loose, the two "heroes" go outside to see the helicopter that the evil guy was on, just parked in car park with people just walking past it, despite having a top-of-the-range bazooka with live ammunition on the back seat, which has no door what-so-ever, and the keys miraculously still in the ignition. Then, they fly over the city and an anti-climax follows where the spider gets blown up and then the film immediately finishes when everyone goes "yay".What really lets the movie down is that it thinks it can be a comedy/horror/action film all in one, a mixture that takes a master of a director to get over, this film would only be really good if Spielberg would have trouble of doing this piece of garbage. The actors are totally uninspiring, and in one scene, the woman geek's hair style changes when shes in a lift.Therefore, I would like to end this review on this final note:Thank the lord I bought this for only £1.99