Camel Spiders (2011)

Too much of everything

Fantastic!

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I enjoyed the opening credits of bright green coming at you while some action western music is playing. The opening scene has a lot of action. US forces are fighting against...Taliban? In Iraqistan or somewhere? One US soldier is killed. The enemy is carried off by BA spiders. The grasp of the spider causes one to shoot their guns aimlessly into the air instead of at the spider. A spider crawls into the mouth of the dead American soldier and makes it back to the US where through a number of plot continuity issues it is released into the Arizona desert. Do we really transport deceased soldiers in wooden crate boxes?The spiders are about the size of a cat. No one steps on them or crushes them. They can outrun a human and leap 6 feet into the air. They are very aggressive and always attack people's head...or crotch in one case. There are a number of groups of people trapped by the spiders, who for some reason hunt humans as pack animals. The spiders appear to be CG as are the flames from the guns.C. Thomas Howell plays the local sheriff and is not the main character. Brian Krause is the main character. The dialouge was unimaginative and boring as were the characters tossed at us.Little girl: "Mom, are we going to die?" Mom: "No we're not going to die. We are going to be just fine. Little girl: "Well, then can you and daddy get back together?"At one point we hear "Technically they are not spiders because they have six legs." If you count the legs: eight. The film reminded me of that old fashion Roger Corman over the top bad scenes. 4 stars is generous. Might work as a rental for the early tween.No f-bombs, sex, or nudity. Mild swearing, teens making out, rear urination scene, occasional blood squirt.

Camel Spiders starts in Afghanistan where some US soldiers are fighting enemy forces when a swarm of large Camel Spiders join the fight, a US soldier is killed in battle & one of the baby Camel Spiders crawls into his mouth. Captain Sturges (Brian Krause) & Private Reba (GiGi Erneta) are tasked with escorting the body back home, while driving through Arizona the truck they are driving is involved in an accident & the simple wooden coffin breaks open releasing dozens of Camel Spiders that crawl off into the desert. The Camel Spider grow to huge proportion's & multiply very quickly, soon a small town is overrun with the vicious flesh eating creatures that outnumber their human prey. Sturges, Reba & a small group of locals from a diner that came under attack manage to make it to an abandoned factory & barricade themselves inside but with hundreds of Camel Spiders outside trying to get in they have to work together to find a way to escape alive...Co-written, executive produced & directed by Jim Wynorski under his regular Jay Andrews alias one has to say that I went into Camel Spiders expecting the absolute worst & while my expectations weren't exactly blown away Camel Spidres turned out a little better than I had predicted. Although Camel Spiders looks & feels like a SyFy Cahannel creature feature & will undoubtedly be shown on the channel it is in fact an independent production from Roger Corman's studio, generally I hate anything Wynorski does so the fact that Camel Spiders wasn't the worst film I've seen since I last watched one of his films came as somewhat of a surprise. The script is standard creature feature fare with little going for it, sure it starts off briskly enough with the title monsters making an appearance a few minutes into the film but there's absolutely no explanation as to why they are so big even if Camel Spiders are real creatures found in the deserts of the Middle East. Once the script hits the US & the town, which consists of one hotel & a café, comes under siege the film has my interest but once the various survivors reach the abandoned factory & hide there the film takes a nosedive & there's lots of boring exposition & the Camel Spiders themselves are a bit underused, they just don't seem to do much apart from crawl around & jump on people. Don't get me wrong, I didn't expect them to build a house or learn to drive a car but they feel wasted. The film has two main groups of survivors, the army people & the townsfolk from the café & some teenage kids from college stuck inside a house & the narrative shifts back & forth between them although both parties find themselves in exactly the same position so it's rather samey. The script also feels unfinished, we keep cutting to two more soldiers in a truck looking for Sturges but they just disappear until the end & then only seen standing in the background while we never find out what happens to the two girls in the red car. Utterly predictable, a bit boring & populated by dumb people (why does that kid wander off on her own despite her knowing that giant killer Spiders are infesting the place? Why do they not drive the truck right up to the factory at the end? Why park it a few hundred feet away from the door?) Camel Spiders is standard creature feature fare that isn't terrible but isn't exactly good either.One thing that Camel Spidres has going for it is that the CGI computer effects are better than usual, sure they aren't brilliant but the Camel Spiders are reasonably detailed & move convincingly enough. They look quite cool too, they probably resemble Scorpions more than Spiders to be honest. The lack of blood or gore is disappointing, there's a bit of blood splatter as the Camel Spiders bite people but otherwise most SyFy Channel creature features have far more blood & gore than on show here. Not much to look at Camel Spiders is reasonably well made & is a virtual masterpiece compared to what Wynorski usually churns out.With a supposed budget of $500,000 this was apparently shot in Feburary in 2010 but remained unreleased until late 2011, filmed in Indiana the low budget doesn't help but the makers did what they could with limited funds I suppose. The acting isn't great, Krause is alright as the hero while C. Thomas Howell really will appear in anything won't he?Camel Spiders was better than I expected but that's no recommendation on it's own, Camel Spiders has better than usual CGI effects but a clichéd & empty story sink it. Passable by creature feature standards but only just, don't rush to watch it.

I am a person who juggles my many music commitments with some free time, which I use to watch movies and listen to music. Save a few tolerable ones, a lot of the SyFy movies are terrible. Camel Spiders is no exception, in fact it is one of SyFy's very worst.As bad as Titanic II, Mega Piranha, 2010: Moby Dick, Battle of Los Angeles and Quantum Apocalypse are, and they are, awful even, Camel Spiders makes them award-worthy in comparison.To begin criticising Camel Spiders would be difficult as there is so much wrong. Let's start with how the film is made, Camel Spiders is one of the cheapest looking of all the SyFy movies right down from the slapdash filming to the gimmicky way the gore and such is used.Camel Spiders completely fails in the script and story too. The script contains some of the worst dialogue I've heard, it was all very forced and cliché-ridden. The story isn't engaging in the least, it was to me a silly premise anyway, but the story itself was bland and predictable with too much time wasted on some of the least interesting story ideas of the movie.The characters I felt indifferent too, they are annoying and underdeveloped and the camel spiders of the title are not menacing at all and laughable in their design. The direction is sloppy, the soundtrack is forgettable, the sound effects sound distorted and are misplaced and the pace is inconsistent with both rushed and pedestrian moments. And need I mention how wooden across the board the acting was? Overall, a terrible movie and one of SyFy's bottom-of-the-barrel type movies. 0/10 Bethany Cox

Tawlite sums it up nicely, I watched this the whole way through (not sure how) and I really wish I'd eaten a bowl of glass instead. On top of the criticism that's already been dished out I have a few more points. To start off with when the SUV hits the truck there's no damage to either vehicle, in fact there's only a small amount of smoke coming from the road. I also noted that when the Sheriff escorts the 'damaged truck' back to town there's no mention of the dead joy rider or his vehicle(possibly appears in a later scene parked at the café?). The 1970's army vehicle I'm pretty sure is used by 2 completely different pairs of troops. I'm really confused by the little girl who runs to find her dad...he's quite obviously with the group of 'heroes' outside but she runs downstairs anyway shouting his name. When she's unfortunately rescued I'm not sure why but the soldier runs with her to the back on the warehouse into a small shed with no glass and claims they're trapped...if she'd just turned around they'd been fine! Why does she drop her gun and carry the girl? It actually slows them down more. The ending is just terrible, high 5's all round for blowing up a warehouse...badly and then don't send in a team to wipe out any potential remaining spiders...just assume all is well. -10/10 for the CGI, choppers & jets are out of scale superbly, don't even think jets should fly as low as they did when blowing up a target but then I'm no expert. The spiders also change size dramatically from scene to scene and for some reason everyone loses signal partly through a phone call. Oh and tawlite, I also noticed the 'I got a photo of that spider back there', cue a professional dissection photo of a camel spider. Amazing encyclopedia on his phone, I want one just like that!Anyway rant over, do not watch this abomination......ever!