Toronto

I'm tired of hearing people compare this movie to Tremors. Tremors was a great movie. It was a B movie, sure, but it didn't go out of its way to remind us of that. Tremors had genuine suspense and some not-half-bad actors like Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward and Reba McEntire... okay, so Reba McEntire was a bad example. Nonetheless, Eight-Legged Freaks has David Arquette, a true thespian if ever there was one. Anyways, the acting is unimportant. What is wrong with this movie is the fact that it goes out of its way to be cheesy, somewhat defeating the purpose. Old B movies were never meant to be cheesy, they just had low budgets and so could not hire the best directors, writers, special effects people, etc. This movie is saturated in special effects. Computer graphics are used almost as much as the latest Star Wars movie (not to knock Star Wars, by the way) The spiders look phony and are not scary in the slightest. In all fairness, the first forty minutes or so of the movie are actually pretty good. We get the setup, the introduction of the characters, then the first few incidents involving the spiders. Later, the film is just overrun with the monsters to the point where you start relishing the scenes without them. Now, I come to the worst point: the sound. Not only does the soundtrack sound like it was lifted right out of Home Alone, but the noises emitted by the spiders are just plain stupid. Aside from the mandatory roaring, hissing and squealing, the spiders sometimes sound like a baby coughing, or a baby giggling, or my favourite: the uh-oh. Just really bad. It doesn't even try to be scary and that's the problem. If anything, it is a lame spoof of B-movies, and if the first third of the movie wasn't so good, it probably would have received a 3, but thankfully it does have some mérit in the first act.

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