Horror, 89 Minutes, 2013
[This is the eleventeenth selection in my irregular, “My Wife and Kids are Visiting Relatives and I’m Home Watching Movies” film festival.]
This started out pretty well, actually. The credit sequence featuring a derelict Soviet space station was nicely creepy and the establishing shots of New York City were promising. It started out strong, it really did.
Then it all went to hell.
The movie didn’t go 14 seconds from start to finish without introducing a another cliché. The spiders are the results of secret government experiments during the cold war. But really they’re aliens! Only one scientist knows the truth! Whomever controls the spiders controls the world… for some reason!
(Of course the soviets just leave this world-dominating , scientific breakthrough rotting in orbit because it’s not like Russia is run by a cartoon villain or anything.)
After the spiders somehow survive in space for 30 years and orbital reentry and a crash landing into one of NYC’s subway terminals they start to breed by laying eggs in whomever they bite. This makes perfect sense because we’re also told that all the spiders are male and they have to find the unborn “queen egg” to keep them going. The just clichés writhe ignorantly around each other like a snake trying to mate with a garden hose.
Our heroes are the head of operations for the subway and a representative of the NYC board of health and, surprise, are also recently divorced from each other. Maybe they just need an emotional tragedy to kick-start their relationship? They have a daughter who resents dad for never being there for her. She’s resourceful! The cliché’s just keep coming, hot and heavy, like the filmmakers were getting tax credit for them. All the hits are here.
Really, it just doesn’t know when to quit and it drags itself down hard and fast. The actual creatures are decent, if uninspired, but that only serves to keeps the movie from sinking all the way to the bottom. This is a sad, bland, chore of a movie.
