The recent huge advances in computer-generated imaging (CGI) have given new life to both the science-fiction genre and to what used to be called the “creature feature”. On a computer, whole new outer-space worlds can be made from scratch, and various monsters can be made as life-like as possible.
Eight-Legged Freaks falls into the second category. It is essentially a Fifties B-movie with extra bells and whistles, or in this case extra detail and movement for a host of giant spiders terrorising a small town in Arizona.
The set-up is simple. A can of toxic waste is flung off a swerving truck and lands in a pond on the outskirts of the town. This pond supplies food in the form of crickets to a nearby spider-breeder, and so, naturally, that enhanced nourishment makes the spiders grow to extraordinary proportions. From then on, it is easy to see how things will develop.
Pets get munched, for a start. I felt sorry for the cat, but not the dog. A kid has realised what is going on, but he’s not listened to. Then the terror begins in earnest, and it’s spiders versus humans until the predictable denouement. Such movies are deliberate half-spoof updatings of older movies such as Them! and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the skill and the fun lies in how energetically the genre can be revitalised and the clichés juggled anew. In this respect, Eight-Legged Freaks works well enough to provide 99 minutes of entertaining nonsense.
The humans ranged against the arachnids are a slightly motley bunch. They are no more than lightly reworked stereotypes, but that’s all you need for this kind of movie. Proper character-development would get in the way, and the filmmakers sensibly keep this to a minimum. There’s the town’s sheriff, Sam Parker (Keri Wuhrer), who happens to be an attractive woman. She and her family will be the focus of resistance to the spider onslaught: that’s her, plus son Mike, the aforementioned boy-Cassandra (Scott Terra), and daughter Ashley (played by the precociously pneumatic Scarlett Johansson). Joining
the resistance, too, is Chris (David Arquette), who has just returned to his home-town and has, inevitably, a lingering romantic attachment to Sheriff Sam.
Also on the team is the bumbling cop Deputy Pete (Rick Overton) and local broadcaster Harlan (Doug E Doug). The latter is the most original addition to the line-up — he’s deeply paranoid, constantly broadcasting conspiracy theories and the like, until all his best nightmares seem to be coming true. His witterings provide an amusing commentary on the action.
The kids do fine, as does Arquette, whose baby face does not transcend an early goatee, but in whose case the casting against type works. Wuhrer, on the other hand, barely passes muster: she’s no Sigourney Weaver. Even in moments of enormous stress, no steel shows up from beneath her Farrah Fawcett tresses. She even gives up aiming at the spiders with her shotgun after a while. She still hits them, though. Cue green ooze.
Those Fifties and Sixties B-movies about scary monsters and invasions of body-snatchers have been read as metaphors for communist infiltration, for instance. Horror movies have been seen as narratives about the fear of sex: the teenagers necking in a car who get carved up, and so forth. In the case of Eight-Legged Freaks, it’s impossible to find any meaning behind the terror of the spiders. Just as a necking-in-the-car scene comes up, and it seems the spiders may be a punishment for sexual licentiousness, we are shown that the girl in question is quite capable of dealing with a horny young man on her own, and the spiders have no moral role to play. If anything, they represent fear itself.
The test of the success of a movie such as Eight-Legged Freaks is in how convincing and scary the monsters are. In this case, they are both — the CGI department has excelled itself. I saw the movie with an audience of teenagers, its likely target market, and they giggled throughout. I take those giggles as an acknowledgement of the movie’s fear factor, as well as a tribute to its ability to send itself up without unduly diminishing the frightening elements. This balance is well maintained in Eight-Legged Freaks.
If the monster-spiders never reach the level of icky horror achieved by, say, the deadly creatures in the Alien movies, that is perhaps down to the fact that there isn’t that much room for invention when you’re dealing with a creature we’re all reasonably familiar with. These spiders, though, do make an awful lot of noise: they screech and jabber as they attack, and they let out a high-pitched shriek when they are dispatched. I didn’t know spiders had vocal cords, but then exposure to toxic waste can have some bizarre side-effects. Just ask George Bush.