30 Second Bottom Line: A campy, slapstick, creepy-crawler.
Story Line: The story begins with a trucker transporting toxic waste through the hard-pressed town of Prosperity, Arizona, swerving to avoid hitting a bunny rabbit in the road. A canister of the evil stuff falls off the truck into a pond (the mayor of Prosperity has made a secret deal for the waste to be stored in the abandoned mines underneath the city). The pond turns out to be the breeding ground for the crickets, which a spider-farm owner named Joshua (fabulously well played by Tom Noonan) serves to his pet spiders.
Joshua has a young fan; a boy named Mike Parker (Scott Terra), who shares his fascination and knowledge of spiders. When Mike makes a visit to Joshua's farm, Joshua tells him about how the crickets are like "spider steroids" and are bulking up his hairy little friends in a huge way. While they're talking, we see that an exceptionally big, hairy one has escaped his terrarium (unbeknownst, of course, to Joshua or Mike). As Mike leaves to bicycle on back to town, not only is Joshua sucked dry in the back of his neck by this creepy escapee, but he manages to overturn every other terrarium, as he thrashes in agony all around his spider farm releasing zillions of super spiders. The spiders head down into the mines, where they grow into huge, ferocious monsters that are compelled to hunt for food for their "queen" spider.
In the meantime, there are a couple of romances brewing in Prosperity and we meet all sorts of interesting, queer folk. There's Harlan (Doug E. Doug) the paranoid disc jockey on the local radio station, who is convinced the aliens are coming. The town sheriff, a woman named Sam Parker (Kari Wuhrer), has got to be the sexiest sheriff in the country (and has the custom-fitted uniform to prove it). Sam is loved secretly by Chris McCormack, who left town ten years ago after beating up her husband and has now returned to profess his love to her. Chris' father owned the mines and Chris is convinced there's gold down there. Completing this cast of odd characters we have Mayor Wade (Leon Rippy), sporting the ugliest teeth and a long, gray, straggly ponytail, and comes up with more fly-by-night, get rich quick schemes that all seem to go wrong.
Tell Me More About It: Director Ellory Elkayem, who is also the writer, clearly aimed to make a campy, funny, gory cult film based on his highly praised short film. And for the first half he is wonderfully successful, giving us great laughs and fun characters. The problem comes along in the second half when it gets a bit boring with the spiders attacking everyone in town. The film looses its scariness, despite the mass feeding frenzy, and many of the characters that were fun and quirky, now turn into buffoons. I would almost recommend seeing the film for the first half, but by the time it was over I was bored and disappointed. When you watch a film like this you know, of course, that it's not going to make total sense, yet you want it to make enough sense to keep you from getting annoyed.
I left the theater wondering if at the end of the movie, when the mines explode killing the spiders-is that huge cloud from the explosion filled with deadly toxic gasses? Perhaps that's the real killer in the movie-and the basis for the sequel? Could "Eight Legged Freaks" actually refer to a new generation of genetically mutated humans?
Mini Filmography
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