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There
seems to be a cinematic spider renaissance every 25 or 30 years.
The first occurred about 50 years ago, with films like Tarantula
(1955) and Earth vs. the Spider (1958), and the second
followed two decades later with offerings like 1975's The
Giant Spider Invasion (with the Skipper!) and 1977's Kingdom
of the Spiders. The
new and – please, God – hopefully short explosion begins
with Eight Legged Freaks, a film silly enough to fancy
itself an homage to the campy spider films of yore, which were
typically so well-made that they often found themselves
lampooned by Mystery Science Theater 3000.
It's
one thing to satirize a particularly bad genre (they did a great
job with Wet Hot American Summer),
but instead of being witty in their send-up, Freaks'
filmmakers follow the same blueprint popularized by its B-movie
brethren (save the high-tech special effects).
The spiders are actually inconsequential to said
blueprint – they could have been anything from ants (Them!),
to worms (Tremors), to produce (Attack of the Killer
Tomatoes), to pocket-sized Asian critters (Gremlins).
Freaks,
which was originally titled Arac Attack but changed for
fear moviegoers might think it's “Iraq Attack,” takes place
in Prosperity, Arizona, and the whole zany spider situation
begins when a barrel of toxic waste is accidentally jettisoned
off a truck and into a small pond near Taft's Exotic Spider
Farm. The waste affects the crickets in the pond, who are fed to
the spiders, which causes them grow into creatures the size of a
Buick. And when
there are no more toxic crickets to munch on, the spiders start
hunting humans.
Freaks'
two big "stars" (David Arquette and Kari Wuhrer) don't
have any more screen time than any of the film's other
characters, which are about as developed as a 10-year-old girl. Arquette
(See Spot Run) is Chris
McCormack, the heir to the near-bankrupt mine that once employed
the entire town of Prosperity.
He's been gone for 10 years but has finally returned to
profess his love for Sam Parker (Wuhrer, Sliders), now
the local sheriff. Sam has two kids - nerdy spider expert Mike (Scott Terra, who
will play the young Matt Murdock in the upcoming Daredevil
film) and rebellious teen Ashley (Scarlett Johansson, The
Man Who Wasn't There).
I'm not sure which is freakier:
Wuhrer playing a sheriff or the mother of a 17-year-old.
Though
I haven't yet encountered spiders this size, I'm almost certain
they don't make sounds like those heard here.
That's part of what makes Freaks fun to watch.
But reruns of Diff'rent Strokes are fun to watch,
too – that doesn't make 'em good, though.
Freaks plays more like a cross between Starship
Troopers, Wild Wild West
and Dawn of the Dead than the '50s flicks it's supposed
to be parodying. Producers
Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla,
The Patriot) have bestowed upon
us another brainless action flick, only this time it's disguised
as sci-fi homage, so I guess we're supposed to cut it some
slack. Okay, then
here's my pull quote – "Freaks is the best movie
since whatever crap came out last week!"
Since
it's supposed to be a throwback to those campy B-movies from the
'50s, wouldn't Freaks have been better without the
expensive special effects?
I'd rather Devlin and Emmerich had cut corners on the
effects budget and instead invested in a wittier,
tongue-in-cheek script that called for fashioning the spiders
out of pipe cleaners and egg cartons.
Incidentally, Doug E. Doug's paranoid conspiracy theorist
isn't nearly as funny as the same character played by Dave
Chappelle in Undercover Brother,
another spoof that got it right.
Freaks does not.
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for
sci-fi violence, brief sexuality and language |
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