Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 17, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
There are many hardcore horror fans who decry the trend in humor-oriented fright films, most recently singling out Scream and its follow-ups for their satirizing of the slasher subgenre. I’ve had a problem with this for two reasons: 1) Many of the cult classics revered by these same fans (Re-Animator, Dead Alive, the Evil Dead sequels) are chock full of comic moments, and 2) While the Scream films may spoof the conventions of the slasher oeuvre, they mostly take murder—and people’s responses to it—seriously. If those dissenters are seeking an example of a genre film where the comic elements feel truly inappropriate, they need look no further than Eight Legged Freaks. There’s a thin line between presenting horrific events with a humorous touch and presenting them as humorous, and this movie stumbles over that line with all eight legs.
More than any film in recent memory, this one illustrates the paradox inherent in crafting big-budget horror movies: Enough money can allow their creators to depict any sort of terrible events they wish—but the more they spend, the more they have to earn back, and thus ensure that their product isn’t too horrific to turn off a mass audience. A careful handling of tone is important to ensure that the mayhem retains proper dramatic weight, however, and Eight Legged Freaks veers way too far in the other direction. Here’s a movie whose makers have spared no expense in depicting realistically nightmarish scenes of death and terror, then have missed no chance to encourage the audience not to take them seriously. The end result goes beyond disappointing and tension-killing to become callous and vaguely insulting.
Eight Legged Freaks comes on as a homage to the “big bug” flicks of the ’50s, but the obvious model is actually Gremlins, with its small-town apocalypse plot, jaunty/bombastic musical score (by John Ottman) and most specifically the vocal effects used for its monsters. Yes, the giant spiders “talk” in this movie, chattering excitedly as they pursue their prey and squeaking “Uh-oh!” as they’re crushed under cars. The special FX that bring the creatures to life are excellent, and their physical behavior as they attack their human victims is chillingly believable. Yet the use of those “voices” annoyingly suggests that the filmmakers don’t take their own creations seriously.
Which is fitting, since the movie’s main characters don’t seem to take them seriously enough either. They witness, as do we, dozens of their friends, relatives and neighbors being pounced on and savaged by jumping spiders, pulled down to horrible screaming deaths by trapdoor spiders, cocooned and dragged away to be left, conscious and squirming in terror, on the floor of a cave where the biggest monster of all waits to drain them of blood. For the most part, though, the survivors react with all the distress of the losing team in a paintball match. Many of them (led by mining engineer Chris, played by Scream veteran David Arquette) even respond to the mounting terror with wisecracks; like the Mummy films, this one doesn’t settle for one comic-relief character when it can have half a dozen of them.
No doubt the movie’s creators (director/co-writer Ellory Elkayem and the producing Godzilla team of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich) would argue that this is supposed to be a fantasy entertainment, a homage to the creature features of yore that replicates their campy appeal with up-to-the-minute production values. But those B-movies at least respected their monsters and mayhem enough to play them straight, and the Freaks team’s souped-up FX thoroughly undercut any honest amusement. You can absolutely believe that plenty of real people are dying in terrible ways on screen; to be asked to believe the other characters’ dispassionate reactions, and share them ourselves, comes off as a perhaps unintended but nonetheless disheartening form of cynicism.
Moreover, some of the filmmaking and scripting is downright lazy. Chris and teenaged Ashley (Scarlett Johansson) are covered with sticky spiderwebbing in one scene, then perfectly clean the next. The final reels focus on a group of survivors whose number seems to vary significantly from moment to moment. And after the movie sets up what appears to be a key subplot about a chemical manufacturer—whose toxic waste is responsible for the spiders’ mutation—buying up the town, the company and its complicity in the invasion are never addressed or even mentioned again.
This is all a real shame, as the concept of an old-fashioned yet state-of-the-art big-bug movie was full of promise, and the first 15 minutes (which contain an effective, unbilled cameo I won’t spoil here) set up the story at just the right pitch before the whole thing falls apart. Clearly the Freaks team didn’t trust the power of their basic material, or never wanted to exploit it in the first place. Arachnophobia, the last studio spider movie, may have taken heat for being billed as a “thrill-omedy,” but this film does a much better job of living up (or down) to that contradictory description.
