6/10
Monster movies are few and far between nowadays. The B-movie is dying. It's a shame, because if they were all as entertaining as this we'd all be queuing up to see them. Not since the masterpiece of Tremors in 1990 has a truly good B- movie come along. We've had the nauseatingly dull and overblown Congo and
Anaconda and although we did get the spectacular Independence Day, it was
never really a monster movie. Now along comes Eight Legged Freaks an
homage to the monster movies of the fifties and a satire on the more recent films of this nature. Lines such as, `Come on we got to go! We got to get out of here! They're coming!' and `They're not aliens they're spiders mutated by
contaminated waste!' don't particularly work if you take them seriously. And this is where I think a lot of people stumble when they come to view Eight Legged
Freaks. They take it in as though we're still living in the fifties and monster movies were supposed to be taken seriously. Gremlins started it, Tremors
perfected it and now Eight Legged Freaks is poking fun at it.
Ellory Elkayem, the director, has a lot of fun playing around with the clichés and the actors do a fine job of not over acting. Surprisingly the director is able to handle both the laughs and the scares with an equal amount of adeptness. It's a fine and intelligent piece of direction, which you don't often see in Dean Devlin/ Roland Emmerich pictures.
It's difficult to criticise a film like this one that is continually having a laugh at itself. And while I chuckled throughout and was occasionally creeped out by
spiders the size of cars lurking, biting and enveloping; the film never seemed to rise above its self-referential humour. If the benchmark is Tremors, then this never lived up to it. By the time the final last stand takes place you've become a little tired and the ending is much welcomed.
But don't be too put off this is charming, light-hearted, funny, and occasionally scary stuff. Although there are better films of a similar genre out there this can be pigeonholed into `perfect popcorn fodder for a dreary Saturday night.'
Monster movies are few and far between nowadays. The B-movie is dying. It's a shame, because if they were all as entertaining as this we'd all be queuing up to see them. Not since the masterpiece of Tremors in 1990 has a truly good B- movie come along. We've had the nauseatingly dull and overblown Congo and
Anaconda and although we did get the spectacular Independence Day, it was
never really a monster movie. Now along comes Eight Legged Freaks an
homage to the monster movies of the fifties and a satire on the more recent films of this nature. Lines such as, `Come on we got to go! We got to get out of here! They're coming!' and `They're not aliens they're spiders mutated by
contaminated waste!' don't particularly work if you take them seriously. And this is where I think a lot of people stumble when they come to view Eight Legged
Freaks. They take it in as though we're still living in the fifties and monster movies were supposed to be taken seriously. Gremlins started it, Tremors
perfected it and now Eight Legged Freaks is poking fun at it.
Ellory Elkayem, the director, has a lot of fun playing around with the clichés and the actors do a fine job of not over acting. Surprisingly the director is able to handle both the laughs and the scares with an equal amount of adeptness. It's a fine and intelligent piece of direction, which you don't often see in Dean Devlin/ Roland Emmerich pictures.
It's difficult to criticise a film like this one that is continually having a laugh at itself. And while I chuckled throughout and was occasionally creeped out by
spiders the size of cars lurking, biting and enveloping; the film never seemed to rise above its self-referential humour. If the benchmark is Tremors, then this never lived up to it. By the time the final last stand takes place you've become a little tired and the ending is much welcomed.
But don't be too put off this is charming, light-hearted, funny, and occasionally scary stuff. Although there are better films of a similar genre out there this can be pigeonholed into `perfect popcorn fodder for a dreary Saturday night.'