ceej@pawl.rpi.edu (Chris J Hillery) (07/18/90)
ARACHNOPHOBIA
A film review by Chris J. Hillery
Copyright 1990 Chris J. Hillery
*Do not* see this movie if you actually are affected by
arachnophobia (fear of spiders, in case you didn't know). The friend I
saw this with is a severe arachnophobe, and he practically broke the
poor chair he was sitting in by flying out of it so hard. If you can
guess from this that this is a scary movie, well, it is. While it is
marketing itself as a "thrill-omedy," this movie has much more thrill
than "omedy," which is fine if that's what you're prepared for. It also
spends a good deal of its time in extreme close-ups of spiders in
action, hence the opening warning.
Basic plot synopsis: a large (!) and ill-tempered South American
spider (a new species no one knew of previously, natch) hitches a ride
to a small backwoods town in the coffin of a photographer whom it had
killed in the jungle. It escapes into the local woods, where it mates
with a local spider and creates a whole bunch of deadly toxic
mean-spirited little spiders, which take off to terrorize the town.
Most of this movie centers around the new local doctor's struggle
to get people to believe that the deaths of several people were not
cardiac arrests brought about by his own negligence, as the old doctor
would have it, but are in fact attributable to these spiders. Once real
evidence is found for this, a regional spider expert is brought in, and
the ground is laid for a plan to rid the town of the threat, leading (of
course) to a grand confrontation between the grandaddy spider and the
doctor, who (of course) has a serious fear of spiders due (of course) to
an incident in his infancy.
You might have notice that this summary makes no mention of the role
of the exterminator, played by John Goodman, who is in all the
commercials. This is because, unfortunately, he has very little screen
time and is not at all important to the plot or development. This is a
real shame, and a great waste of both a good character and a good actor.
The scenes involving Goodman are uniformly quite funny, as his role as
the down-n-dirty and rather thick-headed exterminator is ideal for him
and played to the hilt. If this movie had been, as I suspected,
Goodman's first real starring role and centered on his battle against
the spiders with his spray-gun, this could have been a truly hysterical
movie, while still being a thriller.
Luckily, the movie isn't a total loss without this; indeed,it's a
reasonably enjoyable flick with many good scares (plenty of spiders
flying around) and quite a few laughs along the way. It's pretty
formulatic, beyond its unique plot device, but still well-done; the plot
and tension build nicely if a bit slowly, and the climax is quite, well,
climactic. All the important characters are pretty well fleshed out.
The plot is sensible and has several sub-plots which interact quite
nicely. And so on.
All in all, this is a "solid" movie. It could have been much
better had it been, as it is being marketed as, a movie starring John
Goodman as the back- woods exterminator on a mission to save the town;
that could have been made into a truly funny, cornball movie based on a
thriller, in the same style as the classic GHOSTBUSTERS (the first
one, of course). However, when you realize that it isn't that movie,
you can enjoy what it is. Check it out; it's worth a look.
Ratings IMHO, 0-100 scale: Compare to:
ARACHNOPHOBIA GHOSTBUSTERS (well... they were
Plot: 80 Plot: 95 marketed about the
Thrills: 85 Thrills: 30 same...)
Comedy: 65 Comedy: 100
Advertising: 5 :) Advertising: N/A
Overall: 77 [B-,2 3/4 stars] Overall: 99 [A+, 4 stars]
Please note that the "Overall" ratings above are in no way intended
to be a summation of the previous ratings, but instead a true rating of
how good the movie was taken as a whole. Four categories are not enough
to rate all aspects of a movie, neither should all four be weighted
equally. For instance, the rating for Thrills in GHOSTBUSTERS above was
quite low, but that wasn't what the movie was intended to be about;
whereas Thrills were central to ARACHNOPHOBIA. The reason I chose to
compare it to GHOSTBUSTERS was, as I said, that ARACHNOPHOBIA was
marketed to appear to be a similar type film.
-- Ceej
ceej@pawl.rpi.edu
gmry@mts.rpi.edu
aka Chris Hilleryleeper@mtgzx.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) (07/27/90)
ARACHNOPHOBIA
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: This film has a plot that has been done
to death in the past and occasionally better. Still, my
spider sense tells me that it may do well with a new
generation of viewers who may not be so familiar with its
predecessors. Rating: +1.
One tends to expect new ideas in films from Steven Spielberg's Amblin
Entertainment. And with Disney Enterprises starting a new film branch,
Hollywood Pictures, you would expect something fairly original to inaugurate
the new label. That makes it all the more puzzling that this collaboration
between Amblin Entertainment and Hollywood Pictures would be a plot that was
already old when Spielberg made CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND . There
have already been so many "Invasion of the Killer Vermin" films that one
more is no novelty. In other films we have seen people threatened by
infestations of spiders, ants, birds, slugs, rats, bats, feral dogs, bears,
even frogs. (Don't ask me how you make a threat out of a frog; I saw the
film and still don't know. You have to be pretty desperate for phobias to
make a film about killer frogs!) However well a new film of this type is
done, and ARACHNOPHOBIA was nicely executed, there is not much new you can
put into a film about a small town threatened by an infestation of deadly
spiders.
The idea of the film is that there is a prehistoric breed of spider--
one with a very different social structure from what modern spiders have--
living isolated in the jungles of Venezuela. This breed of spider has a
"king" and a bunch of drones, much like bees have with a queen and drones.
That is something of a stretch since spiders are much more closely related
to sea crustaceans than they are to insects. A plot device that could have
been devised by Rube Goldberg takes the king spider and drops him (quite
literally) into the backyard of a new doctor in a small California town.
Dr.~Ross Jennings (played by Jeff Daniels) has a bugaboo about spiders and
the fact that he has a barn full of them is only one of the many problems he
is facing as a result of moving to Canaima, California, from San Francisco.
There are, in fact, many elements of the plot that executive producer Steven
Spielberg might have found extremely familiar. We have one lone man, who is
not really accepted by his town, who has to convince disbelieving officials
that they have a problem. He has his own phobias to overcome, but the love
of his family, charmingly portrayed, convinces him that he has to overcome
his fears and see that the problem gets solved. Luckily he has a
knowledgeable expert he can call on to help him out and to explain to the
audience how scary the situation really is. Surely all this must have rung
a bell somewhere in Spielberg's memory.
What is nice about the film is that it takes the time to develop
characters so that the audience has some understanding and empathy invested
in them. That too makes the film seem as if it were really a 1970s film.
The viewer gets to know the people who are threatened by the spiders--not as
well as you get to know the Brodie family in JAWS, but far better than you
know anyone in most current horror films. Nobody follows the new popular
formula of being introduced and making vacuous or stereotyped conversation,
then being quickly dispatched to nobody's regret.
The effects work usually is believable, though occasionally a spider
just does not scramble right. A fair number of live spiders were also sued
and unfortunately the film bears no endorsement of the filming practices by
any humane society.
ARACHNOPHOBIA is entertaining and has some genuinely creepy moments,
but lacks anything that really distinguishes it from other films with very
similar plots and approaches. I give it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzx!leeper
leeper@mtgzx.att.com
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper