I'm honestly confused as to how such a ridiculous movie as "Eight Legged Freaks" can end up being boring. It's about mutant spiders that defy laws of science and threaten to destroy a small town. I can understand how it can be bad, but boring?
The movie stars David Arquette, the "1-800-COLLECT guy." He returns to his hometown of Prosperity, Arizona after a ten-year absence and finds that he is still in love with the beautiful sheriff played by Kari Wuhrer. The actors have a nice chemistry and the sexual tension suggests that the movie might be scary, funny and sexy. It's not.
Wuhrer's son spends time with the local kook, a scientist that keeps hundreds of exotic spiders in his living room. He learns about these spiders and is the first person to connect a toxic waste spill with the growing spiders.
In a classic horror movie plot point, a drum of toxic waste spills into a nearby river and causes the local grasshoppers to grow.
The scientist feeds these grasshoppers to his pets and it causes them to grow as large as people and cars. One spider gets out and bites him and, in another classic horror movie technique, he trashes around knocking all the cages over.
Soon pets start disappearing and people start getting killed. The best scene involves a dozen jumping spiders that attack a group of desert motorcyclists. It's a long chase sequence that climaxes with the explosion of a gas-truck.
Like the rest of the movie, this scene just wasn't right. It could have been funnier and much more exciting. The stunts and the computer animation were good, but it left me with a sense of apathy.
As is the case in most horror movies, no one knows what's happening and no one listens to the one person who does.
In this movie everyone ignores the young boy until it's too late. It doesn't help that his mother and Arquette are busy trying to get it on or that the spiders sneak around for the first half of the movie.
Finally, they listen to the boy when a spider breaks into the sheriff's home and tries to make cocoons of her daughter and Arquette. She saves them with the help of her shotgun. Wuhrer with her shotgun is by far the coolest part of the movie. She shoots off spider's legs and they make the most horrible shrieks.
The sheriff takes her kids and Arquette to Doug E. Doug, who has a radio show that the whole town listens to.
Wuhrer makes an announcement about the giant spiders, but no one believes her. That is until the spiders over run the town. As night approaches the spiders crawl out to feed.
The town folk are told to meet at the local mall to fight the spiders. This begins the longest sequence in the film as hundreds of the town's inhabitants try to make it to the mall with various degrees of success.
There are jumping spiders, trap door spiders, and one that's the size of a tank! Still the movie finds ways to be boring.
It is silly when it tries to be creepy and dull when it tries to be funny.
