Leofwine_draca I've been a fan of monster movies as long as I can remember, ever since watching Ray Harryhausen movies as a kid. Well, times have changed and CGI effects have replaced stop-motion Plasticine creatures, but are monster movies still any good? On the strength of SPIDERS, I'd say yes! From the first, you have to go into SPIDERS expecting a cheesy B-movie as this is exactly what you get. Don't look for any serious acting or a well-written plot as you won't find them in this genre. Instead, the film-makers focus on offering up a ton of monster action (on a limited budget, mind), quite a few laughs, and as many genre clichés as they can fit into the running time.Things kick off as a space shuttle crash-lands (really bad effect) and our trio of college student heroes (two nerds, one jock) investigate a sinister government base. Before you can say THE HIDDEN, a massive spider has burst out of a corpse's mouth and is on the run, webbing people up and growing until it reaches behemoth-size proportions. For the first hour and ten minutes, the spider is mainly an animatronic beast before becoming a huge CGI-menace in the traditional "rampage" climax. Mechanical effects for the beastie are generally good, with a few wobbly bits; the CGI effects look, well, just like CGI but I didn't mind them as much here as in other films.The acting is nothing to write home about, as the leads are all supposed teenagers (actually twentysomethings) and the heroine's transformation from geek to Ripley-style heroine is as unbelievable as you'd expect. Mark Phelan is the villain of the piece and his sneering man-in-black comes across as a low-budget Lance Henriksen-alike. The movie has plenty of references to THE X-FILES with rubbery aliens in jars and there are also lots of in-jokes; for instance, we see the body of one "Morrison, J." hidden away in "Area 21" (sic). I was quite pleased with the level of gore on display, with all manner of mutilated bodies, copious slime and gunk, and the centrepiece monster-from-mouth which was quite clearly stolen from THE HIDDEN but which still packs a punch. The swelling heads of the bitten victims are suitably disgusting although the CGI explosions are less than impressive.The film was written on the fly by Boaz Davidson, an Israeli producer who seems to be making a name for himself as the 'Golan-Globus' of the noughties. Director Gary Jones also made MOSQUITO in 1994, another genuinely fun monster flick. While this film is as stupid as you would expect – at one stage our heroes discover a rocket launcher LEFT LYING AROUND in a helicopter on campus – it has a tongue-in-cheek spirit that makes it entertaining, while it never goes for outright laughs as in the dumb EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS. The finale, in which the giant spider rampages through the college campus, is absolutely hilarious stuff, watch out for the guy who tries to jump the bonnet of the police car, brilliant. More rampaging monster flicks need to be like this and less like the execrable GODZILLA remake.

Uriah43 This movie essentially begins with some astronauts on the space shuttle who are in the process of conducting experiments on spiders while in space. Suddenly a solar flare hits the space shuttle and causes an emergency situation prompting an immediate return to earth. However, since the experiments they were conducting were highly classified, the space shuttle is reported to have been burned up upon reentry--when in all actuality it has crash-landed in the Californian desert. Then, as luck would have it, a college reporter named "Marci Eyre" (Lana Parrilla) and two of her friends by the names of "Jake" (Nick Swarts) and "Slick" (Oliver Macready) just happen to be at the same location investing possible aliens when they observe the space shuttle's descent. Rushing to the site they see three dead astronauts with injuries incompatible with the crash and another astronaut who is clearly suffering from some kind of severe illness and on the verge of death. All of a sudden some government agents arrive accompanied by military personnel and the three reporters subsequently hide in a truck to avoid detection. They are then transported to a secret government facility which is located underground. Upon quietly exiting from the truck they investigate this facility and discover all kinds of evidence pointing to some really horrific experiments. But the worst is yet to come. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that I had hoped for a film containing some good suspense and horror. A key component of that would also include some good CGI. Unfortunately, although the suspense was adequate enough, the horror and special effects were not very sharp at all. Additionally, the attempts at humor weren't very effective either and only served to give the movie a rather cheap quality. In short, I was somewhat disappointed in this film and I have rated it accordingly. Below average.

tabor-ukhodit-v-nebo I think most people who have commented on this movie have watched it with the wrong attitude. Get real; What do you expect from a flick blatantly named "Spiders", apparently featuring some generic monstrous arachnid creatures wreaking havoc on people? Unless you're an easily amused teenager with poor judgment, you instinctively steer clear from these kinds of pictures when looking for chills and thrills. There are quality films that offer just that.I thought I was about to watch a really bad movie, with unintentionally comedic elements and worthless cast, storyline and directing. I was wrong. This movie quickly reveals it's true nature for the perceptive. Taking for granted that the movie was "bad" on purpose, I could actually appreciate the cheesy dialog and all the self-irony that it displays. The characters make illogical decisions, use stupid reasoning and don't try to take themselves seriously. The way in which the plot unfolds and how the main characters figure it out is an obvious parody of the genre, and there are so many details which contribute to that feeling in the dialog and some of the scenes; a guy holding the spider's teeth like bull's horns, making DNA-enhanced mutant spiders from hell seem like a an ordinary casual case of lively struggle, quotes like "This is so creepy. Its like a bad sci-fi movie." and "I mean what the hell is this place?" -"I don't care what this place is, what the f-ck are *we* doing here?" etc. made me at least chuckle at times, because they often raise valid points regarding the absurd setting of the film, and do it with subtlety.The CGI was decent at times, yet laughable in some parts (especially when the spider was running around walls etc). The spider looks gory enough in close shots. The physical webs are composed of thin rope and you can see the knots tying together the intersections, which to me was a funny detail (c'mon, they could have easily avoided that, would they had cared for realism).The pacing is fine; There is enough action to keep the viewer at least semi-entertained, assuming they can appreciate other aspects of the film also (I'm not a big fan of "irrational abominable creature vs. bunch of dumb people" films).All in all, this is definitely not a serious movie, so you should not watch it as one. If you are in a humourless mood looking for some horror, then this movie will probably only make you angry. As a compensation for all the bad ratings this movie has received on IMDb, I have to give it 8/10. I'd dare to say it is more self-aware and intelligent than most people realize.

fuzileer Starting off as a tense and reasonably scary movie, in the end it just gets, as simply as possible, stupid. The movie starts off with three nerds who decides to sneak into nowhere for some reason, and then a space craft hits the ground (when I say space craft, I mean a cheap 99p rocket bought from the Early Learning Centre) and they see a mutated crew member who was impregnated with a spider, which was mutated by, yes, you guessed it. Radiation. Original. Chumps. Then, the 3 members of geek-squad somehow get inside an underground base, and the spider hatches out of the crew member who they found in the shuttle. (Don't worry Alien fans, the spider crawls out of the mouth, not the highly original chest-burster.) Then you get to the part where the thing starts to chase everyone around, killing for no reason what-so-ever, and slowly, the scary-o-meter (1 being tellitubie scary, 9 being Alien and 10 being Napoleon Dynamite) drops from 5 to 4, and eventually, the main evil guy gets impregnated. The geek squad falls from 3 to 1 (you can guess which one survives from the very start) and once the last geek-member escapes with her new friend, the scary-o-meter goes from 4 to 2. Once outside, they both bump into the evil guy, who some how managed to break away from being completely wrapped in web and from the spiders layer and never tells us how, and he blows up to reveal a medium sized spider(think of Eight Legged Freaks spiders, but a bit smaller) and now the scary-o-meter reaches -4. As soon as the spider is on the loose, the two "heroes" go outside to see the helicopter that the evil guy was on, just parked in car park with people just walking past it, despite having a top-of-the-range bazooka with live ammunition on the back seat, which has no door what-so-ever, and the keys miraculously still in the ignition. Then, they fly over the city and an anti-climax follows where the spider gets blown up and then the film immediately finishes when everyone goes "yay".What really lets the movie down is that it thinks it can be a comedy/horror/action film all in one, a mixture that takes a master of a director to get over, this film would only be really good if Spielberg would have trouble of doing this piece of garbage. The actors are totally uninspiring, and in one scene, the woman geek's hair style changes when shes in a lift.Therefore, I would like to end this review on this final note:Thank the lord I bought this for only £1.99