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Movies => Bad Movies => Topic started by: Fearless Freep on June 14, 2005, 10:19:58 AM



Title: "Arachnid"
Post by: Fearless Freep on June 14, 2005, 10:19:58 AM
Last nigt's movie fun for me was Arachnid (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0271972/), a none-too ambitous typical monster spider movie.  A bit of fun if you go in with low expectations

**spoilers ahead**

Plot: A team consisting of two doctors, one assistant, a body guard of sorts and his two person team, a native and a pilot travel to a small island inthe south pacific to find the source of a disease that is killing off the natives.  Their plane crash lands on the island.  They find an abandoned village.  One of the disposable team mammbers is bitten by ticks that get under his skin and later explode out of his body...and the start finding other weird bugs, like a ginat centipede and spiders with weird characteristics.  This is all a setup for the giant spider the run into and must fght for survival.  The characters are pretty standard; their is the scientist who is en expert on spiders who provides just enough exposition before he's killed off.  It's pretty easy to tell from the opening few scenes who will still be alive at the end.

What I Liked:  The actors were not bad.  Certainly a step up from "Arachnia".  The special effects were also pretty effective.  I guess the best I can say was that the movie went in as a faiirly low budget attempt to make a movie about  people trapped on an island fighting a giant spider and managed to do that in a way that was not annoying.  I hope I'm not damming with faint praise :)  But for those who like such things, it's a pretty solid piece of entertainment

What I Didn't Like: The characters spent too much time snapping at each other early on for no rational reasons.  Shortly after they crashed I was thinking "man, they won't need any spiders...they'll all have killed each other in a day ".  Also, several of the actors accents were so thick and unintelligble that I had to watch the movie with subtitles on.

Huh?:  The film started a few plot lines that went nowhere.  The start of the movie had a Stealth fighter chasing a UFO out at sea.  The UFO is hit by a waterspout and both craft crash on the island, where the alien pilot is killed by the spider (and presumably the human pilot).  The UFO and alien are never mentioned again (although the human pilot is the brother of the pilot for the team later in the movie...giving her motivation to try to find her brother).  Nothing electical works on the island, although no explanation is given for why.  Early on in the movie, the team is attacked by various weird insects at different times, but once the giant spider appears, the other insects don't factor into the plot.  Why were the insects all mutating or mutated?  Was it connected to the electical problems?  I guess a tighter story would've tried to bring it all together...or not raise the issues in the first place.  I also was amuses that our Hero brought along a *lot* of guns on the trip..but seemed to lose most of them in the plane crash.

Summary:  Fairly generic giant spider in the wilderness type of movie.  Good for a Saturday afternoon bit of fun or some late night entertainment



Title: Re: "Arachnid"
Post by: Neville on June 14, 2005, 11:18:00 AM
I remember this one getting terrible rewiews when it was released. It is the second film by a new horror studio, The Fantastic Factory, that later has made the likes of "Dagon" , "Darkness" or "Beyond Re-animator". While a considerable inprovement over their first movie (Brian Yuzna's "Faust", enough said), it proves they still needed to work harder.

Personally, i rented it on DVD and although I knew it wasn't going to be good, I had a decent time with it. It is briskly paced, has the adequate ammounts of gore and Jack Sholder, unlike Yuzna, seems to know what he is doing most of the time.

I remember some article by the writer claiming his script had been severely mutilated, which would account for (at least some of) the plot holes.

Oh, and the accents are an ongoing problem in the Fantastic Factory movies; the studio is based on Spain, and very often the get mixed casts. In this case at least two of the main actors (Pepe Sancho and Neus Asensi) are spanish, which explains the situation.



Title: Re: "Arachnid"
Post by: Fearless Freep on June 14, 2005, 11:43:24 AM
Personally, i rented it on DVD and although I knew it wasn't going to be good, I had a decent time with it. It is briskly paced, has the adequate ammounts of gore

My take on it exactly.  I didn't expect great cinema, just some time-wasting fun, and it accomplished that for me.

Oh, and the accents are an ongoing problem in the Fantastic Factory movies; the studio is based on Spain, and very often the get mixed casts. In this case at least two of the main actors (Pepe Sancho and Neus Asensi) are spanish, which explains the situation.

I sorta gleaned that from the cast on IMDB  :)