Eight Legged Freaks

David Arquette's giant head does a lot of yelling.

Let me take you back in time for a moment. Back to when Justin Bieber was still pissing his bed sheets and we were all hoping to fall in love with Star Wars: Episode 2. Oh, we were but naive fans. It was a much simpler time. An era of innocence and cinema history. A year that would see the release of such masterpieces as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Spider-man. But standing above the others, a shining beacon of film amongst the common rabble of blockbuster movies was Eight Legged Freaks.

The very title of this movie makes you think. The lack of a hyphen changes its meaning from 'freaks with eight legs' - the spiders - to 'eight freaks with legs'. This seems to imply that people, with the mere existence of their legs, are freaks; that we are born with the ability to walk, we are therein cursed and somehow less as a whole. But we also have people without legs, cripples, amputees, fat people and other lazy degenerates. Are we then to realise that without their legs these people couldn’t possibly be 'freaks'? Is that the moral lesson we are to take away from the seeming punctuation error in the title? That we are all burdened, one way or another, and that our ostracism and discrimination of the disabled actually makes US the freaks?
This is nothing short of pure genius, a hard look at the morals of modern society hidden in what could easily have been overlooked as lazy editing. If there is one thing you can say for this movie about giant spiders starring David Arquette, it's that it is subtle in its approach to sensitive issues, preferring to present the matter and leave it up to us, as the audience, to discuss and change the perceptions of our own society.


The story takes place in a little town called Prosperity, Arizona, and begins with toxic chemicals being dumped into a lake, contaminating the water supply. Talk about an original concept, this certainly isn't cliché or a trope in any way. I also like that they never explain what the chemical is, or what purpose it served previously. Could this innocent-seeming barrel of 'toxic waste' symbolise man's pollution and destruction of natural habitats? A film that makes us ask the big questions could only be the work of genius.

Nope. It's pure shit. 

Strangely no one seems to give a shit about the toxic waste or its immediate effects. It's only through the feeding of 'toxic crickets' to exotic spiders that anyone starts to even notice that it was a problem. The crickets act as some sort of spider steroid, increasing their size to something akin to large farm animals. As is the case with all giant monster movies no one seems to know what is going on until the massive spiders are literally running through the streets. And even then they are all idiots, constantly running into danger rather than away from it, ignoring warnings and generally being dicks. Anyway, the town gets over-run, stupid people die and a bunch of spiders get moderately shotgunned. They then lure the spiders into a local mine that is conveniently full of methane and blow them all up. A truly inspired story.

It's hard to tell if this movie was made to be serious or was more or a tongue-in-cheek homage to 1950's sci0fi films such as 'Them!' and 'Tarantula'. Maybe it's both, a movie inspired by Z-grade horror films and... No... No, it's just shit. They try to spice it up with a few Spiderman gags, but it falls well short of its goal to be enjoyable. Hell, it falls short of being bearable. It's like watching a colostomy bag slowly fill over the course of 99 minutes. The only good part is when we see a towel-clad Scarlett Johansson sprayed with a sticky white substance, but then David Arquette ruins the scene by merely being in it, the cunt. Fuck David Arquette.

It tries to be a black comedy. Well, not really black... more of a grey... no... No. It's really more like a beige comedy, by which I mean it's not at all funny. Fart jokes are funnier than this movie. Fuck, cot death is funnier than this movie. It's unoriginal and uninspiring and cliché to a fault. There is the bumbling side-kick character, the token black guy who makes an oppression joke character, the nerdy kid who's an expert on the subject character. It's terrible.

I would rather be learning than watching this piece of shit. I'd rather eat off the asian menu at a traditional Chinese restaurant. If you own or see a copy of this DVD, no doubt floating like a bloated corpse in a slick-shined puddle of urine, burn it. Burn them all.

If you have a spare 90-odd minutes of time that you're unsure what to do with, and your choice lay between watching Eight Legged Freaks or sewing your own butthole closed, take the latter option. It is considerably less painful.