Cringe-worthy
critters

>> Eight Legged Freaks is
neither freakish nor funny

by MATTHEW HAYS

The monster movie was a staple of ’50s Americana. And they were great—everything from Invaders From Mars to The Blob, the films were often packed with unbelievably cheesy special effects, soaked in barely-veiled ideological paranoia (with monsters sitting in for commies) and had at least one obligatory dime-store romance.
Sadly, the films don’t translate as well today. Yes, there are some impressive monsters in Eight Legged Freaks, but there’s very little else here, save perhaps two bearable one-liners and a scene where a horny teen gets his crotch electrocuted. Nay, this is no I Married a Monster From Outer Space, no Invasion of the Body Snatchers. None of the above.

Instead, Eight Legged Freaks is a nasty blotch on David Arquette’s CV, though the actor always did seem somewhat insane. Here, he proves his lack of grounded thought, taking on what could have been a fun summer movie. (Rather, we get something with the fun bits sorely missing.)
The setup is familiar: Arquette returns to the small town of Prosperity to reclaim his stake in the mines that run underneath the town. Said town is near bankruptcy, so an evil mayor is urging all the townsfolk to sell out. Meanwhile, due to some toxic waste dumping in a nearby lake, a bunch of spiders have been genetically altered and are growing at an alarming pace. Enter predictably brilliant, precocious, plucky child, who warns of impending ecological disaster while no one listens.

Easy creepy

Supplying some pseudo-comic relief is a black conspiracy theorist (played by Doug E. Doug) who hosts a radio show in which he inundates the townsfolk with his own beliefs about the mines, the mayor, the powers that be and now the critters. In a normal movie Doug wouldn’t warrant mentioning, but he’s about the only thing close to funny here and thus gets a citation.

Most will come to this, of course, for the critters themselves. Yep, they look creepy, but I question how much true talent is involved in making audiences cringe by making them watching spiders. Most people have such a visceral fear of them, it’s perhaps the easiest thing to use to evoke fear in a crowd. It’s like trying to make someone nauseous by showing them close-up shots of people puking their guts out. (The critters, and the ideological underpinnings, for that matter, were played out in an infinitely more interesting fashion in Verhoeven’s brilliant Starship Troopers.)

Back to the mall

If there is a saving grace—beyond Eight Legged Freaks being a make-work program for bad actors—it comes with a quasi-academic reading of the film’s final sequence (and it’s almost certainly a misreading of anything the filmmaker’s were even remotely taking a stab at). The final standoff between the American crowd and the evil arachnids occurs in the Prosperity Mall, where the townsfolk find temporary refuge. It’s part nod to George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, part nod to the film’s ideological underpinnings: this is capitalism under siege.

But before dismissing this film as so much pro-capitalist propaganda, it’s worth noting that the threat evoked in this film does not come from the red planet or from outside the community, but from within. More precisely, the film’s fiction has nature running amuck as a result of toxic waste, dumped out of corporate greed. Forget “capitalism is good,” this film seems to be going in the radical direction of suggesting the opposite. Gosh, I wonder how they got that under the wire of all those naughty studio suits. Thank God for the power of metaphor, or we wouldn’t have the fine work of Gene Roddenberry, Rod Serling and this movie!
Okay, okay, I need a life. You’d be coming up with lame-ass theories about movies like this too if you had to sit through them for a living. :

Eight Legged Freaks is now playing

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