Big Ass Spider (2013)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company: Epic Pictures Group

Runtime: 80 mins

Format: Itunes

Plot: A giant mutant spider escapes from a military lab and goes on a rampage through the city of Los Angeles. When a massive military strike fails, it is up to one clever exterminator to kill the creature before its eggs hatch and the city is overran with hundreds of mutant spiders.

Review: I'm a very vocal person when it comes to my annoyance with the overabundance of Shark movies in the B-Movie genre as of late. Surely the majority of them could have still essentially been the exact same movie with a different killer animal, so why not switch it up a bit and get some variety out there? That's why I've been doing my bit to help promote other corners of the killer animal B-Movie market that seem to have a shot at giving the sharks a run for their money. Dinosaur flicks have been putting up a good fight these last couple years with movies like Area 407, The Dinosaur Project, Jurassic Attack, Age of Dinosaurs, and the upcoming flicks Poseidon Rex, Jurassic Block, and the very long-awaited Raptor Ranch.

On the flip side, the other animal also doing it's part to dethrone the shark is the spider, with recent movies like Camel Spiders, Arachnoquake, Spiders 3D, Christopher R Mihm's 2013 movie The Giant Spider, and now this Tremors-esque monster comedy Big Ass Spider (previously known as Mega Spider), so when I had the opportunity recently to catch and review Big Ass Spider, of course I jumped at it (and not away from it, like I would a real big ass spider, hahaha).

Big Ass Spider has Matt Parkman from Heroes (I'm keeping the Heroes love alive!), or rather his real-world name of Greg Grunberg as everyone else not still-obsessed with keeping the Heroes love alive calls him, front and center as the main character that we follow around. He's an exterminator that specializes in spiders and after getting hurt doing a Pro Bono job on his day off, goes to the hospital where shortly after, a slightly larger-than-normal spider kills a patient and he offers to track it down and kill it in exchange for his ridiculously high medical bill to be wiped. Throughout the movie he battles not just this abnormally large arachnid, but also something just as difficult – woman troubles. The guy is as unlucky in love as they come, however it's not for lack of trying...almost too much...but always with the expected hilarious results.

Helping him to track down this spider, he teams up with a side-splittingly idiotic hospital security guard, Jose, who totally steals the movie every time he opens his mouth. The guy acts tough when he's not, repeats everything Greg Grunberg says, and makes sure to rudely include his 2 cents into every single conversation that happens around him, he never fails to elicit the intended laugh and the movie is easily raised up a few notches just for having this character in there, and played so perfectly by his relatively-unknown actor, Lombardo Boyar. Him and Greg Grunberg have such great chemistry together, it's easy to accept them as strangers-turned-friends during the events of this movie. Also joining them here is Ray Wise, who has been in just about everything ever made, as the stereotypical cliche thick-headed stubborn military general partially responsible for not only the spider's existence, but all the failed attempts to recapture or kill it after it's initial escape from the hospital due to ignoring any and all advice from the heroes, and playing one of his lead soldiers and one-of-many potential love interests for Greg Grunberg is the always-beautiful Clare Kramer, who most people will probably recognize as Glory from Buffy the Vampire Slayer but fellow B-Movie lovers like myself will also remember as the main character in the direct-to-video sequel, The Skulls 3.

This movie wastes none of its short 80-minute runtime, starting the plot off almost right away and making good headway even before the 20 minute mark. By half an hour in, the acid-spitting mutant spider has been chased around the inner ducts and dusty basements of the hospital, down through the sewers, and out into the middle of the city where it continues to grow immensely and snack down on the all-you-can-eat buffet that is a wide-open park during a hot summer afternoon. The rest of the movie is spent going back and forth between the military and Greg Grunberg trying to track the always-growing-larger spider down, leading them all to a massive showdown atop a skyscraper in the middle of the city. Along the way in there is even a nice little short scene for fans of Found Footage movies as a squad of soldiers with helmet-mounted video cameras go tracking the spider down in a forest. This movie has no shortage of awesome spider-carnage scenes, and while for the most part it tries to stay a bit family-friendly, there are a couple scenes with some decent gore in them, between skin melting from the spider's sprayed acid and some rather fun impalings, Warrior Arachnid-style.

The special effects are never shied away from, as the movie rarely goes more then five minutes without showing the mutant beastie, and while the average B-grade creature feature of modern day has, well, less-than-stellar effects that has people groaning or laughing at it as opposed to with it, this movie had surprisingly great CGI, especially as the spider continued to get bigger and bigger, a place where the CGI in the SyFy Channel Original Movies that I'm usually used to seem to degrade, but here they seem, if anything, to improve the bigger the spider got. The only times the CGI wavered a bit and were not quite up to par with the rest of the movie were a couple scenes of the military soldiers firing on the spider, and especially toward the end when a nest of baby mutant spiders were running around inside the skyscraper. Save for those two instances, the CGI was top-level stuff and far better than I was expecting out of this.

We also thankfully don't get a whole lot of overdone stereotypical exposition as to the military's creation of this thing. We simply get a really short answer of 'We created this thing as an experiment, this is why and how we created it, and due to an error on our behalf it's now loose' and that's literally it. Seeing as how these kinds of movies always have the same overly-drawn out exposition on the military's creation of whatever mutant animal monster said movie is focused on, I can really appreciate that this movie simply drops a few quick sentences on it and then moves on, leaving in the dust any complicated stereotypical subplot detour that would normally accompany such a movie and instead just uses that time for more fun and hilarity with the main leads of Greg Grunberg, the exterminator unlucky in love, and Jose, the hilariously idiotic-but-lovable hospital security guard.

As mentioned at the top of this review, when it comes to the movie's comedic side, the tone of Big Ass Spider is very nearly identical to that of other purposely-campy creature feature comedies such as Slither, 8 Legged Freaks, and the Tremors series. This thing is simply a laugh-riot from start to finish, with I don't think a single scene passing by that didn't have me in stitches at some point. Hell, you know right from the start that you're in for a hilariously campy fun hour and a half when the movie starts off with Greg Grunberg watching in slo-motion as a building-sized mega spider destroys the city around him to the beat of Storm Large's Where Is My Mind.

Big Ass Spider is one of those rare B-Movies that is several levels better then your average SyFy or Asylum-made production and is not just entertaining, but genuinely made so well that it probably could have had a legit wide theatrical release and been at least mildly successful. I can easily see this being the Arachnophobia and 8 Legged Freaks for this decade, and those who loved those movies should also love this one as well and those who hated those movies...well, find yourself a sense of humor for the lowest price that you can and then come back so you can strap on your exterminator gear and enjoy this laugh-riot killer spider comedy.

As for exactly how you can check this movie out? Well so far the home video release isn't slated until January 7th, 2014 but after recently playing at the Toronto International Film Festival you can now currently watch it via Video on Demand services or find it for digital download on sites like Amazon and Itunes, and you can make a safe bet that the day it does finally come out on DVD (and hopefully BluRay as well), I'll be at my local HMV first thing to nab myself a copy.

10/10  rooms in the Psych Ward

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Spiders (2013)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: Nu Image

RUNTIME: 90 mins

FORMAT: BluRay

PLOT: After a Soviet space station crashes into a New York City subway tunnel, a new species of dangerous venomous spiders is discovered, and soon they start mutating to gigantic proportions and wreak havoc on the city.

REVIEW: When Spiders (Spiders 3D for its limited theatrical run) was first announced and we started getting news of it here and there, I was a bit confused as to what kind of movie it was - remake, sequel, or something original? See, back in 2000 and 2001 there were a couple SyFy Channel style B-Movies also titled Spiders and Spiders II: Breeding Grounds. Like this one, they also dealt with genetically-modified mutant killer spiders brought down on something crashing from space, and they too began growing to immense size during the films. I had no idea initially if this was supposed to be a new sequel to that series (with the 3 in 3D being the number of the movie), a remake to the first, or just a brand new movie with the same unimaginative title and an almost exact same plot. Well it turns out it's that last one, and while that was slightly disappointing to me at first, in the end I completely forgot all about any other similar movies because this one was just so damn good.

As far as expectations for low budget cheesy B-Movies go, this one surpassed them in pretty much every regard. The acting is actually pretty good from everyone, no matter how minor or major the role, and when you take into account just how many Unknowns and B-Movie actors are in this, that's quite the feat - even the child actor didn't bother me at all here and came across as very natural. Also, Patrick Muldoon (here playing subway tracks manager and loving father that has to find his family amidst the spider-caused chaos in the city) has clearly discovered the Fountain of Youth as he hasn't aged a single day since his time on the original Starship Troopers, and he's equally a joy to watch here as he was in that classic.

The special effects of the mutant spiders ranged from ok to great and were always well-above average for what you would expect from such a movie. From the normal-sized little critters that plagued the subway tracks and other dimly-lit locations, to the dog-sized buggers that ran up the sides of the buildings and chased people through warehouses, to the car-sized horrors that occupied the mostly-deserted streets and back alleys, to the gigantic building-sized monstrosity that created mass chaos and destruction across the city, they all looked pretty excellent and the CGI models for them interacted with the physical world almost flawlessly. As a hated of any kind of arachnids, I can assure you that the CGI models in this movie will be giving me nightmares for weeks to come. Likewise, the set designs were excellent as well and actually looked realistic. Even though the movie was filmed in Romania or Bucharest or some place like that, I never once questioned if this was actually NYC I was seeing as it looked pretty spot-on to me. If I hadn't read in another article where this movie had been filmed, I would have never guessed that it hadn't been in New York City.

It's also a nice added bonus that the majority of the movie takes place at night or in dimly-lit shadowed areas, which is something I miss from 80's and 90's B-Movies that seems to not happen much anymore, if at all - so many B-Movies today (especially SyFy Channel ones) take place entirely during the day, and they loose such great potential for atmosphere by doing that (not to mention it helps mask any terrible CGI a bit). Even having a couple night time attack scenes go a long way, so it was a nice surprise when this one was filled with them. Hell, even the main plot of the movie (that being the spiders coming down from space and infesting New York City) happens within the first 5-10 minutes, which was another welcomed change as so many of these kinds of movies take so long to get to the point, but here it starts almost right away and wastes no time.

However, where it does waste time, is with the Government Conspiracy subplot. See, there's this rather large section of the movie devoted to the Government evacuated the city and quarantining sections of it off, threatening those that try to cross by way of on-the-spot execution. In addition to this going on, the Government is also employing very Mission: Impossible style tactics to 'get rid of' (I.E. murder) anyone with real knowledge on the reason the city is being evacuated, that being due to giant mutating alien spiders. On paper I'm sure it looked great, and even in-action it's not the idea of it that I don't like, it's just that far too much time is spent on it, and spent on characters within it that have no bearing on anything else in the movie, and I feel it kind of takes you out of the main meat of fun far more often then not. It brings down an otherwise perfect flow to the movie and that whole subplot could easily have been shortened down or cut out all together and the movie would have been better off for it.

Along those lines there's an extension of that subplot, dealing with a Government scientist and the lead military general doing tests on a captured spider that involves some revelations, that while I didn't mind nearly as much as the previously-mentioned stuff, I still could have done without. I say it all too often, but that's only because these movies do it all too often, but I really hate it when killer animal B-movies feel the need to throw in human villains, as I find it takes some of the threat away from the killer animals, plus nobody tunes into a giant mutated killer alien spider movie to watch a couple questionable humans make some bad decisions and act all tough about it. Don't get me wrong, I liked having the military involved, especially for some of those awesome and fun military vs giant spiders action scenes, but it's just having the lead General and scientist kind of being the obligatory 'evil military general' and 'mad scientist' characters that I could have done without. However, it at least it gave us a couple more main characters to focus on, and they did impact other parts of the movie as well as interacted with our main leads on occasion, so at least they have a good reason to be here, unlike the whole Government cover-up stuff that I mentioned earlier.

Those quibbles aside, this is a near-perfect B-Movie and it's a hell of a lot of fun. I just wish they would have come up with a better, more interesting title then simply 'Spiders'. Especially since there's already an almost identical movie about mutated alien spiders getting loose after escaping a falling man-made outer space object and growing to giant size, ALSO with the exact same generic title of 'Spiders' that was released back in 2000. But whatevs. Nobody probably even remembers that movie other than me anyway.

As for this one, I have no idea why it never got a wider theatrical release then it did. As far as I'm concerned, the acting, CGI effects, and even the movie as a whole is at least on-par with, if not better than, Eight Legged Freaks which did get a theatrical release back in 2002, and in my opinion, this one deserved a far better release treatment then it ultimately got.

8/10  rooms in the Psych Ward

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Arachnoquake (2012)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: Active Entertainment

RUNTIME: 86 mins

FORMAT: Screener

PLOT: After earthquakes ravage New Orleans, dozens of locals fall victim to a previously unknown species of deadly albino spiders. Despite their best efforts, spiders swarm out of the earthquake-opened fissures and infest the city.

REVIEW: I've been backing killer spider movies now for awhile, hoping that they would overtake the shark movies as the popular go-to killer animal for B-Movie companies, however the first of many killer spider movies to hit this year, Roger Corman's Camel Spiders, was only so-so and far from the great 'Second Coming' that I was hoping it would be to usher in the other killer arachnid movies of 2012 and beyond. Well luckily, coming up on Saturday, June 23rd at 9pm Eastern Time on Space: The Imagination Station in Canada, and the SyFy Channel in the U.S., we have our second major spider movie of 2012 – the awesomely-titled Arachnoquake, starring none other then John Connor himself, Edward Furlong! And huge thanks to the wonderful people at Space: The Imagination Station (The Canadian affiliate for The SyFy Channel) for sending me a screener copy of Arachnoquake to check out for early review!

Sadly, my screener copy was only 58 minutes long. It would seem, judging by the regular length of a SyFy Original Movie, that there's roughly half an hour missing from the screener and I think a large portion of that, if not all, is the end. There may be a tad missing from the beginning, since when the screener starts it opens on two characters talking about the earthquake that's already happened, and one of them had already been bitten by a spider, but the title screen comes up shortly after that so I'm thinking that might really be how the movie starts. An hour into it though, the video just abruptly ends mid-battle, so I can't really comment on how it finishes or on anything that may be contained within that last half an hour. With that said, it's certainly a great way to get me to review the screener but still make sure I tune in for the movie when it airs, because I really loved what I saw here and I just can't wait to find out how it all finishes!

Arachnoquake starts off with a group of co-workers that work at a small egg farm out in the woods, and as they work and horse around with one another, they talk about a mysterious earthquake in the area the night before, and one of them complains about having been bitten by something in his sleep. It doesn't take long after that before we discover that the earthquake unleashed a nest of killer mutated albino spiders in the middle of New Orleans, that had previously been trapped below the ground where they evolved through the generations to the way they are now. Of course, as these things go in movies such as this, pretty soon after that the spiders start causing havoc in New Orleans and turn the city into an all-you-can-eat buffet of Human as they continue to grow and multiply, leaving it up to a slacker tour bus driver and his diverse group of tourists for the hour, to save the day.

I had quite a few surprises waiting for me within the confines of this movie, none of which I was expecting. First up is the acting; a few roles aside, the acting really impressed me from almost everyone, and not once did I ever stop and think 'Boy, that was some horrible acting right there.' Heck, even though Edward Furlong is the bigger name, it was Bug Hall as the slacker tour bus guide that really surprised me, and he was a much better actor then Furlong (who falls into the small 'few roles aside' section). Also, you just have to love that name – Bug Hall. My only wish at this point is that his next SyFy Original Movie be one about killer bugs. You just know he has to do it at some point (Bugpocolypse: Starring Bug Hall - seriously, somebody get on that). Also because of his great acting, as well as most everyone else's top-notch skills in this, a lot of the comedic beats honestly came across as genuinely funny. Far too often in B-Movies, moments that are meant to be funny just come across as a lame attempt, but here almost every time (and there is indeed quite a few), all the comedic beats and funny one-liners are full hits, thanks in large part to everyone's excellent comedic timing and acting abilities. Make no mistake – this movie knows exactly what it is and has tons of fun with it, and tons of fun making fun of itself, with almost every scene having some form of comedy within it, be it a visual gag, a one-liner, a silly sound effect, or an insane situation. Actually, one of my favorites is a Deep Blue Sea speech moment. Even though here it's pretty easy to spot coming from a mile away thanks to how the frame was obviously shot, but that didn't make it any less hilarious when it happened.

Another of the surprises are the creature effects. Are they great? No. But they are quite passable and fit within the surrounding physical environments far better then they did in Camel Spiders, and they never once took me out of the moment. Then again, it's hard to be taken out of the moment by low-quality effects when what they're doing is so amazingly cheesy that is is literally candy for the eyes; We have giant mutated albino killer spiders of all sizes ranging from tennis ball-sized to as large as a car rampaging through New Orleans and the surrounding backwoods areas, chomping down on people and webbing entire vehicles up, and we also have a few other little treats such as a scene where an alligator fights with one of the giant spiders in the swamps, and Edward Furlong, along with the girl softball team he coaches, take their bats to an attacking spider with hilarious results. Oh, and despite their large sizes, magically they're still light enough to walk on top of water, and scurry fast enough on it that they can keep up with a speeding boat! Like I said, such awesome cheese to fill your mind that the last thing you're thinking of are the effects because you're just having such a blast with everything else. And that's not even the cheesiest stuff with the spiders! There is one, um...special ability...that they can do, that I won't ruin here in my review, but let's just say I totally was not expecting it, and I loved it every time they utilized it (and the effects for it were indeed really well-done and realistic-looking).

Of course with a killer animal movie, there are two main aspects viewers normally look at – the animals themselves, and the kill scenes. While the death-by-spider scenes were normally either off-screen or light on the red gooy stuff, they made up for that by having very disgusting spider 'births'. See, it's never really explained how (at least not in the first hour that I saw), but everybody that got bitten by one of these spiders had spider eggs implanted in them within that bite, and it doesn't take very long for those baby spiders to...well...burst out. Yes - of the skin, in a grisly and disgusting display of puss and gore, done with a mix of CGI and excellent practical effects.

I do have one complaint though, but it really is only a minor one and it's to be expected in low budget fair like this where they don't exactly have lots of money to spend on background extras, but MAN, New Orleans sure is empty this time of year. There was rarely (if ever) anyone else on the streets of this supposed 'Party Central' city, other then our main group of characters, that at times I was starting to think if maybe what came up out of the ground wasn't albino spiders but really The Ancient Enemy from the 1998 movie-based-on-the-book Phantoms (Screw ya'll, I loved that movie). It would have been a nice touch to see other background people reacting to the invading army of spiders as well.

Apocalyptically-empty city aside though, there were some really great set pieces on display here, such as the tour bus weaving in and out of stand-still traffic in the middle of the city to try to shake off the spiders that were crawling all over it, or the above-mentioned spider chase across the surface of a bayou, or the spiders dragging someone through the thick vegetation of the swampy forest. And I must say, speaking as someone who spent three years in my youth working at a grocery store – I REALLY enjoyed this one scene where the main crew of characters were chased by one of the spiders through a grocery store (which much like the entire city around them was also 100% void of other people). Actually, this movie started really quick with the action and almost never let up on it for the entire run-time, save for maybe 60 seconds here and there in between, and almost every action scene took place within a different set piece so we got quite a nice variety of locations, which in my eyes was a really good creative decision as it prevented the movie from ever getting stale or repetitive. I'm always saying that the worst crime that a B-Movie can commit is to be boring, and this is certainly not guilty of that.

Having not yet been able to view the final half an hour, that's pretty much all I can say on the movie for now. I'm even more anxious then ever to watch the movie when it airs on June 23rd, cause I enjoyed the first hour so much that I'm looking forward to seeing how it all wraps up, especially after having seen some photos online of a couple shots from during that last half hour of the movie that included one of the spiders so big that it was as large as a house, climbing up two skyscrapers, and another shot of it in-battle with some military vehicles – NICE. My below rating is based on just the first hour, so it could easily go up or sink lower (or remain the same), depending on how that last half hour plays out when I watch it on Space. Either way, when Arachnoquake airs in-full on TV look to my Twitter page or Facebook Page to see what my thoughts on that final half hour were, since I don't really see the point in writing up a second review.

Missing 30 minutes aside though (since I can't really speak to that yet), this was a much better killer spider movie then Camel Spiders was, and more along the lines of what I was expecting Camel Spiders to be. If the other upcoming killer spider movies of 2012/2013 (Mega Spider and Spiders 3D) are anything like this, then spider movies still could be in the running to overtake the throne from the sharks as the new Rulers of the killer animal B-Movies! Muah ha ha ha ha!

9/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Camel Spiders (2012)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: New Horizons

RUNTIME: 85 mins

FORMAT: BluRay

PLOT: When a U.S. soldier returns home from Iraq, he accidentally brings with him a cargo of deadly baby Camel Spiders that soon get loose in a small town and start breeding, killing anyone that they come across.

REVIEW: I've gone on many recent rants about the over-abundance of killer shark movies and how I'm glad that it seems 2012 is the Year of the Spider, what with movies like Camel Spiders, Arachnoquake, Mega Spider, and Spiders 3D all announced at various points for this year, I'm thrilled to see B-Movie companies (for the most part) making a shift away from sharks finally. So of course it would go without saying that I would be reviewing each killer spider movie that comes out this year, to help get the word out and do my part to help get those sales figures up so companies continue to move away from sharks for awhile. Of course with that said, it took me longer then I planned to get my hands on Camel Spiders, mostly due to lack of extra-spending funds, but long story short I got the BluRay in the mail the other day and popped it in, really hoping that Roger Corman and Jim Wynorski (using here his well-known pseudonym of Jay Andrews) would not let me down and that I would actually be championing something good.

I have to be honest though and say that after the snazzy camp-filled opening title sequence ended (that directly took the theme music from Dinocroc vs Supergator at that), I soon started getting a tad worried. The film style was a bit below what I would expect from a Corman movie (though really should have seen coming from Jim Wynorski, considering he also did Raptor and Cheerleader Massacre), and there were some questionable creative decisions such as roaring spiders, when these spiders are supposed to be normal camel spiders and not mutated or aliens or some other genetic anomaly, just regular ol' camel spiders in Iraq...that somehow roar and also screech like they're long-lost relatives of the Warrior Arachnids from Starship Troopers. The brutal acting (which admittedly is to be expected), dreadful CGI creature effects (normally to be expected, but the CGI creature effects in Dinocroc vs Supergator, Roger Corman and Jim Wynorski's previous team-up movie, were above-average so I was kind of expecting something of that caliber here as well), embarrassingly bad CGI helicopters, and just the general overall cheapness of the entire production certainly didn't help matters much.

But it didn't take long for me to change my tune somewhat and lighten up a bit. Once the action moves away from the war-torn desert landscapes of Iraq and into middle-of-nowhere small town Nevada, and the spiders finally launch their invasion on the town, something along the way changed. I can honestly say I don't have a clue what it was, it's certainly not anything within the movie itself as all the detractors I mentioned above still stuck around for the most part, and even a few more got added to the mix (which will be discussed below in greater detail), but something within my mind-set changed and I just started to enjoy what was unfolding in front of me – a fun campy little roll in the hay, along the lines of a lower-budget Tremors but with some killer spiders invading the small desert town instead of monster worms.

That's not to say there weren’t some major problems after that point of course; The CG creature effects seemed to get even worse as the movie went on, and the spread of the spiders made no sense at all - Three of the Camel Spiders came over from Iraq, yet within the span of three scenes that appeared to all take place around the same time as one another, there were already two completely separate nests, one out in the desert and another one in a gas station in the middle of town (where the spiders previously were never even near), plus a couple straggler lone spiders here and there as well. The movie also seemed to repeat one of the major (and probably only) issues I had with Sharktopus, and that is constantly introducing random nobody characters that we don't care about nor get to know anything at all about and that have nothing to do with anything else in the movie, and then killing them off in that very same scene that we're first introduced to them. Dinocroc vs Supergator did all that correctly, by having most of those characters have two or three scenes previous to their deaths to better establish them before they bite it (or in this case, 'it' bites them – ha!). Granted, this doesn't do it as often as Sharktopus did, but it still did it enough that it irked me.

Once the actual spider invasion started however, my mind quickly left all that and I began to just enjoy myself a bit more, as a group of the town's residents, along with the Sheriff (played by an almost unrecognizable C. Thomas Howell), a Military Man and Woman that got stranded in that town on their way to a military base, and a couple sketchy land developers get trapped inside this tiny diner with the killer spiders trying to get in – and from this point on, like I mentioned above, it pretty much becomes a lower-budget Tremors in tone, with spiders instead of worms. The fact that it also takes place in a small town in the middle of the desert helps make that connection as well, as does the fact that they attempt to leave town in a crappy truck.

Helping the entertainment factor here for this part of the movie was the nice little bonus of everyone introduced in the previously-mentioned diner scene actually ending up sticking around for awhile and didn't just get offed later in that scene, and all these characters were actually enjoyable to watch, as most were quite quirky in their own unique ways and we also got some decent amount of backstory on each one, which made them pretty likable and I found myself hoping that at least a few of these people might actually live (some of the deaths and survivors may even be a bit unpredictable). Once the movie settled down and focused primarily on this group, that's when my attention was kept best. There is a second group of characters – some college kids played by actors in their late 30's that looked nothing like college kids that get stuck in a house out in the woods, but these characters were neither interesting nor well-acted so I didn't care for those scenes as much. I was actually waiting to see how these two storylines would intersect at the end, but oddly enough they never do. They really are just two completely unrelated stories that have nothing to do with each other in any shape, way, or form, like two mini-movies intercut together. Luckily this sub-plot of the college kids wasn't the main focus and the movie centered more on the other more interesting group the most, as they tried to work together and devise a plan to rid the town of the invading killer camel spiders. It even seemed like the director didn't care much for the college kids part of the story, as he seemed to just drop it from the movie mid-way without any resolution to what even happens to these characters; at one point we cut away from them to focus back on the main group and then we just never do go back to those characters again - it was actually pretty weird and made me wonder what was even the point in having those scenes in the movie to begin with.

Another really disappointing aspect in that otherwise-good second half of the movie was that there wasn't really any in-town mayhem like I was wanting to see. The main diner group didn't take long to get away from the diner and out into a military bunker just outside of town where they holed up for the remainder of the movie, and the other story in the movie took place in a house in the middle of the forest which left next to no scenes actually taking place inside the town itself, which I was looking forward to seeing, especially after that one creepy scene in the gas station near the beginning with the store workers strung up in the giant spider web. It was a pretty glaring missed opportunity in my eyes to not have the central action taking place within the town itself.

Speaking of those spiders though, I have to say that really enjoyed that the killer animals here were just regular animals: No genetic mutation or science experiment or alien creature or anything of that style, just 100% regular blood-thirsty animals. Of course they're in no way accurate to the real-life version of these spiders apart from their visual design, but hey – this is a Roger Corman monster movie so I was never expecting that anyway. Besides, less accurate normally means more cheese, and that's perfectly fine by me! For instance, there's a couple really hilarious Facehugger-inspired moments in the movie, as well as some gory limbs being ripped off of dead bodies, that we would have never gotten if they tried to go with a realistic portrayal.

All in all, it may not have been as good as I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't outright terrible either. If I had to place it on a chart with the other recent Corman/Wynorski team-up movies, I'd say it was not as good as Dinocroc vs Supergator (my personal favorite by this partnership) or Sharktopus, but more along the same level as Dinoshark – possibly a peg or two below it, as Dinoshark at least had some decent creature effects while Camel Spiders' were horrid and this also came with a pretty large missed opportunity and pointless side-plot. But while this one may be the weakest movie yet from the recent Corman/Wynorski team-ups, there's still enough within it to keep a B-Movie fan such as myself at least moderately entertained, thanks in large to the likable main characters of the primary group, some hilarious spider kills, and a few fun action beats.

I wouldn't tell you to rush out and buy it right now, but if you happen to come across it while browsing at the store and it's at a cheap price, or it shows up on Netflix or TV, then I'd say it's worth at least a one-time watch – you could certainly do a lot worse out there.

5/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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