ARACHNOPHOBIA
A film review by Chris Hillery
Copyright 1990 Chris Hillery
*Do not* see this movie if you actually are affected by arachnophobia (fear of spiders, in case you didn't know). The friend I saw this with is a severe arachnophobe, and he practically broke the poor chair he was sitting in by flying out of it so hard. If you can guess from this that this is a scary movie, well, it is. While it is marketing itself as a "Thrill-omedy," this movie has much more thrill than "omedy," which is fine if that's what you're prepared for. It also spends a good deal of its time in extreme close-ups of spiders in action, hence the opening warning.
Basic plot synopsis: a large (!) and ill-tempered South American spider (a new species no one knew of previously, natch) hitches a ride to a small backwoods town in the coffin of a photographer whom it had killed in the jungle. It escapes into the local woods, where it mates with a local spider and creates a whole bunch of deadly toxic mean-spirited little spiders, which take off to terrorize the town.
Most of this movie centers around the new local doctor's struggle to get people to believe that the deaths of several people were not cardiac arrests brought about by his own negligence, as the old doctor would have it, but are in fact attributable to these spiders. Once real evidence is found for this, a regional spider expert is brought in, and the ground is laid for a plan to rid the town of the threat, leading (of course) to a grand confrontation between the grandaddy spider and the doctor, who (of course) has a serious fear of spiders due (of course) to an incident in his infancy.
You might have notice that this summary makes no mention of the role of the exterminator, played by John Goodman, who is in all the commercials. This is because, unfortunately, he has very little screen time and is not at all important to the plot or development. This is a real shame, and a great waste of both a good character and a good actor. The scenes involving Goodman are uniformly quite funny, as his role as the down-n-dirty and rather thick-headed exterminator is ideal for him and played to the hilt. If this movie had been, as I suspected, Goodman's first real starring role and centered on his battle against the spiders with his spray-gun, this could have been a truly hysterical movie, while still being a thriller.
Luckily, the movie isn't a total loss without this; indeed,it's a reasonably enjoyable flick with many good scares (plenty of spiders flying around) and quite a few laughs along the way. It's pretty formulaic, beyond its unique plot device, but still well-done; the plot and tension build nicely if a bit slowly, and the climax is quite, well, climactic. All the important characters are pretty well fleshed out. The plot is sensible and has several sub-plots which interact quite nicely. And so on.
All in all, this is a "solid" movie. It could have been much better had it been, as it is being marketed as, a movie starring John Goodman as the back- woods exterminator on a mission to save the town; that could have been made into a truly funny, cornball movie based on a thriller, in the same style as the classic GHOSTBUSTERS (the first one, of course). However, when you realize that it isn't that movie, you can enjoy what it is. Check it out; it's worth a look.
Ratings IMHO, 0-100 scale: Compare to:
ARACHNOPHOBIA GHOSTBUSTERS (well... they were
Plot: 80 Plot: 95 marketed about the
Thrills: 85 Thrills: 30 same...)
Comedy: 65 Comedy: 100
Advertising: 5 :) Advertising: N/A
Overall: 77 [B-,2 3/4 stars] Overall: 99 [A+, 4 stars]
Please note that the "Overall" ratings above are in no way intended to be a summation of the previous ratings, but instead a true rating of how good the movie was taken as a whole. Four categories are not enough to rate all aspects of a movie, neither should all four be weighted equally. For instance, the rating for Thrills in GHOSTBUSTERS above was quite low, but that wasn't what the movie was intended to be about; whereas Thrills were central to ARACHNO- PHOBIA. The reason I chose to compare it to GHOSTBUSTERS was, as I said, that ARACHNOPHOBIA was marketed to appear to be a similar type film. -- -- Ceej (= ceej@pawl.rpi.edu gmry@mts.rpi.edu aka Chris Hillery
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews