ARACHNOPHOBIA
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: This film has a plot that has been done
to death in the past and occasionally better. Still, my
spider sense tells me that it may do well with a new
generation of viewers who may not be so familiar with its
predecessors. Rating: +1.
One tends to expect new ideas in films from Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment. And with Disney Enterprises starting a new film branch, Hollywood Pictures, you would expect something fairly original to inaugurate the new label. That makes it all the more puzzling that this collaboration between Amblin Entertainment and Hollywood Pictures would be a plot that was already old when Spielberg made CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND . There have already been so many "Invasion of the Killer Vermin" films that one more is no novelty. In other films we have seen people threatened by infestations of spiders, ants, birds, slugs, rats, bats, feral dogs, bears, even frogs. (Don't ask me how you make a threat out of a frog; I saw the film and still don't know. You have to be pretty desperate for phobias to make a film about killer frogs!) However well a new film of this type is done, and ARACHNOPHOBIA was nicely executed, there is not much new you can put into a film about a small town threatened by an infestation of deadly spiders.
The idea of the film is that there is a prehistoric breed of spider-- one with a very different social structure from what modern spiders have-- living isolated in the jungles of Venezuela. This breed of spider has a "king" and a bunch of drones, much like bees have with a queen and drones. That is something of a stretch since spiders are much more closely related to sea crustaceans than they are to insects. A plot device that could have been devised by Rube Goldberg takes the king spider and drops him (quite literally) into the backyard of a new doctor in a small California town. Dr.~Ross Jennings (played by Jeff Daniels) has a bugaboo about spiders and the fact that he has a barn full of them is only one of the many problems he is facing as a result of moving to Canaima, California, from San Francisco. There are, in fact, many elements of the plot that executive producer Steven Spielberg might have found extremely familiar. We have one lone man, who is not really accepted by his town, who has to convince disbelieving officials that they have a problem. He has his own phobias to overcome, but the love of his family, charmingly portrayed, convinces him that he has to overcome his fears and see that the problem gets solved. Luckily he has a knowledgeable expert he can call on to help him out and to explain to the audience how scary the situation really is. Surely all this must have rung a bell somewhere in Spielberg's memory.
What is nice about the film is that it takes the time to develop characters so that the audience has some understanding and empathy invested in them. That too makes the film seem as if it were really a 1970s film. The viewer gets to know the people who are threatened by the spiders--not as well as you get to know the Brodie family in JAWS, but far better than you know anyone in most current horror films. Nobody follows the new popular formula of being introduced and making vacuous or stereotyped conversation, then being quickly dispatched to nobody's regret.
The effects work usually is believable, though occasionally a spider just does not scramble right. A fair number of live spiders were also sued and unfortunately the film bears no endorsement of the filming practices by any humane society.
ARACHNOPHOBIA is entertaining and has some genuinely creepy moments, but lacks anything that really distinguishes it from other films with very similar plots and approaches. I give it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzx!leeper
leeper@mtgzx.att.com
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
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