Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 3 (Arachnophobia)

Okay, let's move away from ghosts and busting them and talk about... spiders? Good lord, that's half of you running for the hills then. I don't fear spiders, but I wouldn't want them crawling on me or anything either. Still, this movie lingers on them in a lot of ways and is also doing some neat stuff structurally. It's executive produced by Steven Spielberg so some part of me is connecting it to other films with his name on them. Maybe that won't bear much fruit, but it'll give me something to talk about. The lush opening in South America with helicopters and waterfall vistas and treks through the jungle led by indigenous guides gives me Raiders Of The Lost Ark vibes, for instance. We don't stay here long, though, as we quickly get spiders biting a guy and killing him before hitching a ride with his body back to the USA.

From there the movie is very low-key but also quite effective. In broad strokes to compare it to Spielberg again, this feels like Gremlins with spiders. A colorful cast of humble small-town folks encountering a strange thing from very far away which reproduces to cause havoc and death throughout the whole town. Of course, Gremlins also had Joe Dante on hand to give things a dissonant tone of wackiness along with the dark horror element. Arachnophobia lacks that, but one wonders what kind of movie that would make. No, this is a played straight movie with spiders biting people and making them go "argh" before falling over dead, and then cutting to their funerals. The editing's brilliant and efficient in that regard, almost taking the restraint from early Friday the 13th. Yeah, they got bit, you don't really need a scene of them choking to death and going "argh", you get the idea.

At the center of it all is Jeff Daniels, the titular arachnophobe who has to overcome his fears to save the town. I kind of like the subversion that he and his son are spooked by spiders, while the women in the family are undisturbed, at least until the spooky killer spiders enter the picture. It was a strange experience, watching this movie. It was very low-key played straight, and honestly not particularly impressing me but not infuriating me either. There are only so many ways to play the tension of "oh no someone is going to get bit by a killer spider", after all. Then the climax happens, with Daniels' home overrun by fucking spiders as they crawl everywhere out of the woodwork as the family tries to escape, leading to Daniels falling off the second floor and through the floor into the basement, with a final encounter with the main spiders and their big baby nest egg. This is good shit! This is genuinely great and gripping tense stuff and it all happens in a cramped wine cellar with some spider puppets and a beat-up Jeff Daniels! 

I guess my main problem is, I wish that the second act of the movie had the energy of the climax, and that the climax had an energy level even higher. The movie's so low-key that it shifts too late and I wanted to see it shift into overdrive. That, and I wanted to see more of John Goodman. He's in this as an exterminator and his every scene is wonderful, as John Goodman so often is. He's not sinister like he would later be in 10 Cloverfield Lane, but he plays shit just right and I would have loved to see more of him. As it stands, the spider movie is fine. Don't even think of looking at it if you actually have arachnophobia, though, because it will fuck you up. Speaking of getting fucked up, let's throw caution to the wind and throw on a film which fucked me up the first time I saw it...