After yesterday’s 70’s snooze-fest (seriously what is with that decade and boring movies), I figured it was time to spice things up. We’re still dealing with animals killing people but now these bastards are huge and there are guns and tanks and shit. Wooo! It’s time for the generic, off-brand Michael Bay to bring us some mutant spiders that have only one weakness: being attacked by a member of the main cast.

So Spiders also known as Spiders 3D (and boy do I ever wish I had watched this in 3D), follows another unlikely hero. This time it’s a recently divorced transit supervisor that gets to take center stage. Along with him is, of course, his wife which happens to be a health inspector in what I can only assume is an homage to Slugs. A piece of an old Communist Russian satellite falls to earth and crashes into the New York subway where a spider lays some eggs in a dude and then more spider hatch and the get real big. Also there is a queen spider that is super, mega, ultra big.

We find out the reason the spiders are all huged up is because Russians found what is more than likely some alien thing and they decided “fuck it” and started splicing it with whatever they could find and the spiders were the only ones to really take to the whole alien DNA thing. Also they had to spliced while in space because of reasons. Now the U.S. government is working with the Russian scientist that was originally behind the whole experiment so they can get a queen spider because of different but still vague reasons. Everyone (no one) is surprised when they can’t seem to contain the giant spiders.

Like I said in the beginning, the spiders in this are literally unkillable unless attacked by one of the main characters. Like, the main guy kills one with a fork lift while going upwards of 6 miles per hour but the soldier will empty an entire automatic rifle’s worth of bullets into one and it will give less than or equal to 0 fucks. The giant house-sized queen spider has a couple of helicopters shooting mini-guns into it for what probably amounted to several minutes worth of screen time alone, not to mention in-universe time, but main character can stab it in the mouth with a pipe and it’s all “Oh no! I am undone! How can I attack this tiny food-morsel when it has such advanced weaponry.”

Anyway, the everything in this movie was…mediocre to satisfactory. Acting by everyone was better than community theater but less than Ben Affleck. The writing was better than a 70s movie but worse than an 80s movie. The effects were better than a Syfy Original but worse than a computer graphics major’s senior project. All things considered, this was a movie that was entirely watchable in spite of the fact that it was pretty much just CGI spikey-spiders and explosions. Or probably because of that, actually.

I’d give the movie a 2.5 out of 5 and that might be slightly higher than it deserves but there were no shots of characters just walking around or driving for minutes on end so I’m feeling particularly generous. Fucking Barracuda.

Favorite thing in the movie: The Russian scientist that would occasionally forget his accent and slip into something closer to German.

Least favorite thing: A distinct lack of David Arquette (haHA! Eight Legged Freaks!)