ARACHNID

You know you’re not going to be particularly challenged by a film which wears its heart so much on its sleeve, but - even bearing in mind that Arachnid pretty much declares itself an old fashioned ‘B’ movie - I was rather disappointed with the results. Our story begins with a fighter pilot somewhere over the South Pacific, about to scramble what looks like some bad offshore CGI; he crashes into whatever-the-hell-it-is which is causing a waterspout and has to make judicious use of his ejector seat to avoid a fatal collision. The bad day continues when he parachute-lands on a nearby island, just in time to see the vision of an alien humanoid, which seems to be warning him about - oh no! There’s a giant spider behind him/her/it! This big fucking arachnid then turns his attentions to the ill-fated pilot…

Skipping forward in time, we find ourselves at a hospital where Lara Croft, sorry, Laura Mercer, a lady pilot who’s had to make it in a man’s world, damnit (played by Alex Reid) is about to be given a job flying an unlikely band of medics, guides, a former Marine called Valentine (Chris Potter), some (what I presume are) soldiers and an expert on arachnids/Ted Raimi lookalike (Ravil Isyanov). They crash before they can land safely on the island which has been causing all the trouble, obviously, thanks to some sort of ‘natural electromagnetic energy’ - and then decide to head into the neighbouring jungle to continue their investigation, because no harm ever came of that sort of thing.

Once they start along this path they are beset on all sides by nasty insects, holes in the ground, never-before-seen species and, you’ll be surprised to discover, big fucking spiders as well. Aside from a moment from Mercer which explains that there beats a woman’s heart behind that surly exterior, the merry band is picked off in a manner of ways.

It’s not that Arachnid is terrible. It’s just spectacularly unchallenging, and is thus unexciting; all that occurs here is tried and tested in almost every way. I could forgive the way the screenplay plucks plot elements out of Alien/Aliens because so many of the original B movies fed off one another, but Arachnid just sort of drifted by, not making a mark of its own. There was, granted, a lot more bloody splatter here than you might have seen in, say, Corman’s old creature features. However, back when Corman et al was making these types of pictures, there wasn’t the common currency that we have now. We know all about those old movies today, we know their flaws and their characteristics, so when making them in the modern era filmmakers ought to give them just that little something extra -ought to ramp it up a little, like in the uber-self-aware and very funny creature hybrid movies we’re getting now. That goes for the performances too, as the male and female leads here were rather unprepossessing.

I will say that some care and attention from the SFX department had obviously gone into the critters themselves - with one neat, novel sequence towards the close of the film that I did really like. There just wasn’t quite enough of anything to really get Arachnid off the ground. Like Faust, this is one of the weaker films in the Fantastic Factory box-set.

If you disagree with me and you simply have to know more about the film, then, as is customary, there are lots of special features here. Brian Yuzna is back to talk about the making of the film in a documentary, ‘King of the Spiders: Brian Yuzna Remembers Arachnid’; there’s a doc on the work of the creature effects designer Steve Johnson, plus a trailer, and Arrow’s great fold-out artwork, a collector’s booklet where horror writer Calum Waddell interviews director Jack Sholder.

Review by Keri O’Shea