Art & Entertainment

Eight Legged Freaks

Entirely faithful to its genre—that of the unpretentious, clunky monster movies. The plot is predictable, the characters are never fleshed out...

Advertisement

Eight Legged Freaks
info_icon
Starring:
Director:
Rating:
info_icon
info_icon

Here's a title that's so plainly hideous. With a name like Eight Legged Freaks, a film can hardly inspire you to go scurrying to an expensive multiplex near you. On second thoughts, perhaps, it's not so off the mark. What can you do if the movie IS about bizarre, giant spiders? An accidental toxic chemical spill causes hundreds of little spiders to mutate into humungous arachnids. It's left to a mining engineer (Arquette) and the sheriff (Wuhrer) to oust the ogres from their Arizona town.

Eight Legged Freaks is entirely faithful to its genre—that of the unpretentious, clunky monster movies. The plot is predictable, the characters are never fleshed out. There's no call for great histrionics nor any star faces. In fact, the star of the show is the sfx that helps simulate the fantastic creatures and create a sense of fear, "a fear that makes the heart beat so fast that you wouldn't even find time to breathe". Maybe I am a hard-boiled cynic. I breathed rather easily through the 99 minutes. The creepy crawlies make one grimace with disgust rather than scream with dread. The sight of hundreds of lousy insects coming out of a man's mouth is more unpleasant than scary. In fact, at times, the beasts look silly and amusing. And the images of huge spiders chasing mobikes or wrapping humans into a cocoon is the stuff for thrilling fantasies, and definitely not spooky nightmares. Perhaps, the biggest reason why horror gets mitigated in Eight... is because it's so clearly spelt out. Hitchcock's The Birds had a similar theme of a town witnessing a mass attack by menacing birds. But the evil was more forbidding because it remained implicit.

Advertisement

In the midst of all the monster mayhem, Eight... also manages to unwittingly unleash some typical American cliches and concerns—a mom worried about the "media-induced delusional paranoia" in her son; a kid who, obviously, is the wisest of them all; teenagers with their hormones on an overdrive; a safe home and society turned insecure by the weird "others". The final battle is played out in the ultimate symbol of Americana, a shopping mall. While the terrified people pick up every object, even perfume bottles, as a potential weapon against the enemy, the sale credo hangs jokingly in the background: Everything Must Go. You go for the film only if you are a die-hard monster fan and stay miles away if you love animals. The most abhorrent images of Eight... are those of the sweet and cute pets—the pups, the cats, the parrots, even the ostriches falling prey to the brutes. These eight-legged freaks certainly don't share a good cause with PETA or Maneka.

Advertisement

Tags

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement