As requested by Outposter KT, and to coincide with the Winter Olympics, the next movie in Last Movie Outpost’s giant spider odyssey is Ice Spiders.
Sadly, this is not the long-awaited sequel to Vanilla Ice’s Cool as Ice. Ice Spiders is set at a ski resort, hence the name I think, but I’ll get into that later.
Don’t be fooled by the movie’s poster, because they took some serious liberties with the spiders’ proportions. The appropriate adjective for the Ice Spiders is family sized, or Stage 3, in accordance with my Sizeable Spider Sizing System:
- Stage 1: Regular sized (still within the size range of spiders found in nature)
- Stage 2: Plus-sized (bigger than any natural spider but smaller than a person)
- Stage 3: Family sized (armchair/Volkswagen Beetle size)
- Stage 4: Big Daddy/Yo Momma sized (parade float size)
- Stage 5: Big Ass (ludicrous size)
We see the first Ice Spider in the opening scene. Two hunters on a snowy mountain are hunting deer (with a bow and arrow for some reason). They spot an Ice Spider, who is also stalking the deer.
Without missing a beat, the hunter shrugs and says ‘we came for a trophy’ and goes after the spider instead. I admire his level of flexibility and lack of curiosity.
Unfortunately, a bow and arrow is not the best weapon for hunting giant spiders. Spiders are mostly comprised of legs and you’d need to be an accurate shot to hit its centre mass. When the first arrow goes wide, the hunters become the hunted. After an incredibly uninspiring chase with no tension at all, the spider kills them (spoiler).
Vanilla Ice Ice Spiders
We are then introduced to the main spider food protagonists. A young ski team arrives at a ski resort to train for the Olympics. The main dude is a guy called Chad who is cocky (who would have known from that name?).
They meet a ski instructor played by Patrick Muldoon from Starship Troopers. He’s the guy who sleazes onto Denise Richards at every available opportunity and constantly belittles her boyfriend (which she falls for) but then gets his brains sucked out by a giant bug.
In Ice Spiders, he plays Dash Dashiell. It evokes speed in the same way Chad’s name implies that he’s a bit of a dick. Nominative determinism as a shortcut to characterisation. I like it.
As his name suggests, Dash is fast on skis and this might be an important plot point later. Years earlier, he broke his leg in the Olympic trials and never made the team. But the ski team still remember him, saying he was ‘awesome in the 90s.’ I guess they saw Starship Troopers too.
Ice Cube Spiders
Dash sleazes onto Vanessa Williams’ Dr Sommers at every available opportunity. He offers to show her his scars but she’s not interested. She works at the research lab at the top of the mountain and is totally complicit in the breeding of the giant spiders who have now escaped and are heading down the mountain towards the ski resort.
It’s weird because for the whole movie she acts like some sort of hero uncovering a conspiracy, when she was actively involved the whole time. She even admits it to Dash.
Turns out they confiscated some prehistoric spider remains found in Afghanistan and spliced its DNA with modern spiders. Their aim was to manufacture spider silk to make bullet proof armour (they are really the good guys).
To make the operation viable they needed lots of silk, so they scaled up production by feeding the spiders hormones, high calorie food and steroids to make them family sized. All of this was completely fine with her.
But then her Professor boss ‘accelerated their growth factors’ (i.e, grew them a bit bigger). This was a red line for Doc Summers. All of a sudden, she’s the morality police.
She sums up her feelings with the best line in the movie:
We were already playing God, there was no need to go any further.’
At least she’s not greedy.
Ice-T Spiders
After killing most of the staff at the lab and a few others on the way down the mountain, the Ice Spiders finally arrive at the ski resort. There are six in total, each one a different spider breed.
Say hello to a family sized black widow and a family sized spitting spider. Doc Summers makes a big deal about the third one. She calls him Dorian and apparently he is 95% Jumping Spider. Cool, except for the fact that we never see him jump (well, it might have happened once but I blinked and missed it).
The spiders look different to each other but seem to act in a similar manner, which is a shame because the concept of giving them individual characteristics is a solid one. I don’t know what species the other three spiders were; they never tell us and I’m not a spider expert (I’m only a spider movie expert, please remember that). One was probably a tarantula, let’s face it.
One thing I noticed is how fond the spiders were at pulling people’s legs off. When Doc Summers finds the bodies at the lab, their legs are separated from their bodies. She finds one person still alive encased in a cocoon and he also has no legs. Just in case we didn’t get it, he informs her, twice, that the spider ‘took his legs.’
Soon after, Dash finds a dead elk and guess what? No legs. I think there is some subliminal revenge going on here. Spiders, after watching generations of their ancestors have their legs pulled off by bratty little kids, finally find that they are sizeable enough to get their own back. You’ve got to admire that level of pettiness.
Ice Spice Spiders (another rapper, not a lost Spice Girl)
The Ice Spiders finally make it to the ski resort. One guy on a ski lift sees a giant spider on top of a pylon. I always hate going over pylons on chair lifts, even when there aren’t any giant spiders on it, so I can relate to the fear he must have felt.
To avoid the spider, he jumps off the ski lift and takes his chances with a fifty-foot fall. Fair enough. I once read that it’s better to regret something you did than something you didn’t do. Write that down.
Anyway, he lands on some rocks, breaks his leg so the bone is sticking out and the spider eats him. Probably pulls his legs off as well. So much for inspirational quotes.
We get a pretty good scene of the spiders taking out the skiers as they ski down the slope. Most monster movies have this type of scene: that moment when the threat is finally out in the open and all bets are off.
One of the ski team sees the spider and says it’s ‘like in the movies with bugs and radiation and stuff.’ Yeah, that ‘stuff’ is called toxic waste, you noob. But still, this is the first giant spider movie I have seen that is set in a universe where giant spider movies exist.
Ice Berg Billion spiders
Chad and the ski team abandon everyone else and escape in a school bus. They crash when a giant black widow hops on the bonnet, looking like the kind of garish hood ornament that only Vin Diesel would think is cool.
Clearly Chad has never seen a movie where the antagonist jumps on the bonnet before, like Lavalantula. All he had to do was hit the brakes. The spider’s forward momentum would fling it off the bonnet, then he could hit the gas again and run it over. Instead, he panics and they crash. They manage to trap one of the black widow’s legs in the bus door until soldiers from the lab turn up and capture it.
The other survivors barricade themselves in the ski lodge until a giant spider comes down the chimney in another example of the ‘worst Christmas ever’ trope. Dash and Doc Summers fight it off with a series of weapons that get progressively sillier.
They hit it with an Axe, then a fire extinguisher, then spray it with insect spray. Finally, Dash pulls a mounted elk head off the wall and stabs the spider to death with its antlers. Awesome!
Then he ruins it by looking up at Doc Summers and saying ‘nice rack’ (as in the antlers, but also breasts). No matter what movie he’s in, this guy’s still a goddamned sex pest.
Fresh Kid Ice Spiders
At the end, Dash lures the last three spiders to the soldiers (I forgot to mention that he ran over another one with a snowmobile earlier in the film). He dashes really fast down the mountain and the soldiers trap the spiders with nets. However, that is not good enough for Dash. He wants them dead.
Luckily, he had the foresight to ask someone to man the ‘avalanche cannon.’ I’m just going to assume that’s a real thing. Dash gives the signal; the guy fires the cannon and blows up the spiders.
Not to be nit-picky, but a spot of foreshadowing wouldn’t have gone amiss with regards to this avalanche cannon. Couldn’t they have introduced it earlier in the movie and explained what it does? I mean…I assume it causes avalanches but I’m not sure why you would do that. A preventative measure, I’m guessing.
It’s a great idea, but a few lines of dialogue would have avoided the deus ex machina, created some tension (you just know it’ll be used later to kill some giant spiders!) and would also help explain what the hell an avalanche cannon is for those of us who are too poor to frequent ski resorts.
One of the giant spiders survives just long enough to kill the evil Professor. Then a bunch of other soldiers arrive and cart off the sole surviving spider (the black widow), setting up a sequel that doesn’t exist.
I’m not sure who these new soldiers were but they were dressed in black, so you know they mean business. Black ops or some shit. Get Seagal for the sequel.
Just-Ice Spiders
Overall, the basic elements are there for a decent movie, but it is executed as poorly as you expect. The vast majority of the cast survives, which I found odd. Four members of the ski team, the hotel manager and his assistant, a bunch of soldiers, Doc and Dash. Most of these should end up as spider fodder but none of them get it.
Also, Stephen J. Cannell is in Ice Spiders. I knew I recognised him from somewhere.
Many monster movies make the mistake of killing off too many characters but this one makes the opposite mistake. Balance, guys. You need balance.
At the end, Doc Summers asks Dash out to dinner and he says ‘only if you let me show you my scars,’ which is the second time he says that. Check out the look on his face. He’s serious.
It doesn’t seem to deter her, though. Good luck, Doc. I think you’re going to need it.
P.S: a note on the title. Ice Spiders. When the Doc is explaining the spiders’ origins, Dash jumps to conclusions and says ‘so you thawed these things out from a Himalayan glacier?’ She looks at him like he’s a moron and says no, that they just extracted their DNA from the fossils.
However, the title Ice Spiders would make more sense if Dash was correct, because they would have been thawed out from ice. The movie makes a big deal out of the fact that the spiders shouldn’t be able to survive the cold, but they do, so I suppose Ice Spiders is an earned title rather than a product of their origin.
It’s like how rappers call themselves ‘Ice something’ because they are really cool. Just thought I would clear that up.
Rating: 4 spider legs out of 8
