I watched this piece of crap for three reasons:
- It was free on Youtube.
- It features giant spiders, and apparently that’s what I do.
- It has the best title I’ve seen in a while.
At first I thought Arachnicide meant that the spiders would be killing lots of people, but then I realised that the suffix ‘-cide’ refers to whoever is on the receiving end. Arachnicide is the killing of the spiders. It makes them sound like the victims, so maybe it’s not such a hot title after all.
It is a real word, though. When I looked it up, I found over 300 -cide words, including fratricide (killing your brother), tyrannicide (killing a dinosaur I guess, I don’t know) and decide (killing Ant’s long-time television presenting partner).
Arachnicide, as well as being a word that describes the unlawful killing of spiders, is a badly dubbed Italian giant spider movie with crappy voiceover artists trying unsuccessfully to sound like tough-guy soldiers. One of them speaks like Christian Bale in full Batman mode.
These soldiers are assigned by ‘military intelligence’ to a ‘multinational task force’ to take on a ‘worldwide drug ring.’ This drug ring operates multiple sites where they grow genetically modified drugs in underground facilities.
The chief bad guy explains it all near the start of the movie with a two-minute video that begins in Ancient Mesopotamia, covers the entire history of agriculture with questionable historical accuracy and ends with the revelation that they have cracked the technology to grow larger plants.
Supply And Demand
They could have used this technology to solve world hunger, but instead they grow hella cocaine leaves! I don’t mean to sound boring, but why not grow legal crops? It’s not as sexy, but they will still get rich, with the added benefit of not having a multinational task force on their ass. Seems like less hassle.
What about saffron? It’s worth more than gold. Or would growing more of it reduce its value? Depends how much they grow, I suppose. Maybe they could control how much they produce to keep prices artificially high like those oil cartels, which is legal somehow.
Sorry, I’ve gone down the supply and demand rabbit hole. I bet you didn’t expect that in a giant spider movie review.
One final point about the growth technology: it also works on creatures.
It’s not clear who or what this promotional video is for, aside from delivering a clunky exposition dump. It’s the sort of advert you might see on Bloomberg to attract investors and is presented to a bunch of smirking suits around a board table. It appears to be little more than a self-congratulating puff-piece and is incredibly incriminating as far as evidence against them goes.
There’s A Mole!
We then find out that one of the board members, Lieutenant Kolman, is a spy. He is a Government agent who has somehow managed to get a seat at this worldwide drug ring’s top table. But get this: they are onto him. They feed him the location of one of the underground labs in Albania as a trap that may or may not involve spiders of unusual size (S.O.U.S).
That’s all well and good, but it makes the playing of the Bloomberg video even more bewildering. They literally explain their entire masterplan and confess their crimes when they know they are being recorded.
Now that I think about it, why doesn’t the task force just swoop in and round up the bosses right there and then, seeing as they are all together in a known location, with enough evidence against them to put them away forever? No point travelling all the way to Albania to take out a single drug factory. Cut the head off the snake, I say.
But nooooo. Instead, Kolman brings the duff information to the task force and they launch a mission to take out the underground lab.
Apart from Kolman, the only other notable character in Arachnicide is Dr Sarti, an expert in microbiology and the token female. Kolman and the rest of the soldiers are mean to her for having the audacity to be a woman.
I realise that something might have gotten lost in the dub, but it is the absolute worst dialogue I have ever heard. At one point, Kolman asks her who she had to kill to get ahead in her career, but surely he meant something else.
Industrial Level Time Wasting
Three things I like about this movie:
- Once the clunky exposition is out of the way, the plot is simple but decent. The drug dealers fill the lab with giant spiders to ambush them. The rest of the movie is a fight to escape.
- The spider effects, once we finally get to them, aren’t terrible. Much better than I was expecting anyway.
- A legendary spider death near the end.
What I didn’t like about this movie is everything else. In fact, it can barely be considered a movie at all. At most, it is 45-50 minutes of material stretched out to an hour-and-a-half via the miracle of time wasting.
They REALLY fuck about. Want some examples? Well too bad, here they come.
The opening prologue shows the task force taking out two separate groups of bad guys without any context, so you don’t know what the hell is going on, and it lasts 11.5 minutes. This includes a 1.5 minute opening shot of a satellite orbiting the Earth that makes you think the spiders are going to have an alien origin, only for it to mean nothing.
At the half-hour mark, the task force gets ready to leave for their mission. Cue montage. Then another one. Then a third. It takes 15 minutes of screen time for them to arrive at the lab, which negates the point of a montage. I thought I was watching their helicopter trip from Italy to Albania in real time like an episode of 24.
Spider Time (Finally)
At this point, the Colonel in charge of the task force, who is directing operations from their base, decides to check his mail. He opens a package containing a DVD from the drug ring CEO (this guy just loves making videos).
On the DVD, he boasts about the trap he set for them and advises the marines to withdraw, despite being the one who lured them there in the first place. He completely undermines his own trap by telling them it’s a trap.
But it works out okay because the team are already in the lab and it’s too late to turn back. The spiders have arrived. After 53 minutes.
At first, our many-limbed friends are regular sized, but for reasons unknown they charge up like He-Man touching an electric fence and grow to family sized proportions.
We then get FIVE whole minutes of soldiers creeping around in the dark while we hear occasional scuttling sounds.
When the spiders recover from their crippling shyness and reveal themselves, we finally get some action: machine guns shooting followed by spiders exploding, more shooting, spiders exploding, shooting, spider explode, shoot, explode, shoo, splode, bang, pop.
The Arachnicide has begun. This continues for 12 minutes, which is a lot in screen time, believe me. I was there. No reloading required. An editor, however, is definitely required.
Atrax Robustus
Quick aside: the marines’ magical space satellite not only manages to bring up live images of the firefight, it also contains a database of all known spider species (well why wouldn’t it?).
The satellite identifies the spiders, from space, as Atrax Robustus. I thought that was Russell Crowe’s character from Gladiator, but it is in fact the Latin name for the Sydney Funnel Web spider. It’s Australian, so you know it’s badass. In real life, it is the most venomous spider in the world. However, the Black Widow and I demand a second opinion.
The spiders kill the soldiers inside the building, thus rendering their valiant efforts over the last 12 minutes completely pointless. The whole complex explodes but don’t worry, the spiders are fine, they escape.
The remaining Government agents, including Kolman and Dr Sarti (I’m trying really hard not to write Sharti), are outside. The spiders give chase while continuing to undergo random growth spurts.
One funny death involves an agent being dragged into a cave. Kolman and Sharti abandon him, saying ‘it’s too late for him now,’ only for him to immediately fight off the spider.
He could have walked straight back out of the cave, but for some reason he decides to get curious and walks further into it, only to look surprised when the spider reappears.
What was he expecting, Batman? Another spider cuts off his escape route and he has no option but to blow himself up, the idiot.
Tell Them Of This Day
But the award for best death in Arachnicide goes to one of the spiders (sorry, I didn’t catch his name). Just as Kolman and Sharting are about to get eaten, the spider stops in its tracks, keels over and dies. The dubbed dialogue that follows goes like this:
‘The mutation has accelerated all metabolic processes, not just the growth but the ageing.’
‘You mean it…died of old age?’
‘I guess it’s possible.’
‘Crazy.’
That’s right, folks. The spider dies of old age. The next time someone says there’s nothing new under the sun, tell them of this day.
Kolman and Sharting escape on a helicopter and have a final bonding moment and I don’t care, I’m just glad it’s over. Arachnicide is the worst giant spider movie I have ever seen, and that’s a high bar to clear. Or is it low bar? I don’t know. It could be a bad metaphor. I should change it.
I was left wondering where the rest of the movie went. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it finished, but structurally Arachnicide is two acts stretched out to feature length, and no third act at all.
By the end of the movie, the drug ring is still active. No sites have been shut down and none of the bad guys have been brought to justice. Were they saving it for the sequel? Hoping to start a franchise?
Everything has to be a franchise these days. No wait, that’s small-time thinking. What they need is a Universe, like my proposed Spider Cinematic Universe Multiverse (SCUM).
As well as the inevitable sequels they can film spin-offs and television shows such as Arachnicide: Sharting Begins and Kolman, Origins: the Rise of Misogyny and How Not to Talk to Women.
I’d watch it because it’s got giant spiders. Apparently, that’s what I do.
Rating: 1 spider leg out of 8.
