I’m not sure if I’ve stated this clearly up until now, so I’ll just come out with it. I fucking hate spiders. Pardon my French.
Anything bigger than a money spider is creepy as hell and deserves to die. None of that ‘catching it in a glass with a newspaper underneath and taking it outside’ crap.
My mother once caught a spider in such a manner and was in the process of awkwardly escorting it from the house when it escaped and made a beeline for me. I was young, and I screamed.
Throughout my childhood it was drummed into me that you should never kill spiders. They are good for the environment somehow. They kill flies. It’s bad luck.
This meant that every time a spider turned up at our house uninvited, evicting it turned into a traumatic ordeal. Just step on the fucker! Hit it with a shoe! Assert dominance! But noooooo.
I realise now that our passive approach wasn’t humane. It was weak. So when I say I hate spiders, I mean I am scared of them. Arachnophobic. A big baby.
I assert myself much more these days. It was truly liberating when I grew up and realised I could be the scourge of all spiders. However, my arachnophobia is so deeply rooted that when I step on one now, I don’t do it because I’m a chest-beating apex predator. I do it because I’m scared, and that’s sad (mostly I get my wife to kill them anyway, which is way cooler).
Nightmare fuel?
Hopefully I will get to the point in a minute. Ah yes, the point is that spiders are scary. So why would I even watch movies starring monstrous versions of creatures that terrify me? Is it the usual horror movie motivation: confronting my fears, or at least experiencing them in a safe and vicarious way for the thrill of it?
Honestly, no, for a simple reason: most giant spider movies are shit. If I can stomach them, then they are doing something seriously wrong. But I don’t just stomach them, I laugh at them. I mock them. I fart in their general direction.
However, in recent years I have been casting a wary eye in Itsy Bitsy’s direction. This one looked legit, and I delayed watching it because I thought it might actually freak me out.
So could Itsy Bitsy be the giant spider movie of my nightmares, ready to knock me out of my socks and pay me back for all the ridicule?
Well…no, as it turns out. But it’s still pretty good.
The Black Egg of Maa-Kalaratri
Itsy Bitsy Spider is the American version of the nursery rhyme Incy Wincey spider that we have in the UK (maybe a distant cousin or something). This movie is American, so they have earned the right to use their version of the name. And it may be just me, but I think Itsy Bitsy sounds creepier than Incy Wincey. I’m fine with the title. It’s a solid start.
As the opening credits roll, members of a native tribe of some kind, probably South American (it isn’t made clear), place a plus-sized spider into a sacred pot during a ceremony and seal it up.
Next thing we know, most of the tribe have been killed by poachers, who steal the pot. One of the poachers has a leg injury and his buddy just shoots him dead. The wound didn’t even look serious.
The poacher, Ahkeeba, delivers the pot to Mr Clark, an elderly treasure hunter and collector of ancient artefacts, many of which aren’t legal (which he admits). Ahkeeba calls the pot the ‘Black Egg of Maa-Kalaratri.’
Ahkeeba makes it sound like a big deal. The reason he stole it, and committed all the murders, wasn’t for fortune and glory but for revenge on the tribe, who he blamed for killing Mr Clark’s wife (Mrs Clark). He has a photo of them together when he was a boy. She was like a mother to him.
Fortune and glory, kid
You might think that Mr Clark was the one who orchestrated Ahkeeba’s mission, but you would be wrong. He doesn’t believe the tribe killed his wife and he doesn’t want the egg when it is presented to him as a gift.
When he finds out that Ahkeeba committed mass murder to obtain it, he condemns the genocide of native people and the theft of their artefacts. However, the tribe are shown sacrificing babies to their spider God, so they aren’t entirely innocent.
Mr Clark and Ahkeeba don’t seem to like each other at all, and it made me wonder why Ahkeeba gifted him the egg. But I have a theory.
I assume Mr Clark also had a hand in raising Ahkeeba, seeing as he was married to Mrs Clark, but he wasn’t around much. He was busy globe hopping, raiding tombs and robbing graves. Or perhaps he was just emotionally distant, caring more about people who have been dead for 500 years in another country.
The murders and theft could be a genuine attempt by Ahkeeba to gain the approval of his adoptive father. It doesn’t excuse his actions, but it provides context.
Bit of a downer
Ahkeeba storms out but leaves the egg. The next day, in a case of terrible timing, a nurse called Kara and her two kids move next door to Mr Clark after she gets a job as his carer (he has MS). On her first day, Ahkeeba returns to the house for reasons unknown and smashes the egg. Spider time!
The spider bites Ahkeeba offscreen. He drives away in his van but runs off the road when the venom kicks in. The Sheriff doesn’t find his body until the plot requires her to, which is near the end of the movie.
We then find out that Kara used to have three children but one of them, Stevie, died in a car crash. Her youngest child, a girl called Cambria, doesn’t seem to know. Also, Kara is addicted to painkillers and steals Mr Clark’s oxycontin to block out the car crash flashbacks.
There’s not much humour I can mine in that, and it reminded me that there’s another reason giant spider movies don’t scare me. It isn’t just because they are shit, it’s that even the decent ones don’t take themselves too seriously.
Itsy Bitsy takes itself very seriously, which is admirable, but I’m not sure I like it because it’s a bit of a downer. I guess there’s no pleasing me.
God or spider?
Let’s lighten things up a bit. Cambria befriends a cat who she names ‘Mr Whiskers.’ How cute, I hope they…never mind, the spider got him.
It’s a good scene that shows the cat hunting a rat but getting killed by the spider: the food chain in action. Speaking of the food chain, Kara’s oldest child, a boy called Jesse, mashes a regular spider with a slipper when his sister finds one in her room. He’s my hero now.
Jesse steals one of Mr Clark’s artefacts but gives it back the next day. Mr Clark lectures him on taking things that don’t belong to you. Jesse reminds him that his entire fucking house is filled with stolen artefacts looted from around the world. Not bad, kid,
They end up bonding while fixing the broken egg. Mr Clark tells the story of Maa-Kalaratri, the Spider Goddess who was worshipped by the native tribe, but only after she decimated their village and carried off a child (she wasn’t getting enough attention – you know what those old Gods are like).
We see drawings of the Goddess depicted as a person with three arms (not enough – that’s only 5 limbs) and as a spider with a human head (correct number of legs but it looks stupid).
The spider in Itsy Bitsy is just a spider, albeit a plus sized one. There’s no evidence of God-like behaviour, only spider-like behaviour such as spinning webs, laying eggs and shedding skin. That’s right, spiders shed their exoskeleton when they grow, and it becomes a plot point later.
The spider did it
Kara and Mr Clark get into an ugly argument after he catches her stealing his drugs. It’s pretty brutal. He says her kids deserve a better mother. She says he’s one step away from needing someone to wipe his ass. The sort of argument that would make you cringe every time you thought of it for the rest of your life.
Luckily for Mr Clark, this isn’t a very long time. The spider bites him the same night. He wakes up with a bloody foot, falls off the bed and crawls to his bathroom. The venom kicks in and he seems paralysed as the spider lands on his face and eats his eyes.
Jesse discovers Mr Clark’s body and tells the Sheriff that a spider killed him, based on their conversation about Maa-Kalaratri. The Sheriff is cool about it and tells him to bring her any evidence he finds.
However, when he tells Kara the same thing, she doesn’t believe him. He replies ‘does one of us have to die like Stevie?’ and she slaps him round the face. There’s a lot of family trauma in this movie.
Spider surprise
Somehow we’re already into Act 3 of Itsy Bitsy. It’s a dark and stormy night. Ever notice that in monster movies, the final showdown is always at night (except Tremors, of course)?
Kara looks for her kids and finds them in the attic. Jesse is busy cutting Cambria out of a spider web. It isn’t clear how she got stuck in it, or where he got the scissors from. Did he have to go back downstairs to fetch them? I hope he didn’t run with them.
They see the spider in another part of the web, but it doesn’t move. We then see that it is just the husk of its old exoskeleton. The real one leaps onto Kara and bites her in the chest.
She falls out of the attic into Cambria’s room and the spider follows. She throws a lamp at it. I would have shouted ‘how about a light?’ but as I previously stated, this movie is too serious for one-liners.
The spider jumps out the window. They really ought to have shut the door or at least the window, but don’t. Jesse calls the Sheriff, who has just found Ahkeeba’s corpse, so she’s inclined to believe him at this point.
Puny God
Cambria returns to her room to fetch her stuffed giraffe. There are many toy animals on her bed, including a new addition: a giant spider.
The Itsy Bitsy spider jumps her and bites right through her hand. This is a good thing, kind of, because when it squirts its venom, it doesn’t enter the girl’s body because the fangs are sticking out the other side of her hand.
Still, it must sting a little. Jesse kicks the spider. It hits the wall and appears to die. Its legs curl up but I wasn’t fooled. I would have dropped a wardrobe on it.
Kara shoots up some adrenaline to counteract the venom. I’m pretty sure it was from Mr Clark’s stash, but we won’t judge her on this occasion because it’s an emergency and he’s dead and it’s not an addictive opioid.
The spider runs out the window, onto the roof and drops down the chimney like Christmas at Marilyn Manson’s house.
Jesse fights it with a poker, then Kara finds the strength to pull its legs off and dismember its body by hand. I would have quipped ‘puny God’ after I did this, but we’re still not making jokes. It’s too soon.
The stinger
There’s a sting at the end of Itsy Bitsy where we see spider eggs hatching in the attic. After the credits, we get another sting where a couple of removal men enter the attic and see the same spiders. It’s a pointless scene because it gives us no more information than we already had before the credits (the spiders are still small).
It would have been better if some time had elapsed and the spiders had grown to plus-sized proportions. I want to know how big Maa-Kalaratri would have grown if it hadn’t been dismembered. We only see it shed its exoskeleton once.
The post credits sting also raises questions around the nature of Maa-Kalaratri. Does the existence of multiple offspring suggest that there will be many giant spiders running around in the future? If so, which one is the Goddess?
Or is the whole Goddess thing just bullshit a legend that the tribe ascribed to a particularly large breed of spider found in nature? That would make more sense, although it would make the child sacrifices even more pointless and sinister than they already were.
But I must admit I like the Goddess angle. It’s unique and weird. I like to think that either the spiders will cannibalise themselves until one remains, or one of them is a larger ‘queen’ type who is Maa-Kalaratri and the rest are smaller (but still plus-sized) warriors.
Give me an Itsy Bitsy sequel. I need answers.
Rating: 5 spider legs out of 8
