They’re just making up words now. Arachnia isn’t a real word because a squiggly red line appears under it every time I type it. How annoying.
Arachnia is a movie about giant spiders. At one point, the spiders bother a herd of cows. It made me realise how much I want to see a movie with killer cows in it. I think I saw one with killer sheep once. Or did I dream it?
Anyway, did you ever see that milk advert where a guy is being stalked by cows because the milk he drinks is so good that the cows want it back?
Well, it would be like that, except maybe we could give them vampire teeth or something to make them scarier. The thing about cows is that no-one expects them to turn nasty. But that’s how they get you – they lull you into a false sense of security with their docile, cud-chewing hypnosis…then they strike!
Anyway, back to the giant spiders. A meteor shower causes a light aircraft to crash in a forest. The passengers – a professor of palaeontology, his assistant, three students and the pilot, all get out alive but then have to deal with the giant spiders that have been freed from their underground nest by the crashed meteor, or the crashed plane, or both.
To be clear: these are not alien spiders that came down from space with the meteor, nor are they regular spiders that have been mutated by either of the usual suspects – toxic waste or radiation. They were there the whole time, which is a similar origin to Lavalantula (but Arachnia did it first).
Deke Head
Our heroes encounter a grizzled old dude called Moses whose grandad captured a giant spider many years ago. He keeps the spider-corpse in his barn, takes it to fairs and charges 10 cents for people to look at it. Nice work if you can get it.
The first half of Arachnia is pretty fun for a low budget giant spider movie. First up is a re-work of an old action movie cliché. After the crash, one of the students, Deke, has slept through the whole thing. He wakes up while everyone else is still unconscious and smells gasoline.
He panics, crawls out of the window and runs. We have seen what comes next a hundred times – the hero running away from whatever is about to explode, then jumping into a ditch just before it goes boom.
Except this time he jumps and nothing happens. He has to pick himself up and dust himself off. The others wake up, do exactly the same thing, and this time the plane does explode as they hit the ditch. Perhaps you had to be there, but it was a funny moment.
The characters are total clichés, but they know it and have fun with it. First, we have the arrogant, lecherous Professor Monkford who has no redeeming features whatsoever and constantly spits out the pilot’s name like a seventies Bond villain:
‘Miiiiiiister Pachowski.’
Miiiiiiister Pachowski (or Sean) is played by none other than Rob Monkiewitcz. You remember him! Okay you don’t, but he has giant spider pedigree. He will play exterminator Buzz in Bite Me! a year after Arachnia.
Arachnalesbians
The two female students, Trina and Kelly, are dim but also sexy and spend most of the movie in various states of undress.
After fleeing the plane, they find an old cabin with a rusty tin tub and the girls decide to take a bath (yeah, why not). Kelly is naked in the tub while Trina washes her back, and they end up having a girly splashy water fight!
When Moses arrives, he bursts in with his shotgun. Kelly stands up butt naked in front of him and he says:
‘Well saw off my legs and call me Stumpy.’
Later on at Stumpy’s farmhouse, the girls share a bed in their lingerie. Trina is afraid of spiders so Kelly scares her by running her fingers over her naked flesh. They end up wrestling and having a pillow fight! I swear this is all true.
Then they finally get all lezzer with each other. Kelly asks Trina if she has been with a girl before and she replies:
‘I don’t think so.’
You mean you don’t remember?
In a later scene they have to leave the house in a hurry on account of the giant spiders. Kelly is on the toilet, and Sean drags her out as she tries to yank up her undercrackers.
In terms of female exploitation, this movie sets a high bar. There’s more partial nudity than Bite Me! and that one was set in a strip club.
Can You Dig It?
It is almost a shame when the spiders turn up and besiege Stumpy’s house because everyone starts taking things more seriously.
The spiders are animated mostly in glorious stop-motion, which is far better than bad CGI. First, Stumpy gets dragged off when he and Sean find the spider tunnel. Then two spiders play Tug O’ War with Deke and pull him in half. The stop motion animation has a certain old school charm about it.
Oddly, the movie then spends five minutes of its lean 1:22 runtime on Sean digging a grave and burying Deke. He shares a heart-to-heart with love interest Weaver, the Professor’s assistant, but it’s an odd conversation about their racial make-up.
For the record, Sean is Irish-Polish while Weaver is Indian-English, black, but with a white father (adopted). I mean…they could have just said ‘American.’
Next it’s EVEN MORE DIGGING as Sean digs a flame pit around the property in preparation for the next spider attack. He gives the Professor a shovel but he can’t seem to use it properly. This guy is an archaeologist and he can’t dig. He’s swinging the shovel around like a golf club.
Believe All Women
Arachnia then does something truly astounding. After surviving a plane crash and being stuck in an isolated farmhouse for a day and a night besieged by giant spiders, the characters all suddenly remember they have working cellphones that they can use to…you know…call somebody.
Sean calls the cops, but instead of reporting the plane crash, he tells them about the giant spiders. Rookie mistake. They don’t believe him and hang up. For those keeping track, this also happened in Eight Legged Freaks in what I like to call the ‘who you gonna call?’ trope?
Weaver then calls her father, who is an army colonel. She doesn’t make the same mistake as Sean and tell him about the spiders. She’s savvy.
She tells her father the Professor raped her instead.
*Record scratch*
I realise the Professor is not a very nice person, but that’s over the line. She mobilises the US army against an innocent man.
When the soldiers arrive later in the movie, they have multiple helicopters, dozens of men, machine guns, hazmat suits, shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, you name it. All for one (alleged) rapist. They don’t even find out about the spiders until they arrive.
Precision Dynamite
The next scene is a Night of the Living Dead style siege at the farmhouse, except with spiders. Guns don’t seem to work very well on the spiders, so Sean employs a more effective close-combat weapon: dynamite! He lobs multiple sticks of dynamite with 3 second fuses and nails a spider every time.
They fight off most of the spiders but Kelly gets dragged underground after the Professor uses her as human shield. Something tells me he’s not long for this world. The others launch a rescue mission by journeying into the spiders’ underground lair to find Kelly.
I must say that Arachnia’s structure is solid. Absolutely everything could be done better when it comes to the specifics, but the bare bones are everything you want from a monster movie: a colourful cast, an isolated location, a siege, a journey into the creature’s lair, a last minute rescue.
Let’s throw a bunch of money at the guys who made Tremors to remake Arachnia. We’d have a winner.
The End?
The Professor is the only one who refuses to enter into the caves, so he gets killed outside by spiders. The others find Kelly, cocooned in web (of course) but otherwise okay. Stumpy is also cocooned but not so lucky. They get to him just as baby spiderlings burst out of him. Human pinata time!
Oh, and they find a useless looking queen spider that looks like a beached catfish and presents no threat at all.
The army arrives and takes out the nest. I like the use of stock footage when they turn up. We cut from Sean looking up to a grainy shot of a Vietnam-era helicopter coming into land. For a moment I thought I was watching the opening credits of The A-Team.
Arachnia ends with a title card that poses the question ‘The End?’ It’s been 23 years, so I think I can safely answer ‘yes’ to that one.
Anyway, I would recommend the first half of Arcachnia. The second half can’t quite match the high watermark of pillow fighting lesbians.
Rating: 4 spider legs out of 8
