Last week, in my review of the original Spiders, I made a joke about how they should make a sequel, except they should forget about the spiders and focus on the alien dude as he adapts to life on earth, resulting in lots of fish-out-of-water shenanigans.
It would be like Crocodile Dundee, except with an alien instead of an Austr-alian (boom!).
Unfortunately, the makers of Spiders II ignored my genius pitch and brought back giant spiders for more ‘using humans as hosts and eating them’ shenanigans. But that is where the similarity with the original ends.
Spiders II features no returning characters or references to the first film. In the first ten seconds of the movie, we see that a mad doctor has a fully grown giant spider in captivity, but we never find out where it came from.
It isn’t essential to the plot, but it would have been nice to establish a connection to the original film, otherwise why bother calling it Spiders II? It’s not like the original was a roaring success or an established IP that they could cash in on.
Nobody watched the original film except me, and maybe those that were in it. On the DVD menu, the title appears in inverted commas, as if the filmmakers themselves didn’t even consider it a proper sequel.
The only thing the two movies have in common is the giant spiders, but that isn’t enough to call it a sequel. Using that rationale, every movie involving time-travel should be called Back to the Future, and every movie featuring an immature but loveable loser who turns his life around should be called Adam Sandler.
All At Sea
The filmmakers went with Roman numerals for this movie: Spiders II instead of plain old Spiders 2. I believe this is used to add a sense of importance and gravitas. A bold ambition for a giant spider movie.
Anyway, Spiders II is set entirely at sea. I will do my best to avoid any ‘this movie is all at sea’ jokes. That one doesn’t count.
Pirates abduct the occupants of a pleasure boat. A couple in a sailboat, Jason and Alexandra, stumble across the burnt-out remnants of the boat. Before they can report it, they get caught in a storm and their boat sinks in about three seconds flat.
A cargo ship picks them up, which may seem like a lucky break, but not when you consider that the ship houses the pirates, the mad doctor’s laboratory and a giant spider storage facility!
They don’t know this at first, though. In fact, for the first hour the giant spiders are kept safely locked up and are hardly seen at all. The movie focuses on Jason and Alexandra, who slowly realise something is amiss.
First, the ship is called ‘The Mystery of the Seas,’ which is quite creepy. Then the mad doctor Grbac inspects the couple and declares them ‘perfect specimens.’ He’s even got an Igor-like assistant.
Jason notices that the ship is not carrying its full load, due to the tide line on the hull. He finds out the radio is working even though they said it isn’t. Then he realises they are sailing in circles. Then he finds the bodies of the kidnapped pleasure-boaters strung up on hooks in a meat-locker.
That last one is a big clue that something bad is going on.
An Unexpected Pregnancy
The build-up in Spiders II is pretty good but doesn’t work as well as it could because we already know about the giant spiders, courtesy of the opening scene.
It would have been better if the audience discovered things as the hero did, then we would have felt like we were unravelling the mystery with him rather than waiting for him to catch up.
I liked the captain of the ship – Captain Bigelow. He looks like a budget Michael Biehn, but will he end up as The Terminator Michael Biehn (honourable good guy), or The Abyss Michael Biehn (psycho)? He’s got a moustache, so you figure it out.
On the one hand Bigelow is party to the killings and knows about Dr Grbac’s experiments, but on the other hand he disapproves by calling the doctor ‘sick.’ He also shares a couple of heart-to-hearts and even a candle-lit dinner with Alexandra, and you wonder if anything is going to happen between them.
Bigelow even lets Alexandra use his shower. Yes, we get an unnecessary shower scene. Sold!
Dr Grbac keeps shooting up Jason with God knows what, claiming it to be antibiotics. The good doctor persuades Alexandra that Jason’s claims of seeing strung-up bodies is just paranoia caused by an infection. She believes them, which brings her closer to Bigelow.
The doc carts off Jason to the lab to be impregnated by a giant spider. However, the mad doctor also creates a vaccine, just in case he wants to let him live later. Thanks, I guess.
No Padlocks
This brings me to the biggest problem I had with Spiders II. Why let Jason and Alexandra run around the ship and uncover their evil secrets? The pirates had no problem abducting and offing the pleasure cruisers and using them as spider food/hosts/whatever. I am not advocating murder, but it seems inconsistent with both the pirates’ code and the mad doctor’s hypocritical oath.
Instead, they hand Jason a lifeline with the vaccine nonsense and let Alexandra run amok on the ship trying to save him when she finds out the truth. She turns off the electricity supply, which lets the giant spiders out of their cages.
On this boat there are no manual latches on the cages. They are all electronically sealed and one flick of a switch opens them all. This seems like a security oversight to me. How much does a padlock cost?
It’s game time once the spiders are released, with an effective last act that riffs on Aliens. The usual qualifiers around budget, special effects and filmmaking talent still apply of course, but I seem to have hit a nice vein of decent early 2000s spider movies recently.
The 1970s was undoubtedly the golden era of spider flicks, but the early 2000s delivered a quiet sort of renaissance.
If you are wondering – yes, there is a Spiders 3, and it stars Sydney Sweeney. Stay tuned.
Rating: 5 spider legs out of 8
