BEFORE: Well, I was right, I could have gone just about anywhere linking away from "De Palma", there were THAT many actors in it, seen in archive footage. I could have, if needed, skipped tonight's film and the next two and linked straight to my November 1 film, via Andy Garcia, who appeared in the archive footage from "The Untouchables". So if I fell behind in October, which was VERY possible, I could have dropped three more films and still linked up with my planned chain, I just would have had to fill in those slots later with something else.
But here we are, three days left in October and three horror films left on the docket, so let's just proceed as planned. Scarlett Johansson carries over from "De Palma", where she appeared in archive footage from "The Black Dahlia", which, as Brian explained, was all about the Black Dahlia.
I spent about two hours yesterday JUST going through which actors appeared in the archive footage in "De Palma" - and I tried for a second time, in vain, to get the IMDB to list those actors. BUT they turned me down again, which is just ridiculous. I mean, it was a documentary about the films directed by Brian De Palma. Therefore, it used a lot of footage from those films, including Al Pacino ("Scarface", "Carlito's Way"), Piper Laurie ("Carrie"), Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson ("Dressed to Kill") and Kevin Costner ("The Untouchables"). I've never lied to the IMDB before, yet my voluntary submission of 82 actors who appeared in "De Palma" got turned down TWICE - what, exactly, is the problem here? Why do I do all this work for the IMDB and get zero results? Can't somebody who works for the IMDB just watch the damn movie, like I did, and agree that I clearly know what I'm doing?
Then I spent a few more hours adding films to the watchlist, and some other films to the pre-watchlist-list, and updating a few other lists that were tangential to the main list, and before you know it, my whole Saturday day off was gone. OK, so I also did laundry and grocery shopping, but either way, my whole day off kind of went away. So here's hoping there are a few more days off in November. Let me just take some time today to work out next month's schedule...
THE PLOT: Venomous spiders get exposed to a noxious chemical that causes them to grow to monumental proportions.
AFTER: What year was this film made? 2002? Yeah, that tracks, since the big motivating fear that drives the plot is toxic waste. We're storing toxic waste in underground mines, what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Actually one barrel falls off a truck and polllutes a bog, and this creates slightly larger radioactive crickets, and this would only be a problem if somebody were to collect the crickets and feed them to the predaory spiders in his pet store. Which of course is exactly what happens.
The pet-store owner is played by Tom Noonan, who I happen to have met in real life. If you're not aware, he played a serial killer in "Manhunter", the first film with Hannibal Lecter in it. He's also gone back to the thriller genre several times, in "Last Action Hero" and the "12 Monkeys" TV show, often cast as a villain because of the way he looks. But he's a very nice man, we both recorded voices for the same animated film and we were roommates for a few days during a Sundance Festival. Again, he was nothing but friendly to me, but you try getting to sleep when the guy who played the "Tooth Fairy" killer is sleeping right...over...there... The sheriff/mother character doesn't want her son hanging out with the pet store owner because he's creepy and he keeps spiders for pets - I'm on her side, I think, but also because kids shouldn't be hanging out after school with any adults their parents don't know. Just saying, there were parents who let their kids hang out with Michael Jackson and they thought everything was fine - and he had a whole zoo in his yard.
Anyway, the pet store owner becomes the spiders' first victim, after they get all hopped up on the toxic waste but before they grow to Unusual Size. The people who keep spiders as pets will also tell you they're perfectly safe, that they won't bite a person unless they're provoked. OK, fine, but just to be on the safe side, I'm going to avoid them, OK? Because I can't communicate to a spider that I'm no threat to them. I realize that I'm like planet-sized compared to most spiders, but still, I'm not taking any chances. There was a spider in my living room about two months ago, a tiny one, and it was walking across the ceiling. It would move about six inches, then drop down on its filament about a foot, then climb back up. Again, move six inches, drop down, climb back up - but each time it got a little closer to me. Eventually it was right above where I sit on my recliner, and it started descending - Jesus, has it been sizing me up all this time? Does that spider think I don't see it, and it's somehow going to web me up and live off my blood for the rest of its natural life? I was willing to let it be, but if it was going to drop right on me, then it had to die. I hate to kill anything larger than an ant, but I need to be able to watch my movies in peace, and I can't do that if a spider is stalking me.
About five years ago we had a big spider on our front porch, I mean, it must have been Australian or something, it was the size where it started to look more like a crab than a spider. It would pick a different spot each day and spin a web between the poles that hold up our awning, and in a way it was just nice to know where it was each day, so I could avoid that spot on the porch. Again, I try to just live and let live, it's one of God's creatures and all that. But when it built a web that blocked off the front door, well, then I couldn't help but feel that it was out to get me. It spent all day building that web over the door, thinking it was going to catch ME in it when I got home. Sure, there's a metal grate over the door that opens OUT, which would destroy the web before I could walk through it, but I wouldn't expect the spider to figure that out. Since it was the size where it would have been difficult for me to kill (both physically and ethically) we had to wait for it to go up to the light fixture above the door, my wife then hit the light with a broom handle, and when the spider dropped down on a filament I caught it in an empty peanut container. I screwed the lid on and walked it two blocks to a cemetery, where I quickly opened the lid and dropped the container there. I apologize for littering, I apologize for moving a wild animal to where it would be someone else's problem, I even apologize to the spider on the off-chance it had a peanut allergy. But I needed it to be GONE so I could get on with my life. Anyway this was about a month before Halloween in 2018 so maybe it went on to build some webs that decorated the cemetery for the season.
Of course, when the spiders are bigger than people are, it's a whole different ball game. The movie does its best to throw in a little bit of knowledge about the different kind of spiders seen here - there are orb-weavers, jumping spiders, trapdoor spiders, Tiger Wolf spiders, spitting spiders and one big ol' tarantula named Tank. Probably the only town residents who even care are the now-deceased pet shop owner and the nerdy kid who hung out with him. It might have been a nice touch if this kid's knowledge ended up being the key to defeating the spiders, but the movie chose not to go this way. Once in a while the kid's intel is important, like he knows that spiders react to noise and vibrations, but overall this wasn't that helpful. Mainly because at the size they grew to, all of these spiders were deadly to humans, either through their venom or their webbing or just plain eating the humans outright. So any distinction between venomous or non-venomous was a moot point, as this Arizona town was just full of walking snacks for them.
In the middle of it all is that family with the nerdy kid - mom's the town sheriff and her daughter is the town's "bad girl", also in the mix is Chris McCormick, who comes back into town after ten years away, his father ran the mine and he's the one who told the sheriff her husband was cheating on her, and he'd love to express his feelings for her, but thanks to the spiders it's really not the time. Also his father owned the town mine, which for ONCE this month isn't a gateway for demons to come through, but it does get filled up with giant spiders, so there's that. There's also a bumbling deputy, a local conspiracy theory radio DJ and a corrupt mayor who supported the now-abandoned mall which then became the toxic waste dump that started all this trouble.
Location scouting is a powerful thing - this film shot in and around Glendale, Arizona, which provided an old mining town location (Superior, AZ), a ranch where ostriches could be raised, and also an abandoned mall in need of demolition. I hope some location scout got a nice bonus for finding all of the things the movie needed within a short distance of each other. Sometimes the plot drives the location and sometimes it's the other way around, and by that I mean having a mine filled with methane gas right near a mall that you could explode without consequences seemed like an ideal fit for an explosive climax that could also neatly solve that spider problem.
The problem here, though, is that there's really no third act to the story, there's barely even a second act. The majority of the film is the same thing, over and over - this person sees a big spider, they're shocked, they try to fight the spider, they lose. On to the next person, they see a big spider - and so on until we get near the end of the movie. It's like if the movie was just one big car chase, you'd probably get tired of that pretty quick - same goes for repetitive arach-attacks.
But hey, if you're worn down by the usual horror films this October, you're tired of ghosts and zombies and witches and creepers and you want to FEEL something again, you could do a lot worse than this one. Spiders are universally hated and nearly everybody is afraid of them (I haven't done the research, just a gut feeling here) so you're bound to at least have a visceral reaction to the effects work here.
My link to tomorrow's film is a little bit suspect - usually I only go by the IMDB credits, but they're not always sufficient for my purposes. I'm going to rely on another source, which tells me that a certain noted voice actor performed the sounds of Consuela, the giant female orb weaver spider, and also that he did similar vocal effects in tomorrow's film. I'll explain, I promise.
Also starring David Arquette (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Kari Wuhrer (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Scott Terra, Doug E. Doug (last seen in "Mo' Better Blues"), Rick Overton (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Leon Rippy (last seen in "The Color Purple"), Matt Czuchry, Jay Arlen Jones (last seen in "The Patriot"), Eileen Ryan (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Riley Smith (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), Matt Holwick, Jane Edith Wilson (last seen in "Catch Me If You Can"), Jack Moore (last seen in "Welcome to the Rileys"), Roy Gaintner, Don Champlin, John Christopher Storey (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), David Earl Waterman, Tom Noonan (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), with the voice of Frank Welker (last heard in "Scooby-Doo".
RATING: 5 out of 10 missing pets
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