Arachnophobia. Kingdom of the Spiders. Eight Legged Freaks. Ok, forget the last one. Killer spider films are fun. Not like giant ass take over the world spiders, but normal creepy crawlers. There’s no need to make them gigantic, normal sized ones are scary enough. They give me the heebie jeebies. And I know I’m not the only one. This French spider movie has gotten me excited for a few weeks since the first time I heard about it. Great reviews. Scratch that. AMAZING reviews. And it’s finally here.
Synopsis:
Residents of a rundown French apartment building battle against an army of deadly, rapidly reproducing spiders.
IMDb: 6.6
Rotten Tomatoes: 95%
Tagline: The invasion begins!
Sebastien Vanicek makes his full-length motion picture debut with this French language film from last year. The film itself plays as a metaphor for the stigma of poor people, Arabs, and black people, as evident by the original title for the film, Vermines. As in, do you want spiders in your home? Everyone in the movie is treated like vermin, so there’s a little bit more going on here than a simple spider film.
This kind of takes a minute to get going. We follow a street hustler who picks up a crazy ass poisonous spider from another hustler who got it from some desert climate where one of them damned eight leggers killed a dude. So, we know this shit is legit. I just wish we liked the main character. That’s the thing about Arachnophobia that makes it so good. We like the doctor and his family. The characters are what make the movie.
The French slums are not a place that I have seen much in films, nor even heard about much in the news. Apparently, it’s a real thing in and around Paris that is a bit of its own community, functioning as an important part of society. People just doing whatever it takes to get by. It didn’t appear to be all that violent, just looked down upon by French society. Of course, what do I know? I’m just a dumb American.
The spiders are creepy and of course, they reproduce like crazy. Their bite is lethal, and it does the trick quickly. I don’t know if a species like that exists, for I know there are bad ass arachnids out there (I’m looking at you, Australia), but to almost instantly kill someone, I am not so sure about. The babies really mess you up, too, almost making you ooze nasty shit out of your eyes and the bite locations. It’s pretty gross.
I enjoyed the music, almost like a Hitchcockian violin shrieking type cue that really amps up the suspense. I don’t know if the film is particularly scary, never truly taking on that terror that I felt all those years ago when watching Arachnophobia in the theater, but it’s still fun. Those were tarantula looking fuckers, and these are more like a giant brown recluse.
I’m a subtitle guy, as I hate dubbing. The actor’s performance is captured better in their native language, which is why I prefer to read their lines and still feel their original dialect. But here, trying to scan the place for those damn spiders and such, it’s hard to read and truly immerse yourself in that environment. I don’t know if a dubbed version exists, but if it does, this might be the one time I recommend it.
This is a good movie. The spiders are mostly real with very little CGI, which always makes me happy nowadays. Everything is fucking CGI anymore, and while there’s a little here, it doesn’t detract from the movie. Of course, the spiders get pretty fucking big, so if you can buy into that, then there’s no other problems with the movie. It also doesn’t rely on cheap scares, as each of these feels earned. There is tension that builds up, and then the release pays off. There are a few parts that will definitely make your skin crawl or at the very least, squirm.
A little complaint is all the annoying French language hip hop. It’s not translated in the subtitles, so what the fuck are the French rapping about? The biggest REAL drawback is the cast of characters that I don’t really care too much about. In a lot of ways, if you go with the original title and its meaning, the undesirable characters were deliberately written that way. I guess that’s on purpose. Either way, it does the trick and satisfied my killer spider needs for the moment.
