Spiders Reviews

Relying more heavily on special effects than sharp writing, this homage to the halcyon days of '50s drive-in movies lacks the tongue-in-cheek savvy of zippier updates like TREMORS. California coed Marcy (Lana Parrilla) works on her college newspaper, irks her editor with her extra-terrestrial obsession. Marcy and her staff, Slick (Oliver Macready) and Jake (Nick Swarts) are investigating a secret government facility, and even Marcy's professional paranoia doesn't prepare them for the scoop they uncover. The space shuttle Solaris crashes in front of them, and before the aerospace clean-up crew lands, Marcy, Slick and Jake sneak aboard and examine the crew's horribly mutilated corpses. When NASA bigwig Agent Gray (Mark Phelan) arrives, he kills an uncooperative scientist and orders sole surviving astronaut transported to the pathology lab. Although Agent Murphy (Josh Green) takes exception, he's powerless to stop Gray's bizarre experimentation. Marcy stows away in a government van and enters the Roswell-type fortress, where she finds confirmation of her UFO theories, and more. To her horror, she learns that the astronauts injected alien DNA into spiders, which escaped their containers after solar rays rocked the Solaris. Marcy's co-workers, meanwhile, learn the hard way that these genetically altered arachnids hatch their eggs in flesh-and-blood hosts. Although Murphy helps Marcy escape to her newspaper office, surprises await. The biggest shock is a visit from Gray, last glimpsed inside a spider's maw; he's now being used as a spider-incubator. Is there any way to stop this "alien-nated" spider which grows to enormous proportions and eats its way through Los Angeles? Though it's fun to watch a big bug munch on extras, the shudders are spaced too far apart for this creature feature to build much momentum.