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Welcome to Louisiana, home of the bayou, Mardi Gras, jazz, French-sounding things, plantations (let’s skip over that one), alligators, and silly looking pink-and-white giant spiders that resemble plush Pokémon toys.
The spiders in Arachnoquake are among the cutest giant spiders seen so far (apologies to Hanus). If nothing else, this should illustrate the toll this exercise has taken on my grip on reality.
The spiders emerge following an earthquake. Fracking is blamed for bringing them to the surface. It’s a ‘subterranean-spiders-that-already-exist-and-have-been-brought-to-the-surface’ origin story, as previously seen in Lavalantula, 2 Lava 2 Lantula and an upcoming giant spider movie, Arachnia .
As the resident authority on the Spider Cinematic Universe Multiverse (SCUM) that only exists in my head, I can confidently say that Arachnoquake shares a universe with those movies. They emerged after the Arachnia spiders because they live deeper in the earth, but not as deep as Lavalantula, who came after. It all fits!
Additional information about the spiders is revealed during the first ever giant spider autopsy, which I will get into later. They at least make some attempt to sell the origin story, which I appreciate.
SyFy Returns
Arachnoquake is another made-for-television effort by SyFy, the makers of Webs, Ice Spiders, Camel Spiders, In the Spider’s Web, and the two Lavalantula movies.
Arachnoquake begins with comedy Cajuns filling up cartons of eggs somewhere in the Louisiana swampland. They discuss the earthquake that happened the previous night, which saves money on the effects budget I suppose.
One guy has already been bitten on the neck, offscreen. It’s hardly riveting stuff. Imagine Independence Day starting with Will Smith saying ‘damn, did you see that alien invasion last night?’
Deadmanwalking (the dude who was bitten) investigates the death of some hens but discovers a chasm in the earth instead. A spider bursts out of his back where he was bitten (human pinata time!) but it’s so small that even I would fancy my chances against it.
But it’s a plucky little fella. It screeches and backs him up towards the chasm. It shoots out some kind of tentacle (that’s a new one) that stings him in the face before he falls to his doom.
Pictured: a plucky little fella.
We then see spiders crawling into egg boxes that get loaded into a truck and driven to New Orleans. It’s like Tarantulas: the Deadly Cargo, except with eggs instead of coffee beans being the hitchhiking commodity of choice.
Looks like the Big Easy is going to end up over easy. It’s an egg joke. It may not make sense. I’m struggling.
A Very American Loser
Cut to New Orleans, where we meet Paul, one of those annoying slacker types who oozes enough cool to get away with it, at least with the ladies.
His dad, Roy, thinks he’s a loser because he’s hungover and two hours late for work. They run boat tours through the swamp, but Paul lost their tour boat the previous night while drunk. In Paul’s defence, he did pick up a hot chick and spent the night at her place.
Paul is a very American kind of loser: good looking, blue eyes, amazing hair, charming, irresistible to women and part owner of his own family business. In other words, not a loser at all.
He may lack a proper work ethic and drink too much, but that’s not enough in my opinion. He’ll have that straightened out by the end of the movie once he’s forced to step up and prove himself (giant spiders are great for that). You want to give him a real obstacle? Make him fat and stupid, Hollywood. I fucking dare you.
We then meet Petra, Paul’s impossibly beautiful sister who has beamed in from planet Baywatch. We’re meant to believe she’s spent her adult life running swamp tours in Louisiana.
Yeah, I spend my life huntin’ gators.
She’s so out of place it’s distracting. Couldn’t they have messed her up just a little? Ruffle her hair? Smear some dirt on her face?
John Connor Returns
After a stern talking to by Roy, Paul is taken off boat tours and put onto bus tours instead. Apparently, this is a demotion. We cut to a school bus picking up a female baseball team, but this isn’t Paul’s bus, it’s another bus driven by…wait, really? It’s Edward Furlong!
I haven’t seen him since Terminator 2 and that was a loooooooong time ago (I didn’t see American History X). He was Leonardo DiCaprio before Leonardo DiCaprio came along, but he sure doesn’t look like Leo now. He has more of an ‘everyman’ quality, to put it kindly.
“Everyman? How can I look like everyone?”
His name is Charlie. He wears check shirts and drives a bus. His wife and two teenage children (one boy, one girl) are waiting for him alongside the baseball team. It appears that he journeyed to New Orleans for work, but his family tagged along for a vacation.
His assistant was meant to be driving the bus, but she’s in bed puking up white shit because she was bitten by a spider. Now Charlie has to drive the bus and let his family down because they want to go on another bus and tour the city. You would have thought they’d be tired of buses after travelling on one from Houston to New Orleans.
Small Giant Spiders
We then cut to the other bus, the tour bus that Paul is driving (why do all these crappy SyFy movies feature people on buses?). Charlie’s family get on, along with a couple (Glen and Tina) and a grumpy old man they call Gramps (ageism is fine).
They don’t get far before they reach a chasm in the road. A small spider appears, and when I say small, I mean small by giant spider standards. It would still fill a Frappuccino cup, and I know this because Charlie’s daughter Annabel scoops it up in a Frappuccino cup.
My point, I think, is that it’s still big enough to freak you out if you saw one in real life. You wouldn’t say ‘that’s a small spider.’ You’d say something like ‘look at the size of that fucking thing.’ I’m only calling it small because I’m 33 giant spider movies deep and my perspective is all messed up. It’s a tiddler.
Charlie’s wife, Katelynn, examines the spider and determines that it is blind because it has no eyes. She’s an 8th grade science teacher, so she has credentials. She’ll be doing the autopsy later.
She surmises that the spiders must use echo location to get around, which is an interesting idea to explore and could generate some tension in the attack scenes, but they don’t use it. Oh well.
More spiders leap onto the outside of the bus – bigger ones this time, as big as dwarves. That’s Gramps’ description, not mine. He’s old school. At least he didn’t say ‘midgets.’
Paul drives away and shakes them off somehow, so they can’t be very sticky. I mean…they’re spiders. I thought that was their whole deal.
Gas Station Showdown
Paul stops at a gas station with a shop as big as a supermarket attached to it. That’s America for you – everything’s bigger, even the spiders.
More spiders arrive, plus reinforcements emerge from the egg boxes in the store. So that’s where they ended up. Finally, some answers.
It’s a little redundant though. Arachnoquake‘s prologue made a big deal of the stowaways travelling to New Orleans, but New Orleans is already infested with spiders.
Paul and co fight off the smaller spiders in the store with bug spray and makeshift hairspray flamethrowers, and the whole time I was shouting at them to just STEP ON THE FUCKING THINGS!
Talk about over-complicating it. Annabel must have heard because she squishes one just before it attacks her cowering mother and brother.
Glen bravely tells the others to flee while he holds off a larger spider. He throws a single tin at it, misses, then runs away so quickly he overtakes everyone he was meant to be covering.
A spider jumps Gramps and Paul does nothing to help as the spider eats his eyes or whatever the hell it was doing.
I must mention that Paul does a convincing job of freaking out every time he sees a spider. He jumps around and flaps his arms like a marionette puppet. I rank it as one of the most convincing giant spider reactions so far.
Most actors just scream, which I don’t think is quite the correct response. They should be creeped out too, but this rarely comes across. Paul pulls it off while acting against nothing because the spiders are CGI, so well done to him for that.
Jambalaya
In the swamp, Roy and Petra retrieve the boat that Paul lost the previous night. If he abandoned the boat on the middle of the bayou, how did he get to that girl’s apartment? I feel that there’s a better movie to be made about the day before this one.
Petra finds a dead alligator, Armando (that’s his name), covered in spider web. That’s a clue to who killed him. It’s a good example of the ‘this is my world, you just live in it’ trope that means the spiders are the apex predators now.
Pictured: Petra’s concern for Armando
When they return to base, Roy and Petra see a single column of smoke in the distance but react like they’re witnessing the end of the world. The special effects department really lets them down.
Roy immediately blames Paul (?) and rushes off to find him. He blasts along the road in a brand-new red Ford Mustang. There’s no way this down-to-earth working man would own a car like that.
He finds the tour bus, drives it off the road and blames Paul for the giant spiders (which I guess Roy found out about offscreen on the way over?). I’m starting to think he’s a bit of a dick. Tough love has its limits, Roy.
Meanwhile, Annabel calls Charlie in the other bus to warn him about the spiders. Right on cue, a spider appears. Charlie loses control and crashes the bus on an arrow-straight stretch of road.
Charlie and the baseball team fight off the spider with…well, baseball bats (logic checks out). Edward Furlong’s subplot is filler, apart from the revelation that the spiders can breathe fire. There is a logic to it, as revealed in the first ever giant spider autopsy (stay tuned).
The army rescues everyone in the school bus. Charlie beats the spider corpse with a bat and screams:
‘That’s how you make jambalaya!’
Remind me to never eat that.
Go, Gators!
Back to Paul’s group, where Glen tries to get a refund on his bus tour ticket. When Paul refuses, Glen threatens him by saying he’s from the ‘Hood’ or whatever. Glen then stands on a bench and attempts a rallying speech about how they all need to work together.
It’s a direct rip off of Samuel L Jackson’s speech in Deep Blue Sea, with the same end result. I saw it coming this time. On the bright side, at least Paul didn’t have to process that refund.
The survivors escape on the tour boat but, in a cool twist, it transpires that the spiders can walk on water. Like Jesus, but spiders.
Tina, Glen’s partner, hits the boat’s accelerator and the boat runs aground. Tina is flung thirty metres from the boat into the forest, but nobody else is. I like to call this phenomenon ‘karma physics.’
Tina gets spidered (I can’t believe I left it this long to turn ‘spider’ into a verb) and taken into a hole. Everyone else flees the boat. Roy distracts the spiders but gets flamethrowered (another new verb) down one side of his body.
Roy’s left arm is charred black like Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Just as the spider is about to pounce, an alligator eats it. It’s my favourite moment of the movie. Respect to the alligators for not relinquishing their apex predator title without a fight. Go gators!
The Bayou Badass
They run into the Cajun egg farmers from the start of the movie, led by a guy called Jean Jacques. He seems legit, so I have nicknamed him the Bayou Badass. They capture a spider and, as promised, Katelynn performs the first ever giant spider autopsy!
I should mention that Katelynn had an asthma attack earlier in the movie and lost her inhaler. Ever since, she’s been breathing from one of Paul’s deep sea diver tanks because apparently that has the same effect as an inhaler. I’m not a scientist, but I’ll go with it.
The autopsy reveals all sorts of information about the spiders, such as their eggs (they lay them in hosts) vocal chords (they’re well-developed, so they should be able to carry a decent tune) and the lack of a brain (so they should be able to write a SyFy screenplay).
This information isn’t relevant to anyone except giant spider movie enthusiasts. They also find a gas bladder that fuels the spiders’ fire breath. The spiders are from the shale layer, which contains a lot of gas (hence the fracking), and they evolved to use it.
Spiders arrive and cut the autopsy short. One guy is surrounded while another character yells his name in slow motion.
You know a character is about to die when someone yells their name in slow motion. It’s an absolute certainty. Also, his name is Guillaume, which I struggle to pronounce even at regular speed. It’s French.
All Hail the Queen
The survivors scatter and a spider injects Dumbledore in the head with those tentacle things. He dies, but not before expressing regret for the way he treated Paul. However, he also places upon him the burden of getting everyone to safety. It’s time for Paul to step up and make his dead dad proud.
Petra and Katelynn are both spidered (sorry, had to use it again) and taken into an underground tunnel network. Paul and Annabel enter the spiders’ lair and rescue them. They also discover the QUEEN SPIDER!
Guess what our resident 8th grade science teacher says about the queen? Correct, I can see you’ve been paying attention. She says if you kill the queen, all the other spiders die, which has no basis in science at all. Perhaps she also teaches 8th grade movie cliches.
Some good news: Petra’s trip into the tunnels has finally scuffed her up a bit. She looks human now rather than a luminous being made of light. I might have a shot.
They return to the boat, push it back into the water and leave. Why didn’t they do that before? Anyway, the queen spider follows them downriver to New Orleans. Arachnoquake‘s third act takes place in the city, where the queen sets up a web between two skyscrapers.
Asthma’s Revenge
Charlie reunites with his son Glen, a superfluous character who hasn’t warranted a mention up to now. When we first see him, he’s taking photos of the female baseball players’ butts, which makes him a perfect candidate for spider karma.
But he totally gets away with it. I’m assuming it’s because he’s quite handsome, and my understanding is that questionable male behaviour is only creepy when the guy carrying it out is ugly. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
Glen escapes the swamp with the Bayou badass. He and Charlie then spend the entirety of act 3 on a rooftop doing nothing except watching events unfold with mildly concerned looks on their faces.
But the Bayou Badass won’t go down like that. The army takes his gun away, so he steals one of their rocket launchers to take on the spider. Fuck yeah.
Meanwhile, Katelynn suffers another asthma attack and dies. I think. It isn’t clear. Annabel tells Charlie she didn’t make it, but he doesn’t seem bothered at all and we get no resolution.
Arachnoquake is shit. I probably shouldn’t have wasted nearly three thousand words on it.
Bug Hall
Oh wait, I’m still going. Paul and the Bayou Badass have to save the day. Like Lavalantula, the final showdown in Arachnoquake involves the hero dressing up in a wacky costume to confront the queen spider.
In this case, it’s his dead dad’s deep sea diver suit. Bayou Badass shoots the queen with his rocket launcher but it just pisses her off. It pulls him into its web, cocoons him, spears him in the chest and drops him from a great height. He would have wanted to go out like that.
The spider swallows Paul but he’s okay because of the diver suit. Paul sticks a coil of wire into the queen’s gas bladder and the queen…how do I put this gently…well, she sharts him out. He sparks the wire with a battery and the spider explodes. Paul inexplicably survives.
Also, an actor called Bug Hall plays Paul. That’s his name. Well, technically it’s a nickname, but he earned it way before he starred in Arachnoquake. You’ve got to love nominative determinism.
There’s a sting in the tail that’s confusing, but we all like a sting so let’s do it. We see the spider that Annabel caught in the Frappuccino cup floating in the sea, still in the cup. Then it just kind of…squishes.
It’s not clear whether this is a result of the queen dying (we see other spiders dying off) or some undersea creature. Only one thing’s for sure: I’m not going to spend another moment thinking about it.
Rating: 2 spider legs out of 8
The post Giant Spider Review: ARACHNOQUAKE (2012) appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
