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I thought it was about time we got back to some big ass spiders, and they don’t come much bigger than the big ass spider in Big Ass Spider.
Big Ass Spider has the greatest opening scene in giant spiderdom. It opens on a close-up of our hero, Alex (J.J Abram’s best mate Greg Gunberg) lying on his back on a city street, bruised and battered. He drags himself up as chaos reigns around him: smoke, cars on fire, people fleeing, soldiers firing at an unseen foe, rubble crashing down onto the street.
Basically, all the worst parts of the bible.
Alex walks towards whatever everyone else is running from, like the calm centre in the eye of a storm. The whole segment unfolds in slow motion as a melancholy piano version of the Pixies’ Where is my Mind plays on the soundtrack.
Alex looks up and we get our first glimpse of the big ass spider, perched on top of a skyscraper like Kong. When I say ‘glimpse,’ I mean we see it taking out helicopters in slow motion. The spider has a leg span of at least 25 storeys. Now that’s what I call a big ass spider!
My only gripe is that I would have preferred not to see the big ass spider that early on. The scene would have been more effective if we only saw the destruction it caused, leaving our imaginations to conjure up images of the monster that could cause such a hullaballoo.
I mean…we know it’s a big ass spider. The movie is literally called Big Ass Spider. But you should never reveal your monster in the first three minutes. Tease me for a while. That sounded weird.
Arachnophobia Sequel?
We cut to 12 hours earlier. Alex steps out of a pick-up truck with the name of his exterminator company printed on the door. It reminded me of John Goodman in Arachnophobia, who was introduced in an almost-identical manner.
I lamented in my Arachnophobia review that we never got a spin off movie with exterminator Delbert McClintock, but this is a pretty good spiritual successor.
Alex catches a rat from under an old lady’s house but he’s going to let it loose in the park because he’s such a nice guy. She pays him with fruit cake which he accepts because he’s such a nice guy. It’s his day off but he answers the call anyway because…well, you get it.
Alex is single but wants a girlfriend, so if you’re not already rooting for him to get one by the end of the movie, I don’t know what to do with you.
After getting handsy with Alex, the old lady tries to kill a spider on his shirt. It bites him and he’s off to the hospital.
Alex Strikes Out
At the hospital, Alex meets nurse Lisa. She is introduced ass-first with a tracking shot of her butt as she walks in. It isn’t a big ass, and therefore inconsistent with the movie’s overall theme, but it is a nice ass, so I’ll allow it.
This review features mostly ass pics
I felt confident that Lisa would be Alex’s love interest but it doesn’t happen. They share a flirty scene where he fails to impress her by pretending to be someone he’s not. But then he drops the act and genuinely impresses her with his knowledge of anti-venom.
However, he fails to close the deal when he tells her the bite might be fatal and he may only have one more meal in him, so did she want to join him for it? It’s a solid chat-up line, obviously not meant to be taken seriously (apart from the meal part) but she gives him a look that would wither your grandma and gives him a big ass no.
The moral here is to be yourself, but it still won’t be enough.
Enter The Spider
Meanwhile, a mortician wheels a dead body into the hospital morgue and something unzips the body bag from the inside. It’s our big ass spider, although it’s only plus-sized at this point. Its ass is probably still big, at least for its size. It was originally a black widow, and they have ass for days.
Pictured: ass for days
Anyway, while Alex waits in line to pay his big ass hospital bill (it’s America), the mortician appears at reception, holding his neck and saying he was bitten by a spider-like animal, but bigger.
Hospital director Gordon, Lisa and security guard Jose speculate on what it could be. Jose suggests the living dead, a black cat or a monkey. I like him already. Gordon says ‘if it was bigger than a spider, then it wasn’t a spider.’
I guess none of these noobs have heard of Occam’s razor, or big ass spiders for that matter. Alex negotiates a deal with them to catch it in exchange for waiving his bill. Jose accompanies him, and I think this will be the start of a beautiful friendship.
Meanwhile, special forces arrive at the hospital in blacked out 4x4s and a truck straight out of Knight Rider’s worst nightmare. The unit is led by Major Braxton C Tanner (proper military name, well done) played by the great Ray Wise. He is supported by Lieutenant Karly Brant, who is a woman, and the next candidate for Alex’s new girlfriend.
Gonna tell my kids this is Twin Peaks.
They are accompanied by Doctor Lucas, an eccentric Eurotrash scientist who smokes weird-shaped pipes, wears a Panama hat and utters ominous phrases like ‘it’s already entered stage 2.’ They are on the trail of the big ass spider and call me paranoid, but I think they may have had a hand in its creation.
Premature Ejaculation
At this point, Alex is crawling through the airducts looking for the spider. He finds a web and accidentally sets fire to it. It is highly flammable and burns up in seconds. That may be foreshadowing.
Karly saves Alex just as the spider is about to attack him. As soon as he sees her, he looks her up and down and squirts his poison spray, which I think is meant to represent premature ejaculation (whatever that is, I wouldn’t know, I must have read it somewhere).
The spider escapes into the sewer and Karly says ‘nice job, moron,’ which is unfair and doesn’t bode well for their relationship. However, they do swap business cards, so there is still hope. Jose convinces Alex to team up with him to find the big ass spider.
As great as Alex is, Jose is the MVP of this movie. A lot of his lines seem improvised but in a good way. He has his own Mexican theme music, a great accent and a line for every occasion.
Most Replayed Scene Of The Movie
It isn’t long before our big ass spider appears on the news. It kills some homeless people in the sewer and then embarks on a rampage through a park.
The spider is ‘Yo Momma’ size at this point (as big as a parade float) and employs a variety of inventive kill methods: spearing people with its legs, squirting them with acid, capturing them in its web, eating them and then burping their remains out onto a family picnic (putting them right off their burgers).
I must mention the scene where the spider menaces a group of female volleyball players in bikinis, which YouTube tells me is the ‘most replayed’ scene of the movie. I have no idea why, so to be thorough, I watched it a few times just to check if I had missed any important plot points.
Nope, nothing to see here
Alex and Jose arrive in Alex’s pick-up. They lure the spider away from the park towards the soldiers but get caught in the middle. The spider trashes Alex’s pick-up. The soldiers shoot it but it has zero effect.
Despite Alex’s warnings, the soldiers chase it into the woods and get killed. The spider cocoons Karly and drags her off. Due to plot armour, she isn’t dead, so there’s hope for her and Alex yet.
Big Ass Origins
Dr Lucas explains to Alex and Jose about the spider’s origins, which will sound familiar if you’ve seen the classic giant spider movie Tarantula. It centres around the discovery of a growth hormone that makes plants bigger.
Dr Lucas and co were going to use the hormone to grow giant crops to feed the world so we don’t have to suffer any more versions of Do They Know It’s Christmas. However, one of the plants contained a nest of black widows and the growth hormone worked on them too.
The twist is that the growth hormone was discovered in Martian DNA, so it has an alien origin.
The only part of that I have trouble believing is the military wanting to end world hunger. They want a weapon. Just admit it.
According to Dr Lucas, there are 5 stages to the spider’s development. We only get sketchy details of these stages and most of them don’t make sense, but here are my findings:
Sizeable Spider Sizing System
Stage 1: they don’t say what this is, but presumably it has something to do with a normal spider being doused with liberal doses of alien growth hormone.
Stage 2: this is where the spider’s exoskeleton hardens. However, this happens every time a spider sheds its skin, which it needs to do to grow. This would have to happen many times for it to reach big ass proportions. It isn’t a one-off event. Therefore, it doesn’t seem like a credible ‘stage’ in its lifecycle.
Stage 3: this is where the spider increases in size. But again, it is doing this the whole time. Dr Lucas says it has quadrupled in size even before it reaches stage 3, so size increases are not exclusive to stage 3. How is this even a stage?
Stage 4: fuck knows what this is, they skip it and go straight to stage 5. I’m beginning to think Dr Lucas is a lunatic. I guess this stage is where the spider stops growing and its big ass status is confirmed.
Stage 5: where the big ass spider reproduces. Finally, a stage that makes sense.
In my opinion, the five stages should be based solely on size. Here is how I would define them, thus codifying the sizeable spider sizing system (SSSS) that I have been working on for a while now:
Stage 1: Regular sized (still within the size range of spiders found in nature)
Stage 2: Plus-sized (bigger than any natural spider but smaller than a person)
Stage 3: Family sized (armchair/Volkswagen Beetle size)
Stage 4: Big Daddy/Yo Momma sized (parade float size)
Stage 5: Big Ass (ludicrous size)
Stop The Spider, Save The City, Kiss The Girl
Tanner asks Alex where he thinks the spider will go next. Alex has finally earned the Major’s respect as an arachnid expert. Alex tells him it will travel to a remote area to lay her eggs. Then they see footage of it trashing downtown LA and nesting at the top of a skyscraper.
Oops. Tanner kicks Alex and Jose out of the mobile command centre and orders an airstrike on the spider. Credibility ruined.
Tanner’s aerial footage locates Karly in the spider’s nest. He asks Alex and Jose to save her, and they only have 24 minutes to do it before the bombs drop (you know, the ones he just ordered). 24 minutes in LA traffic? The cheek of this guy. At least he lends them his car.
Alex accepts because he’s really horny for Karly. His plan has three stages: stop the spider, save the city, kiss the girl. These should be on everyone’s bucket list.
Jose suggests killing the spider by shooting at its highly flammable web, which is contained in the spider’s spinnerets, which is located in…it’s ass! Its big ass! Now we know why they called the movie Big Ass Spider. Finally, some answers.
But how will they ignite the web? Alex searches their vehicle and finds a bazooka in the back seat, as you do. Who doesn’t keep one in their car in case of emergencies, right next to the empty McDonalds cartons? You never know when you’re going to need to shoot a big ass spider in its bubble butt.
Spiderlings
As they near ground zero, falling rubble causes them to crash and we’re back to the opening scene of the movie, minus the slow motion and melancholy piano music.
It’s frantic now, apart from a brief elevator scene on the way up to rescue Karly, where Alex and Jose beatbox and subtly jive along to the elevator music. Moments like this make an average movie good, and a good movie great (this one is the former).
The spiderlings hatch (that’s what baby spiders are called – it almost makes them sound cute). They emerge as stage 2 spiders, so they can still be stomped on and shot, although they manage to drag away a random extra, which doesn’t seem physically possible.
Alex, Jose and Karly escape just before the planes destroy the top of the building and presumably all of the little spiderlings (aww).
The big ass spider is blown from the building and plummets to the ground. Did its web malfunction? Every time I’ve knocked a spider off something it just deploys its web and hangs about in mid-air like Stallone in Cliffhanger, giving gravity the old middle finger.
Anyway, it lands on its back but in the next shot it is laying on its front, despite not moving. In the wide shot it falls onto a major city street, but in the next shot it’s a crappy back road with boarded up shops. The lack of continuity is jarring, but the CGI is solid, so I’ll let it go.
It Ain’t Over Yet
Tanner says to his men ‘let’s not celebrate yet,’ and then proceeds to congratulate everyone and does nothing to make sure that the spider is actually dead. Which it isn’t. Obviously. It is resting.
Jose spots the spider coming back to life and Alex yells at him to get the bazooka. Jose runs back to the car while Alex runs TOWARDS the spider.
What is he hoping to achieve? He just dodges about, avoiding the spider’s attempts to impale him until Jose catches up and throws him the bazooka. Alex blows up the spider’s big ass and kisses Karly.
Spider stopped, city saved, girl kissed. This shows the importance of setting goals in life.
Rating: 6 spider legs out of 8
P.S, I wrote ‘big ass’ 27 times in this review. 28 including that last one.
The post Giant Spider Movie Review: BIG ASS SPIDER (2013) appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
