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After thirty instalments, a British movie has finally taken its place in Last Movie Outpost’s pantheon of giant spiderdom. It is called Spider in the Attic.
Spider in the Attic is an effective title because who wasn’t scared of their attic as a child? I was expecting a bogeyman story with a child finding a giant spider in their attic but nobody believing them. But that’s not what we get. The title is misleading, for the following reasons:
The title suggests a single giant spider, but many of them appear in the film. Would it have killed them to pluralise it, or were they saving that title for the sequel?
The spiders are not confined to the attic. They roam around the house and even outside without a care in the world. The attic cameos, at best.
British movies should use British parlance, which is ‘loft,’ not ‘attic.’
Even though the title is bullshit, I concede that Spiders in the house, garden and loft occasionally doesn’t have the same ring to it. It doesn’t excuse the lie, but it explains it. The original title was Spider from the Attic. Yeah, that ‘from’ really needed to go.
Ethical concerns
We start with a guy who looks like your dad, sitting in a big chair by a roaring fireplace. I thought he was about to start reading The Night Before Christmas. Instead, he reads a letter firing him from his job.
Until recently, he worked in biomedical research (uh oh) at a ‘research organization.’ Organisation is spelt the American way, with a z, even though we’re in Britain (which could be Microsoft Word’s fault, it’s always trying to autocorrect that).
He calls his former employers ‘idiots’ and asks aloud to nobody:
Why discard credible science because of how ethical the research was?
Well, we could have a long chat about that, but to keep it short, the whole ‘the end justifies the means’ argument is often used to rationalise away pure evil. Just saying.
As if to prove my point, we see flashes of his research paperwork, which includes Nazi swastikas on headed paper. Never underestimate a person’s capacity for denial.
The delightful gentleman’s name is Mr George Kemp, according to the letter. Not sure why he isn’t a doctor or a professor. Perhaps he was struck off for ethical breaches, or perhaps his former employers were giving him the finger in a passive-aggressive way by calling him ‘mister.’
False advertising
After a short research montage, he looks into a magnifying glass and announces:
‘I’ve done it, finally.’
He sounds unconvincing, like an introvert father of the bride making a reluctant speech at his daughter’s wedding that makes everyone’s toes curl. Or maybe just a mediocre actor.
He uses a voice recorder to explain himself to the viewers. He has corrected a gene in an organism and made it immortal, aggressive and adept in growth. Will these scientists never learn?
He walks over to a glass cage, where he keeps a weird-looking stage 2 spider of some kind. By the way, the poster for this movie is a lie as well. It depicts a tarantula-like stage 4 spider resembling Shelob from The Lord of the Rings lurking in an attic. The spiders in this movie infrequently visit the attic, look different and are much smaller, mostly.
False advertising
George retires to bed, only for the spider to creep into his room and kill him. Did its cage have a cat flap? Bye, George. We hardly knew you. You’re a real loss to humanity.
G.I. Jane
In the next scene we meet Linda, a radio presenter who hosts a true crime show. Her horrible boss, Shauna, isn’t happy that Linda’s listener numbers are declining. Linda doesn’t want to sell out by producing mass appeal/low quality content, but surely that’s not the only other option.
Quality and appeal aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s no reason why a high quality show can’t also be popular. She could even aim for low appeal/low quality, a strategy popularised by the makers of this movie.
Linda has two adult daughters. Belle is heavily pregnant and sells it by having a big belly and weird cravings. Lucy is in the army and sells it by wearing camouflage clothing five sizes too big for her.
Lucy is played by Sarah Alexander Marks, who Boba Phil interviewed last year. Alas, they were chatting about another movie.
Both daughters want to help their mother freshen up her show. Belle’s bright idea is to find a crime that hasn’t been investigated before and solve it.
Woah, step back folks, we’ve got a real genius on our hands here. Isn’t that the entire point of a true crime show?
Lucy’s plan is bolder and stupider. She knows about George’s Nazi research and wants Linda to investigate. How she knows about it is confusing and contradictory.
At first Lucy says it’s sensitive military information, but then she says it’s just rumours they heard while training (it happened in the next town). Then she presents an article detailing the whole saga of George being fired for carrying out Nazi experiments on animals.
It isn’t clear where the article came from. Either it is public knowledge or she’s leaking classified documents. Screw it, we’ve got to get this movie started somehow.
Moral relativism
Lucy’s plan is to interview George to get his side of the story, using the carrot of publicity to get him to agree. She thinks it might lead to him getting a research grant! Yeah sure, I’d love to read the ethics section of the application form.
Lucy acknowledges that the subject is controversial (what, being a mouthpiece for a Nazi scientist? Surely not) but that’s what gets ratings, and the end justifies the means, right?
It’s a shame that George is already dead. He would have gotten along famously with Linda and Lucy. They could have had long chats about moral relativism into the wee hours of the morning.
Linda takes her proposal to Shauna, who isn’t keen on the idea because she’s a nemesis archetype who acts as a barrier to the main characters’ goals. She has no choice but to be an obstacle – she’s written that way.
From an in-movie perspective, Shauna doesn’t want to invest in a failing show, even though she’s the one who wants it to be reinvented (for free, presumably). But how much would it cost to travel to Kent, interview George and determine the feasibility of the project? I’m guessing…not much.
Their source of conflict isn’t credible, in my opinion. Anyway, Shauna’s colleague Lorena arrives and talks her into agreeing way too easily, as if the screenwriter was going through the motions of providing an obstacle to Linda because they knew they ought to, but their heart wasn’t really in it.
I mean, we all know the movie isn’t going to end here. Of course Shauna is going to agree. But the art of screenwriting is convincing viewers, even for a few seconds, that it could end here.
Character fate predictions
But there’s is a catch: Shauna and Lorena have to accompany Linda on the trip. Wait, so we’ve gone from not wanting to invest in the show to making a significant time investment of two senior members of staff in the space of a minute?
Also, that’s three characters now whose names start with an L (Lucy, Linda and Lorena). Rule number one of screenwriting: never give your characters similar sounding names.
Lucy and Belle tag along for the trip, as well as Danny, Belle’s reluctant ‘baby daddy’ (I believe that’s the politically correct term for deadbeat fathers). It’s clear what the moviemakers are doing: stacking the cast with spider fodder.
Let me guess who dies: the deadbeat father, obviously, and Shauna, the awful boss. Lorena is under-developed, so she’s finished too. Pregnant chick is probably okay, unless they go hardcore, but she’ll almost certainly go into labour and will be forced to mask her cries so the spiders don’t find her.
Linda and Lucy’s fates are unclear. It could go either way. I’ll guess that Lucy lives and Linda dies. I can’t wait to find out how well I’ve done.
Arrival
They arrive at George’s house in the Kent countryside. He doesn’t answer the door because he’s still dead. It transpires that Linda tried to call, once, but they made the trip anyway (money is no object now, apparently).
Lucy breaks into the house using a trick she claims she learnt in the military, but I reckon she’s using that as cover for some sketchy shit she did as a teenager. She looks the type (just kidding – Sarah Alexander Marks is lovely).
They search the house and find many spider webs but no spiders. It quickly becomes clear that these spiders are hide-and-seek world champions. In one shot we see several of them in a bedroom, mooching around, but when Linda enters, they have all disappeared.
She hears scuttling sounds, looks under the bed but finds nothing. This happens every time a character looks under a bed in movies. The jump scare always happens when the person gets back up. Anyway, Linda gets back up and a spider is on the bed! She flees and shuts the door on it.
Surprise motherf*****
At the same time, Shauna discovers George’s cocooned corpse and Lorena finds the spider in the glass box. It’s still there! So where did the other spiders come from, including the one that offed George? You know what? Don’t bother explaining, it’s fine. Sorry to have bothered you.
Here’s my main issue with this movie: once they discover the house is infested with giant spiders, 33 minutes into the film, it takes another 48 minutes of screentime for them to ACTUALLY LEAVE THE HOUSE.
It would take me five seconds. Ten if I tripped on a rug on the way out.
Feminism is bullshit
Danny wants to leave but Belle refuses. They argue and Danny reveals that he never wanted the baby (he’s definitely a goner now). He walks out but instead of getting in his car and driving away, he hears a strange noise in an outbuilding (a sauna, I think).
Bear in mind that he already knows about the giant spiders, so it’s not clear why he’s still curious about the source of the noise. It’s obvious what made the noise: a giant spider made the noise. If anything, it should provide a greater incentive to get the hell out of there. Instead, he investigates and gets sprayed in the eyes with web.
Between you and me…I think it’s terminal.
Belle and Lucy have a heart-to-heart conversation. In one of the most surprising twists of the movie, Lucy announces that feminism is bullshit. She doesn’t put it exactly like that, but that’s the gist.
Despite being a strong, capable, intelligent, career-focussed, successful, independent girl-boss, Lucy’s life feels empty and she wants to have a baby like her sister. Good for her.
Belle reminds Lucy that family life is no picnic, as evidenced by her relationship with Danny and the fact that she only kept the kid to keep him, even though he didn’t want the kid, and now he’s dead because these two idiots don’t know how to talk to each other (but hey, lucky escape for the kid!).
Also, I doubt that a fit young man like Danny had life insurance. He rocked tight T-shirts to flaunt his muscles. He probably thought he was going to live forever, but now Belle has to raise the baby alone without a father or financial support.
Pictured: a tight T-shirt
In conclusion, I don’t think that Belle and Gaston…sorry, Danny’s relationship is the best example of family life. It’s probably best that Lucy ignores any advice her sister gives her, or just does the complete opposite.
Alien DNA (again)
Meanwhile, Linda and Lorena investigate the attic, to fulfil the promise of the movie’s title. They don’t find any spiders. They find a gun, which may come in handy later, and some exposition cassettes where George explains everything from beyond the grave.
He introduces himself as George Zizzerman, even though the letter we saw earlier said George Kemp (continuity alert!). I prefer Zizzerman to Kemp. At least he doesn’t sound like a long-lost member of Spandau Ballet.
He confirms he’s been replicating Nazi experiments and growing creatures using alien DNA (stop me if you’ve heard this one before). It’s not clear where George obtained the alien DNA required to continue Hitler’s experiments 70 years later, but he managed.
Once grown, the creature developed eight limbs, presumably because it was morphing closer to its original alien form (or it was desperate to be included in my giant spider series). At one point George says the creature has ‘grown to a rapid size,’ which is an odd way of putting it because the adjective ‘rapid’ describes speed, not size.
The spiders most closely resemble camel spiders, but they don’t really look like any spider found in nature. But they’re aliens, so it’s cool. I like the design, and the effects are decent, so why not put it on the poster?
Note to the filmmakers: if you want to make Shelob in the Attic, then do it. Nobody’s stopping you. Instead, you made a whole other movie that you didn’t believe in enough to put on the poster.
Side note: there does appear to be an inverse correlation between the quality of modern monster movie posters and the quality of the actual movie. It reminds me of 1980s fantasy movies, where posters featuring large breasted women wielding swords promised so much.
The unabridged spider chronicles
Belle notices that Danny’s car is still outside, hours after he supposedly left. She finds his body in the sauna but can’t escape because the spider that killed him is still hanging around. Then she goes into labour. Of course she does. She is forced to mask her cries or the spiders will find her.
After finishing the unabridged spider chronicles audiobook read by the world’s most boring man, Shauna makes the sensible decision to leave (the others want to stay). Her car won’t start, so she walks around to the front and lifts the bonnet (or hood, in American).
There’s a spider on the engine block. I recall a similar scene in Camel Spiders. I might need one more example before I can add it to the bingo card, but a new trope appears to be emerging that states if a giant spider sits on your engine, the car won’t start for some reason. The spider spits something at Shauna (not web – some kind of acid) and then eats her face.
Surprise again, motherf*****
Linda and co investigate Shauna’s screams but run back into the house when they see the spider. They don’t attempt to save her. Would you save your boss?
Linda starts ranting about how they shouldn’t be there and are trespassing in the spiders’ home. Oh really, you think? They can’t reach the police on the phone (no signal, can you believe it?) and then they remember that Belle exists, and is missing.
Spider showdown
Linda searches upstairs with the gun (I told you it would come in handy) but almost blows Lucy’s head off. Lucy takes the gun. Perhaps they should have just given it to the soldier in the first place.
Lucy rescues Belle from the sauna, so she can start her screaming labour in earnest. Great, a birth scene. I can’t wait.
They notice that the spider in the glass box is missing (must have exited through the cat flap I mentioned earlier). They seem to think that only two spiders are on the loose, one inside and one outside, but everyone knows that for every spider you see, there’s maybe a hundred you don’t.
It’s confusing because the audience has seen many more spiders in various cutaway shots so it’s hard to see things from the characters’ perspective. It would be better if we saw what they saw. Our superior position makes them look even dumber than they are anyway.
GI Jane goes spider hunting and zeroes in on one climbing the wall in George’s bedroom. She takes it out with a quick one-two double tap. Nah, only kidding. She fires twice in a panic, the gun bucks, she misses and falls on her ass. Maybe she works in catering?
She looks under the bed and the spider RUNS STRAIGHT AT HER! It’s a good moment that subverts expectations. I mean…she looked under the bed and something was actually there. That never happens, except when it does (it’s possible that I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about). She shoots it again and takes it out.
A cunning plan
Downstairs, Lorena asks Linda if she heard the gunshots. I’m guessing yes. Belle is screaming quite loudly at this point but it’s GUNSHOTS, in the same house. Why would you even ask that question?
Linda goes to find more towels for Belle. If there’s one thing that movies have taught me, it’s that women in labour need lots of towels, but I don’t know why and at this point I’m afraid to ask.
Towels
Lorena meets up with Lucy, who has a cunning plan: let the spider who is outside into the house, then run to the cars. Great plan, assuming they can get past the giant spider they just let in the front door. The next step of the plan is to burn down the house (finally a good idea).
They return to the attic because Lorena saw some gasoline up there earlier (well, where else would it be?). Also, we’re still in Britain. Would it have killed them to say ‘petrol?’
Lucy finds the petrol in the attic and a spider appears! Finally, a spider in the attic! Mission accomplished. Lucy shoots it and runs downstairs with the fuel, but Lorena lags behind. Another spider heads up the stairs without seeing Lucy somehow (the geography is confusing and it’s dark).
Lorena sees the spider, runs into the attic and closes the door. In the next shot, the spider has somehow made it into the attic. Lucy arrives at the top of the stairs and the door is closed. This means the spider opened the door and then shut it behind him. It attacks Lorena and Lucy doesn’t even try to save her. She pours petrol over her instead.
Finally, leaving the house
Belle and Linda encounter another spider in the birthing room. Belle is forced to mask her cries or it will find her. At least it shuts her up for a bit. In the end the spider just walks out, so the scene is anticlimactic.
Belle and Linda escape the house and make it to their car. Lucy throws some petrol around the house and lights it, but we don’t see any flames (budget I guess). Lucy gathers George’s exposition tapes and gives them to Linda so she can keep her show going!
In many ways this has worked out quite nicely for them. And I guessed most of the character’s fates correctly.
One last sting. As they get in the car, they hear a spider’s roar. For the record, spiders don’t roar. They sometimes make sounds by rubbing body parts together, but it’s more of a hum than a T-Rex bellow. But I suppose you can get away with anything when it’s an alien.
A stage 5 big ass spider lumbers into view, dwarfing the house. Where was it hiding all this time? Anyway, it sets up an epic third act battle that will decide the fate of all humanity.
Nah, just kidding. Spider in the Attic ends on that shot. Sorry.
But hey, at least we didn’t have to see the baby being born.
Rating: 3 spider legs out of 8
The post Giant Spider Review: SPIDER IN THE ATTIC (2021) appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
