SPIDERS

A Russian satellite crashes on Earth. Fragments fall on New York, causing major damage inside a subway station. Jason, the railroad superintendent, realizes that this is not a simple accident shortly after the death of a colleague and friend. Indeed, spider eggs are found in the man's corpse. These are not common spiders, but a species that grows fifteen centimeters every hour that passes. A much bigger threat than the fallen satellite, which will infest the subway in a few hours. But the army does not seem too concerned. Very likely, with a clear mind, in response to the question "What scares you the most?" one of the most popular answers in this hypothetical survey would be: spiders. An atavistic fear that revolves around the wonderful eight-legged creatures, architects of perfect constructions, in the collective imagination for over fifty years as cinema monsters. They began to become protagonists of science fiction in the 1950s with "Tarantula," continuing in horror with "Aracnofobia" and "Arak Attack," to end up making appearances in famous billion-dollar sagas like "Harry Potter" and "The Lord of the Rings." In 2014, after several delays, the latest work with spiders as protagonists arrives in Italy, this time coming directly from space. They are huge, mean, and protagonists of a horrible movie. Behind this project is the director Tibor Takacs, whom some may remember as the author of "Non aprite quel cancello," a 1987 film, the only more or less known title in his filmography. The rest of his career has been based on a string of TV trash. It's pointless to spend words on the meager budget, the troubled production, and all the excuses that may come to mind: "Spiders" is a bad movie. Everything is of poor quality: the story, the acting, the special effects, and the set design, the photography. There is nothing to save in such a disaster. Pretending that all these flaws do not exist (a difficult task), one remains disappointed because one falls once again into the same mistake, typical of mediocre horror productions like this one: the total absence of irony. In a Z-movie, irony is fundamental to the success of the work. If one takes as an example "Sharknado," a movie in which sharks are transported around by a storm, one has the awareness of seeing a nonsense given that everything is played on absurdity, starting from the plot itself. In front of a movie like "Spiders," this does not happen. It does nothing but take itself seriously from the first to the last scene, generating embarrassment and general flatness. Complicit in the failure is also the staging. There is not a single image in the movie that was shot outdoors (except for the panoramas of the city of New York made from above). All locations (the subway, the city streets) are all reconstructed (poorly) in the studio with such unreal photography that it bothers. One never understands if it is day or night, and this damages the general atmosphere of the story. Coming precisely to the story, one can tear one's hair out. Alien DNA inserted into spiders that has transformed them into precious weapons of war, study, and providers of an indestructible web used by the military, naturally all kept secret from the world until an old satellite, loaded precisely with these spiders, does not crash on Earth. So much stuff and so many doubts. During the viewing, there are moments of total lack of credibility, such as the doctor who discovered that the victim's body is full of spider eggs. She does not contact health authorities, she does not contact law enforcement, but she talks to a railroad official. Once given the railworker a sample of eggs (never seen before on the face of the Earth) extracted from the teeming body, he takes them to his ex-wife, with whom he obviously has a war-like relationship, who happens to be a national health official. Banality that gushes in torrents like blood from a severed artery. When the surprise of the movie finally arrives, the Godzilla-sized spider queen does nothing but walk through the city streets, while dozens of soldiers with poor aim surround her and waste bullets. If they wanted to pay homage to something, they got everything wrong, and it is incredible to think that a movie of this kind, today, has the possibility of being released in theaters. We conclude with a clarification that does not seem very clear to the filmmakers. Spiders are not insects. They are arachnids.