Arachnophobia (1990)

Film: Arachnophobia (1990)

Stars: Jeff Daniels, Harley Jane Kozak, John Goodman, Julian Sands, Henry Jones

Director: Frank Marshall

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

When it comes to horror movies, one of the things that I didn't realize until I got more into them is that you need to deal with a surprising amount of humor in these films.  Horror movies are meant to be funny, and generally are, but especially when it comes to the horror classics of the 1980's & 1990's, the films have a level of cheekiness that borders into camp, sometimes to the film's chagrin and sometimes to their benefit.  Child's Play, for example, is at its best when it's being funny (you need some sort of winking given that a tiny doll can somehow keep overpowering these grown humans).  This is definitely the case with Arachnophobia, one of the last major horror films that Steven Spielberg produced (he also had a hand in Poltergeist and Gremlins) during his time when he was much more adventurous with his reputation (he became more serious post-Schindler's List).  The film is the silliest of the three films that he produced during the era that were decent-sized hits, but I think the least successful artistically precisely because the camp is too much for me.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film starts with an expedition in the jungles of South America where Dr. James Atherton (Sands) is looking for rare spiders, and finds one.  Unfortunately for one of his skeptical colleagues, the spider is vengeful and extremely venomous, and kills him.  The spider also is a stowaway when they send the body home, and ends up in a small town on the farm of Dr. Ross Jennings (Daniels) who has moved to the town with his wife Molly (Kozak) to become the town doctor, wanting to have a "simple life."  Unfortunately, Dr. Jennings is supposed to replace Dr. Sam Metcalf (Jones) a cranky old man who refuses to retire when he gets there, meaning Jennings will have no job in the new town.  The few patients who do end up spending time with Jennings end up dying after (because they coincidentally end up being victims of the spider and its drone army), which earns him the nickname of Dr. Death, until Dr. Metcalf also dies at the hands of a spider.  The town, including a pest control guy named Delbert McClintock (Goodman) team up to defeat the spiders, killing the parent spider and destroying the egg sac.  In the end, they move back to San Francisco...just as an earthquake hits.

The film is not meant to be taken seriously.  Goodman's character, the best part of the film, is a riot but also meant to be a silly figure, a jaded, talking-out-of-his-butt character who wants you to know he's seen it all, and can handle anything (except the task right in front of him).  The film leans into the horror without a lot of clear jokes (save Goodman), though, with us watching a series of comical deaths where each person dies at the hands of a spider bite, in an almost Three Stooges-style way.  The film is structured well to handle this (Daniels as the generically handsome doctor, his generically pretty wife by his side)...in some ways it reads like the type of horror movie you'd see in the 1950's save for some gruesome corpse photos, where it's not clear how much is meant to be funny.

But it doesn't work for me.  Maybe because a fear of spiders isn't really my thing (I don't like them, but I live in Minnesota where poisonous spiders are uncommon), but that wasn't something that I was innately scared of while watching.  The movie clearly wants to be like The Birds, but it lacks at least some of that social commentary (though it's Spielberg, so there's an urban vs. rural divide happening pretty opaquely in the first half of the movie).  All-in-all, it becomes a bit dull, and I sort of wish we'd seen more of Goodman earlier in the film, as the horror aspect just wasn't clicking for me, so at least we would've had more proper laughs.

Past Horror Month Reviews

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Child's Play, The Evil Dead, The Fly, Friday the 13th, Gremlins, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Thing

1990's-Present: The Blair Witch Project, Scream