Multi-legged creepy crawlies are even worse when a) there are lots of them b) they are huge, or c) they’re also kind of half zombie. Well, what do you know?! Whatever the case may be, there’s a movie for that.
IN THE SPIDER’S WEB (2007)
I swear there’s a company out there responsible for just making sure Lance Henriksen is always working. “What’s that? He’s finished filming Sasquatch Mountain and the two made-for-TV Pumpkinhead sequels? Okay. Now let’s have him play a mad scientist that can control spiders in a cave filled with spider webs. We’ll call the movie, In the Spider’s Web.”
Voila. A bunch of hikers in the jungle is brought to Lance by some creepy local tribesmen when one in their ranks is bitten by a spider. While Lance is busy caring for the bite victim, the others go exploring in the nearby caves.
The special effects team must have cleaned out an entire Halloween season’s worth of fake spider webs from every Party City in existence to make this film. The cave is covered in them, people are covered in them.
There are plenty of CGI spiders, but the webs totally steal their thunder.
Everyone’s trapped in the cave for a majority of the film, but the webs and the spiders are the least of their problems. Because the spiders seem to merely be doing the bidding of their master. Good lord…of the spiders.
If it weren’t for this film, we never would have known about Lance’s hidden talent: spider eater shadow puppets.
QUEEN CRAB (2015)
Director Brett Piper has been plugging away with b-movie wackiness since the 80s, hitting everything from zombies to dinosaurs, so it’s no surprise that Queen Crab is a goofy fun throwback to 1960s monster movies. It’s kind of, well…the redneck crab version of Mighty Joe Young.
The movie begins with a little girl befriending a pretty big crab – the result of experiments being conducted by her scientist dad. Several years later, she’s a young woman, orphaned and living by herself in her small town when livestock start turning up dead on local farms.
Ken Van Sant (HalloweeNight, Splatter Beach) plays her uncle and is also the sheriff, so he clashes with his deputy, played by cutie Richard Lounello (Bleeding Hearts), who is convinced she has something to do with it. These two guys make a pretty funny comic duo, but the odd thing is, Lounello’s character walks a line between being so likeable and a total scumbag! It’s quite a dilemma for viewers.
Meanwhile, the trashy locals are busy hanging at the bar, where the girls have to beat the guys off with a stick. Our main girl’s BFF, back in town after a lucrative career in exploitation film, has to put our adora-bastard deputy in his place with moves right out of The Bionic Woman.
And another young woman has to fight off the advances of the daddy bear bartender. Turns out he has crabs!
The queen crab is not happy when her little ones get squished during the scratching process!
Old school monster movie effects and modern blood and guts meet as townsfolk are clawed to pieces and eventually go crab fishing. Even military planes come in for the kill!
See, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman 1993? This is how much silly fun you could have been.
INFESTATION (2009)
Years before bringing us zombedy Night of the Living Deb, director Kyle Rankin brought us zombugs!
In this creature feature comedy, Chris Marquette (Freddy vs. Jason, Night of the Living Deb, Fear, Inc.) plays a young man who gets fired from his office job at a most inopportune time. Just as his boss is giving him the speech, the world grows fuzzy…and he comes to, covered in webbing. Within second of breaking free of it, he’s attacked by a giant bug!
He joins an eclectic group of survivors (you know the drill) attempting to survive a new reality in which giant bugs need to be squashed before they can sting you and turn you into…the fricking bug/zombie equivalent of a centaur. WTF? And these fuckers shriek like the clones in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
As freaky as the zombugs are, the focus remains mostly on the giant insects, and the party really starts when the survivors make it to the home of our leading man’s dad, played by always witty Ray Wise.
It’s a fun, funny, giant bug movie for sure, and the CGI is better than your average SyFy film. Plus, the zombugs give it a bit of a horror edge, saving it from being just another “must find and destroy the hive” creature feature.
