Arachnia (2003)

When a small plane carrying a group of science students and their professor crash lands in the middle of nowhere, the survivors go to a nearby farmhouse to look for help but soon find themselves besieged by giant mutant spiders.

REVIEW: I grew up watching all these 1990s/early 2000s SyFy Channel-level creature feature movies and Arachnia, from 2003, was one I remembered loving a lot when I was younger.

Well how times have changed. I decided to revisit this one recently for the first time since high school, since it was on Amazon Prime Video, and boy oh boy, was it a rough viewing. 

The acting was atrocious, even by the low bar of standards for these types of movies, and the characters were all annoyingly horrible people - There isn't one single character that was enjoyable to watch here or that you feel you could root for, which just makes it all the more frustrating when it takes forever for the giant mutant killer spiders to start attacking and you have to spend so much downtime with all these unlikable characters.
 

It's not all horrible though. The death scenes, at least the ones that aren't annoyingly off-screen, are pretty enjoyable and gory, and the most interesting thing about this movie is the use of oldschool claymation stop motion effects for the mutant spiders and their attack scenes. I mean sure, it doesn't mesh well at all with the actual real live-action stuff, but at least it's something different from the norm and I can appreciate the attempt and the effort that went into that. It's certainly more interesting and visually-pleasing than the really bad early-2000s TV budget CGI that plagued a lot of these types of movies.

4/10 rooms in the Psych Ward