The B-Movie Shelf

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 t...

When radiation left behind by atomic weapons testing creates a gigantic killer mutant arachnid, it's up to a trio of scientists, an Army general, and a newspaper reporter and his fiancée to figure out how to stop the hungry beast from devouring the entire county. REVIEW: The Giant Spider is the 8th movie in the ever-growing filmography of Christopher R. Mihm's micro-budget films done in black and white and as a loving and beautiful fun-filled throwback to the classic 1950s Drive-In B-Movies of yesteryear. All of the films made by Mihm and his crew, films such as: The Monster of Phantom Lake It Came From Another World! Cave Women on Mars Terror From Beneath The Earth Destination: Outer Space Attack of the Moon Zombies House of Ghosts all take place in the same shared movie universe, but are also mostly stand-alone from one another other than some recurring characters and the occasional brief throwback to a previous movie here and there, so it's not i...

A giant mutant spider escapes from a military lab and goes on a rampage through the city of Los Angeles. When a massive military strike fails, it is up to one clever exterminator to kill the creature before its eggs hatch and the city is overran with hundreds of mutant spiders.  REVIEW: I'm a very vocal person when it comes to my annoyance with the overabundance of Shark movies in the B-Movie genre as of late. Surely the majority of them could have still essentially been the exact same movie with a different killer animal, so why not switch it up a bit and get some variety out there? That's why I've been doing my bit to help promote other corners of the killer animal B-Movie market that seem to have a shot at giving the sharks a run for their money. Dinosaur flicks have been putting up a good fight these last couple years with movies like Area 407 , The Dinosaur Project , Jurassic Attack , Age of Dinosaurs , and the upcoming flicks Poseidon Rex, Jurassic Block, and t...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: Nu Image RUNTIME: 90 mins FORMAT: BluRay PLOT: After a Soviet space station crashes into a New York City subway tunnel, a new species of dangerous venomous spiders is discovered, and soon they start mutating to gigantic proportions and wreak havoc on the city. REVIEW: When Spiders (Spiders 3D for its limited theatrical run) was first announced and we started getting news of it here and there, I was a bit confused as to what kind of movie it was - remake, sequel, or something original? See, back in 2000 and 2001 there were a couple SyFy Channel style B-Movies also titled Spiders and Spiders II: Breeding Grounds. Like this one, they also dealt with genetically-modified mutant killer spiders brought down on something crashing from space, and they too began growing to immense size during the films. I had no idea initially if this was supposed to be a new sequel to that series (with the 3 in 3D being the number of the movie), a remake to the f...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: Active Entertainment RUNTIME: 86 mins FORMAT: Screener PLOT: After earthquakes ravage New O rleans, dozens of locals fall victim to a previously unknown species of deadly albino spiders. Despite their best efforts, spiders swarm out of the earthquake - opened fissures and infest the city. REVIEW: I've been backing killer spider movies now for awhile, hoping that they would overtake the shark movies as the popular go-to killer animal for B-Movie companies, however the first of many killer spider movies to hit this year, Roger Corman's Camel Spiders , was only so-so and far from the great 'Second Coming' that I was hoping it would be to usher in the other killer arachnid movies of 2012 and beyond. Well luckily, coming up on Saturday, June 23rd at 9pm Eastern Time on Space: The Imagination Station in Canada, and the SyFy Channel in the U.S., we have our second major spider movie of 2012 – the awesomely-titled Arachnoquake, starri...

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long COMPANY: New Horizons RUNTIME: 85 mins FORMAT: BluRay PLOT: When a U.S. soldier returns home from Iraq, he accidentally brings with him a cargo of deadly baby Camel Spiders that soon get loose in a small town and start breeding, killing anyone that they come across. REVIEW: I've gone on many recent rants about the over-abundance of killer shark movies and how I'm glad that it seems 2012 is the Year of the Spider, what with movies like Camel Spiders, Arachnoquake, Mega Spider, and Spiders 3D all announced at various points for this year, I'm thrilled to see B-Movie companies (for the most part) making a shift away from sharks finally. So of course it would go without saying that I would be reviewing each killer spider movie that comes out this year, to help get the word out and do my part to help get those sales figures up so companies continue to move away from sharks for awhile. Of course with that said, it took me longer then I planned t...