DVD Review: Arachnid
Written by: Kage Alan

Film Rating: C+
DVD Special Features: N/A

          I'm not particularly fond of spiders.  As a matter-of-fact, I despise them
and I blame my mother for this.  She doesn't like them either and passed this
fear on to me at a very early age.  I do attempt to overcome my fear from
time to time by watching films like "Arachnophobia" and "Spiders", but I'm
still left with my irrational dislike for those nasty many-legged, sometimes
hairy and potentially poisonous arachnids.  Isn't it just fitting another
film comes along with the arachnid title that dares me to sit through its 90
minute running time?  Of course I'll do it, but that doesn't mean my legs
weren't up in the chair with me the entire time.

"Arachnid" fortunately starts off with a major hokey factor.  A pilot flying
a new stealth plane catches sight of a UFO flying over the ocean and collides
with it.  He ejects and magically lands in the middle of an island.  Where
this island came from is a mystery because there wasn't anything around for
miles when he was flying.  Right, suspension of disbelief is in full gear
here.  So, he lands and comes across some alien wreckage as well as one of
the aliens.  No sooner does one of the beings appear when it's killed by a
rather large spider that also, we assume, kills the pilot.

Now we flash forward 10 months later when a female charter pilot named Mercer (Alex Reid) is hired by a group of people to fly them to some island in the South Pacific to bring medical relief to the natives there.  They are
apparently being killed off and bitten by something that hasn't been
identified yet.  Hmm, ¦what could that be?  The team that's assembled consists
of the leader Valentine (Chris Potter, "Queer As Folk"), a marine named Bear
(Rocqueford Allen), the head doctor Samuel Leon (Jose Sancho), his assistant
Susana (Neus Asensi), resident arachnid specialist Henry Capri (Ravil
Issyanov, "Along Came A Spider"), another marine and several natives.  They
are fortunately also packing lots of weapons.

Something on the island causes anything electrical to malfunction and Mercer
is forced to make an emergency landing on the beach.  It soon becomes
apparent as our group sets out for the village that they are not alone in the
jungle and that many animals have begun to mutate.  Ticks are now quite large
and burrow their way into one of the marine's bodies, there's a millipede
from Hell and then there are all those spider webs that keep showing up.  The
natives are knocked off one by one as are the medical staff in some extremely
disgusting ways.  Those who manage to make it past the first 80 minutes of
the film must then face the ultimate arachnid that the budget could provide.

"Arachnid", while not perfect, does contain some extremely gory moments that
are extremely unsettling, especially if you're not fond of nature-gone-amuck
films.  I certainly don't relish finding myself at the bottom of the food
chain.  At least the characters do try and do some intelligent things for a
change, yet that does tend to go to hell during the finale.  While there are
enough thrills and chills to keep you watching, many questions are left
unanswered and the ending is left open for a sequel.  Don't you just hate
when that happens?

The video quality on the DVD is actually quite nice.  There's not a lot of
grain and colors are decent.  The only problem I had was that the film was
listed as being in Widescreen, yet I couldn't find a setting on my player
that would show it that way.  It actually looked as if the Widescreen was
crammed onto the entire screen, much like watching a Pan and Scan ratio.  If
there's a way to get the player to view it differently, I couldn't find it.
The audio is a bit of a problem as well.  All of the non-English actors have
such thick accents that I had to turn the subtitles on just to find out what
they were saying.  Also, during the plane ride and then on the beach after
the crash sequence, dialogue was so overshadowed by the music score and other audio effects that it was impossible to hear what anybody was saying.  This improved slightly once the film moved into the jungle, but I ended up keeping the subtitles on for the rest of the movie.

I was a little surprised at the lack of extras on this DVD.  Director Jack
Sholder did such a wonderful job with providing supplementary material for
"The Hidden" that I thought there'd at least be a commentary if not some
behind-the-scenes footage.  Nope.  Nothing.  There are a couple of trailers
and that's it.  It's kind of disappointing because I thought the special
effects crew would be drooling at the prospect of being able to show off how
they grossed us out and how they did the animatronic spider and CGI
creatures.

Overall, "Arachnid" was entertaining.  The characters had some decent
moments, the acting from some of them wasn't too bad and the majority of the
special effects weren't entirely awful.  There's just enough gore to keep
gorehounds happy and enough creepy crawly things to keep people like me in
the seat with my feet off of the ground.  It was really the audio that
spoiled it for me as well as frustration over trying to find out why I could
get the picture in Widescreen.  Maybe you'll have better luck than I did with
it.  In the meantime, if you're walking in the dark and feel something crunch
underneath your feet, check around.  There might be more of them.

Kage holds degrees in Creative Writing, as well as Film & Video. He has been featured in a Life Journey Tele-Course, published poems in several national anthologies, been a contributor to The Third Coast Magazine and written several novels. kage@modamag.com This site is a