Over the weekend I watched another insect horror film, Eight-Legged Freaks (2002). It’s meant to be a satire of the insect B-movies from the fifties, but I found it wanting.

The set up is labored, the plot contrived, and the subplots are confusing and dull—a bad combination. It stars David Arquette and also features a young Scarlett Johansson, playing the rebellious daughter of the local sheriff.

The plot, such as it is, involves a spider farm owner who feeds his spiders crickets that were contaminated by toxic waste. They grow bigger and bigger, escape from the cages, eat the owner, and then begin terrorizing the sleepy town of Prosperity, Arizona.

It’s a pretty dumb movie that tries to be funny, but most of the comic bits fall flat, particularly the scenes showing a lot of people, as well as several cute dogs and cats, who get their insides liquefied by arachnids the size of minivans. And the giant spiders giggle and grunt a lot.

Most of the scientific information is imparted by a boy named Mike (Scarlett Johansson’s character’s younger brother), who informs us about spiders’ nocturnal behavior, feeding habits, and sensitivity to vibrations. Of course no one listens to him until it’s too late, after dozens of people have been cocooned and exsanguinated.

It’s mildly cool to see gigantic trapdoor spiders in action, and the moviemakers at least nod in the direction of the actual spiders’ behavior. In real life, trapdoor spiders build hinged, camouflaged hiding places, lay trip lines outside their burrows, detect their prey by vibrations, and then burst out and snag their prey.