Recorded on VHS tape from Channel 7, I repeatedly watched Arachnophobia (1990) as a child. Along with Tremors, these were horror comedies that worked best as ‘gateway horrors’ for me, at a time when I was petrified by the horror aisle in a video store due to the suggestive box covers. Both Arachnophobia and Tremors also feel like people making their own big budget versions of the ‘creature features’ they grew up watching on TV during the 1960s and 1970s. Directed by Frank Marshall and an Amblin Entertainment production, Arcachnophobia ambles along as a movie, throwing out shaggy jokes continuously and almost feeling akin to Touchstone Pictures comedy dramas from this period, of big city folk making a go of it in small country towns, than an out and out horror movie.
In the small town of Canaima, there are two recent arrivals. There’s the affable doctor Ross Jennings (Jeff Daniels) and his family, looking to become the new GP. And then there’s a venomous Venezuelan spider that has made the trip in a photographer’s coffin and is ready to mate with a common house spider (I will always remember the shot of two spiders tenderly stroking each other’s legs), creating a new strain of deadly spiders ready to take over the populace. Being an Amblin production, there are allusions to the works of Steven Spielberg, from the opening sequence based in Venezuela with the British entomologist Atherton (Julian Sands), recalling an Indiana Jones vibe, and then the encroaching threat across a peaceful, quiet town has aspects of Jaws, particularly when the local authorities are slow to believe the doctor’s theories that a string of deaths may have been caused by a spider bite.
Recently I watched all of the Aaron Sorkin HBO series The Newsroom, kind of a hate-watch if I’m honest, but it was great to return to a younger Jeff Daniels and appreciate how dryly funny he is in the lead. That, and he really sells his character’s fear, the classic movie coincidence where the hero investigating the deadly spiders has had a childhood case of arachnophobia; makes you realise that movies like this are more effective when the hero is visibly scared. Of course, we gain and lose something with each era of filmmaking, and I was just appreciating the 1990s era touches of Harley Jane Kozak playing the “wife” character, or John Goodman as comedy relief exterminator Delbert (complete with his own theme in the Trevor Jones score). Or even just the cliches of character actor Roy Brocksmith (the doctor from Total Recall) playing the mortician and walking into a morgue with three dead bodies on the slab chowing down on a big bag of potato chips. And then the hilariously entertaining finale which brings all the bells and whistles to what is ostensibly Jeff Daniels freaking out in his basement against the Queen Spider, cinematically rendered as a cross between Evil Dead II and the climax to Aliens.
Streamed on SBS On Demand.
VHS Tracking 