The slasher films are out, so why not bring back the good old B-grade monster movie? Well, watch Eight Legged Freaks and find out.

Eight Legged Freaks, once known as Arac Attack, is about a small town in Nevada that becomes infested with giant, radioactive spiders. That's the plot for the most part; everything else is just filler.

The good thing about the movie is that it never tries to be more than it is; it knows it is a B-grade film and embraces the fact. The spiders don't look completely real, the characters are cheesy, the situations are cheesy - well, hell, the title is cheesy (yet superb). The movie stars David Arquette, who actually pulls a surprise and acts worse than usual.

The bad thing about the movie is that it never tries to be good. There's a difference between trying to be a B-grade movie and trying to be a good B-grade movie; there are, after all, there are good B-grade movies (just look at the Evil Dead movies - by the way, wouldn't Bruce Campbell have been perfect in David Arquette's shoes?). Eight Legged Freaks at times tries to spoof itself, but not nearly as much as needed. In fact, it falls into the crack that no movie like this wants to fall into - it isn't scary, and it isn't funny, either. It is just there, a film on the shelf with no soul. Or something along those lines.

The thing is, I wasn't expecting much from Eight Legged Freaks. I just wanted a nice, fun, cheesy horror movie with some good laughs and perhaps a few thrills. Instead, I sat there and watched giant spiders jump around for an hour and a half, and that really gets tiresome after a while. There really isn't anything terrible about Eight Legged Freaks (keeping in mind what kind of movie this is), but there's isn't anything good about it, either. It is just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill... comedyhorrormovie? I don't even know what to call it, because it sure as hell wasn't scary and it definitely wasn't very funny.

Had there been a funny script to go along with the action, Eight Legged Freaks would have been an enjoyable, mindless film. Instead, it's just mindless.

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.