In all truth, to write a long review of Camel
Spiders would be giving the movie more attention than it deserves, even if we
did sort of have a good time watching it. Originally a TV flick, Camel Spiders
does lack that one special effect that makes most Jim Wynorski flicks
particularly fun to watch — big and plentiful if usually plastic breasts — but for that it still
zips along fast enough, features a lot of cheap-looking and laughable CGI, and
displays enough flaws in both the script and the cinematography to keep the
viewer guffawing as they scarf down their chips and beer.
Yes, we enjoyed it — as we have most
Wynorski flicks, with the possible exception of Vampirella
(1996), which we violently hate — but we would never say that Camel Spiders is
anything close to a good movie. Camel Spiders, another project from RCU — Roger
Corman University, a film school Wynorski has chosen never to leave — is merely
yet a further Roger Corman produced
super-cheap and cheesy C-film, one of many in a lineage of
bargain-basement monster animal films that goes way back to equally inane if
now ancient flicks like Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954 / trailer),
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957 / trailer),
Attack of the Giant Leeches
(1959) and many, many, many more. And like those films, in many a decade from
now Camel Spiders will probably enjoy its own nostalgia-tinged fans who get a
kick out of cut-price blasts from the past.
The Facts behind Real Camel Spiders:
Needless to say, the biological and zoological veracity of
the movie is null — but who really gives a fuck? Like Eight-Legged Freaks (2002
/ trailer),
what we have here a simple big killer spiders movie, just made with a lot less
money and even less-known names than the older and admittedly better-made flick. (Rest assured, Scarlett Johansson was not a
name when she made Eight-Legged Freaks.) And Camel Spiders is indeed full of
hungry, killer spiders — spiders that seem to reproduce in milliseconds, for no
sooner do the first three baby spiders escape than is the entire region
infested with hundreds if not thousands of aggressive killer camel spiders.
In regard to the movie's narrative, Camel
Spiders is pretty all-over. It starts in Iraq with a military shootout, which
sets the scene for how the spiders (and the movie's lead male hero, Capt.
Sturges [Brian Krause of Sleepwalkers
(1992), Growth (2010 / trailer)
and Coffin Baby (2013 / trailer)])
get over here: Sturges, injured, gets sent home with the dead body of a fallen
comrade housing a few baby spiders. An accident on the roads of Arizona
(so-stated as the location, despite the fact that all cars have California
license plates) frees the spiders and, as already mentioned, in seconds they
multiply and grow and spread and before you can say "premature
ejaculation", Sturges, military babe Sgt. Shelly Underwood (Melissa
Brasselle, whose whole limited career is based on Wynorski flicks), and a group
of desperate survivors — including C. Thomas Howell, the best actor of the
movie, playing Sheriff Beaumont and looking like a refugee from the Village
People — are holed up in a warehouse in the middle of the desert, surrounded by
hundreds of hungry spiders. Not as many of the desperate group die as should,
to tell the truth, so to up the body count a few extraneous characters — mostly
teenagers — show up here and there, say a line of dialogue or two, do something stupid, and then die
in bloody CGI attacks.
The Village People — Macho Man:
Camel Spiders is a truly and notably
disjointed, possibly even stitched-together movie. For aside from the plotline above, which is
the focal one, there is a secondary narrative in the movie, one involving a
group of students on a field trip that have to face off with the spiders — and
never the twain do meet. In fact, the student narrative simply ends with the
two females locked inside a closed car that won't start. What is all the more
odd is that while Sturges and his group face off the camel spiders in the desert,
the students have their confrontation in a far more green and leafy environment
— Franklin, Indiana, according to the closing credits. (How quickly those
spiders spread!) This, combined with the final closing scenes in a drive-in
that could well be recycled from another movie, accentuates the overall cheap
and cheesy feel of the probable cobble job that is Camel Spiders.
So there you have it, too many words spent
on a mildly enjoyably bad movie that is anything and everything but imperative
viewing, but can be enjoyed if you have the right frame of mind. But, really,
both Wynorski and Corman have been involved with way better movies than this
tax write-off here. You're probably better off watching one of those movies instead.... or waiting a half century before you catch this one.
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