20140419: SciFi Review--Big Ass Spider

Big Ass Spider!

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. American live action feature length film, 2013, rated PG-13, 80 minutes, SciFi, comedy.
2. IMDB: 5.2/10.0 from 2,357 audience ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 78% on the meter, but no consensus yet; 43% liked it from 739 audience ratings.
4. I saw this on the SyFy channel.
5. Directed by: Mike Mendez.
6. Starring: Ray Wise as Major Braxton Tanner, Patrick Bauchau as Lucas, Greg Grunberg as Alex Mathis, Clare Kramer as Lieutenant Karly Brant, Alexis Knight as Nurse Lisa.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Alex the exterminator has an ordinary day, more or less, but he gets bitten by a brown recluse.  He goes to a hospital to have the inflammation treated early on.  He sees a corpse go by, and asks Nurse Lisa about it.  While Alex is being treated, one of the hospital staff in the morgue notices something moving in the corpse's body bag.   The staff member thought it was a spider, just bigger than a spider.  No one believes this, but his wound inflammation is huge, nearly all of the right side of his neck.


2. Alex trades killing the spider for paying the hospital bill.  He sets about to kill the spider with a security guard.


3. Meanwhile, Major Tanner arrives and places the hospital under his command.  (Right, under what jurisdiction?)  Tanner wants to see the body in the morgue.


4. The spider, now a bit larger than dinner plate, crawls through the ducts ahead of Alex, and kills a patient.  The spider keeps getting larger with each kill.


5. The rest of the film is about the continued growth of the spider until it is huge.  Will Alex or Major Tanner get the giant arachnid under control before Los Angeles is destroyed or the spider eggs hatch?


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: The endless badness is almost funny, but not quite.
2. Two stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 7/10 Reasonably good.  The creature animation was mostly ordinary, partly stupid beyond belief.


2. Sound: 6/10 The actors were miked OK, but music was not used well.


3. Acting: 4/10 Yikes, what are Ray Wise and Patrick Bauchau doing in this debacle?  (The plus four was for Wise and Bauchau.)  Greg Grunberg was unrelentingly not funny and not believable.  I got absolutely no sense of fun or cleverness.  The rest of the actors (notably Clare Kramer) were terribly bad.


4. Screenplay: 2/10 Fifteen minutes of story were stretched beyond breaking over eighty minutes of movie.  On the SyFy channel, add another forty minutes of commercial interruptions.  This story was never scary, never funny, never clever.  It's wall-to-wall nonsense delivered with straight faces; stale, stupid, failed.  For this one, I would say that the viewers got it right, and the RT critics got it dead wrong.