Looking for a new residence, she’s just not sure this one’ll do for her thousands of offspring. Maybe something a little taller?
Falling into the same category as Terrordactyl (2016) is Big Ass Spider! (2013), which concerns the Army losing track of a corpse of someone killed by a mutant spider. When the corpse shows up in the morgue of a local hospital, and the spider escapes into the ventilation system, pest exterminator Alex offers to go after “it,” whatever it is, in exchange for voiding his hospital bill.
By the time he and his informal partner track it down to the physical plant of the hospital, the Army has arrived and boggles up his attempts to take down the spider, which is only a foot or two across.
Things go rapidly downhill after that, as the spider escapes the building and rapidly begins harvesting “food” (that would be humans) in preparation for reproducing (although it’s not clear with what it might have mated with in order to fertilize the eggs), with Alex in dogged pursuit, and one might say competition with the Army, in particular the second-in-command, a lovely Lieutenant Karly. Their firearms are useless against the carapace of the spider, and Alex is having problems applying poison to the spider. By the time the spider spawns, Karly is another item on the menu. And the spider?
Well, it’s big ass.
This is another entry in the evolution of the role of mythical monsters in the psyche of Western Civ. Representative of the divine in the early centuries, it exchanged those responsibilities for the role of being the devilish offspring of scientists, but now they’re becoming the creatures we must overcome to assert our dominance in the local neighborhood, even as they are a result of our own miscues. For all this may be played for horrific laughs, it can be seen as societal training for future treatment of monsters, extra-terrestrial or domestic, political or physical.
As a movie, it’s not bad, but not great. We had more fun with it than we expected, to be honest, and there are minor names in the cast as well, which may explain why it didn’t descend into that layer of movies known as cultishly bad. It was competently acted.
But, still, it was silly.
