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DVD Review – Spiders 3D (2013)

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Spiders 3D, 2013

Directed by Tibor Takács
Starring Christa Campbell, Patrick Muldoon, William Hope, Shelly Varod, Jon Mack and Sydney Sweeney

SYNOPSIS:

After a Soviet space station crashes into a New York City subway tunnel, a species of venomous spiders is discovered, and soon they mutate to gigantic proportions and wreak havoc on the city.

There is a moment we all go through when popping a giant monster movie into our DVD or Blu-Ray players. It’s a moment that is essentially one thought: ‘will this be a made for Syfy waste of time, or will they actually try to make a good film?’ Thankfully, Tibor Takács’ Spiders 3D is in the latter category. Sadly, that doesn’t make it a good movie.

It’s always best to approach low-budget science fiction monster movies with a low amount of expectations as high ones will very rarely be met. You cannot expect the big explosions or realistic effects that comes with its bigger budgeted brethren as the film will most likely disappoint. However, even with your expectations lowered, Spiders 3D still doesn’t really muster up to much.
Patrick Muldoon plays Jason, a train line supervisor in New York whose day is interrupted by a crash landing of a Russian space station through his subway roof. Although it seems to be a just a brief inconvenience at first, the chunk of metal is soon revealed to be home to a race of alien spider creatures who start to create a havoc among the city that never sleeps as they grow in size. As his day gets worse and worse, Jason and his ex-wife Rachel (Christa Campbell) need to work together in order to rescue their daughter who are being held hostage by the government.
The simple story is actually quite engaging at the start of the movie and there is a good Aliens style Weyland Yutani business tone to it which gives Spiders 3D a bit more weight than your bog standard alien invasion movie. Sadly however, the film sort of starts to fall apart when the spider invasion starts. The movie gets all the exposition out of the way quickly, but then all you’re left with are a series of sub-standard action scenes that don’t excite or scare. It doesn’t help that the spiders are far too indestructible that even the smaller ones cannot be stopped, which might have been Takács’ way of giving them a Terminator-esque edge, but it just comes off as a cheap tactic to put our protagonists in peril.
The problem with Spiders 3D is that this cheap, b-movie style giant monster picture was done better in 2002 with a movie called Eight Legged Freaks. Even though the movie had its tongue placed so firmly in its cheek it was nearly chocking, it still managed to create a sense of fear for its characters as well as making its audience feel uneasy. Spiders 3D fails on this account and its attempts to take itself too seriously further damage any enjoyment. Even if you’re petrified by spiders, the design of these creatures is so laughable that it’s hard to buy into it.
Takács does create a good atmosphere in the early scenes of the movie and there is an effort made to create some interesting characters, but Spiders 3D is a pretty lousy movie experience with nothing new, inventive or imaginative. It relies too heavily on CGI animation (which makes the film look cheaper than it is) and it fails scaring its audience. It is better than all of the Syfy monster movies as it feels like they were trying to make a good film, but it’s still one to miss.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.

Originally published October 14, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.

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