One lovely morning, in the peaceful country town of
Canaima, California…in front of an attractive old farm-house… down
kerplops a crow! Fell right out of the sky! Dead!
Next, up pulls a station wagon, and out piles the
handsome, fair-haired Jennings family from nearby San Francisco, eager
to move into their new dream home. They are Ross Jennings (Jeff
Daniels), a doctor, his wife Molly (Harley Jean Kozak), and their two
kids.
Dr. Jennings does have this one personality quirk: because of a childhood trauma, he has “arachnophobia’—the fear of spiders.
Meanwhile, creeping off the nearby dead crow, eager to move into his
new dream home—the barn—is “Big Bob”: a huge, hairy, horrifying
tarantula, coming to us directly from a just-discovered prehistoric
sinkhole in Venezuela, some 4,125 miles away as the crow flew (actually,
Bob took a plane most of the way).
This incredible happenstance might be both
funny-peculiar and funny-ha-ha, since “Arachnophobia” is billed as a
“thrill-omedy”. But what it portends is: within two months all the
crickets in Canaima stop chirping; several locals die of apparent heart
attacks; and finally, there is Dr. Jennings poking around in his cellar,
hyper-ventilating, with a homemade flame-thrower consisting of a can of
spray-paint and a Bic Flic, which he fires off frantically at any
moving shadow—and they all seem to be moving!
This traumatic physician-heal-thyselfing seems a
bit much—why not just give him a regular, healthy fear of spiders, like
the rest of us? I myself have since adopted a squish first, ask
questions later policy, there is a rolled up newspaper within reach
right now, ready to smash any UMO’s (unidentified moving objects) that
appear.
Studies have shown that a spider’s scariness is
geometrically proportional to the thickness of its legs, and Big Bob’s
plump drumsticks would give anyone the leaping heebies. He somehow mates
with a harmless little California spider his first night in town, and
their many offspring have thinner but nimbler limbs, allowing them to
quickly disperse through town, climbing up steps, scuttling under
doorways and across walls, and sometimes catapulting off ceilings. They
crawl into coffee cups, shoes, blankets, football helmets, and shower
drains. One even becomes an unwelcome premium in a box of breakfast
flakes.
The moviemakers worried about keeping us too tense
for too long, so they cast John Goodman (of ABC’s Roseanne) as an
eccentric exterminator.
“We needed to have somebody who the audience knows
is a funny guy. When they see his name, they feel that this movie will
be okay,” says director Frank Marshall (“Shot by Shot”, Premiere, 7/90).
Also, though, he thought it “was very important to have it totally
believable —so I used real spiders throughout the movie.” (“Thrills,
Chills and Spiders”, WPIX, 7/23/90).
Entomologists may find the most comic relief in
“Arachnophobia”. Their on-screen proxy, Dr. James Atherton (the dashing
Julian Sands), collects specimens by blasting trees with insecticide and
raking up the bodies—yet later on he insists that dead spiders are no
good to study; Dr. Jennings must find him a live one.
When a member of his expedition dies suddenly, and
his corpse wears an expression of supreme terror, Atherton dismisses it
as “jungle fever”. When, at night, alone, looking for the poisonous Big
Bob, he finds a web as big as a circus net in the Jennings’ barn, he
strums the trigger thread playfully and says, “Come out, Mr. Spider,
dinner’s ready.” He’s not even wearing gloves!!!
Just as using real spiders doesn’t guarantee
believability, nor is simply casting John Goodman enough for the
funniness—they didn’t give him enough funny things for him to say and
do.
Also, the spiders are lousy actors —in their
closeups, you can tell they don’t know who they’re supposed to bite,
where they’re supposed to go, or anything.
Those legs definitely put the chill on you, though,
and there’s so many spiders that when you try to go to sleep that
night, they’ll still be swimming in front of your eyes.
Daniels and Kozak are attractive performers; the
set design and cinematography are high quality; and on all counts, if
you are wanting a spider movie, “Arachnophobia” is way better than
“Kingdom of the Spiders”, “The Giant Spider Invasion”, or even “Earth
Versus The Spider”.
The opening sequence, shot on location in the
awesome Venezuelan mountains, is wonderful—there’s this one shot of two
blue parrots swooping in front of a green background that I’d love to
have framed —we hate to see the expedition leave this amazing place.
Maybe they should have stayed in the sinkhole, giving Big Bob the home
court advantage, and had Daniels and Kozak along on the expedition as
the pilot and a free-lance photographer respectively. She could be
initially attracted to the dashing Sands, and the timid Daniels would
have to prove himself, and —ahhhhhh! [SMASH] Oops, sorry, thought I saw
something moving!
— R. Rube; article first published in Hunterdon County Review, 1990
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