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| Tookey's Review |
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| Pro Reviews |
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| Mixed Reviews |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
1990 |
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| Genre: |
COMIC STRIP
UNDERRATED
BLACK COMEDY
MONSTER
HORROR
THRILLER
FAMILY
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Length: |
109 |
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Spiders threaten a small American town.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Jeff Daniels plays a young doctor, scared of creepy-crawlies, who ends up having to protect his all-American family and town from- what else? - a plague of Venezuelan killer spiders. Like Roy Scheider in Jaws, he has to contend with local scepticism and complacency. Like Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, he is allowed to triumph only when he has come face to face with his phobia.
Formula stuff, perhaps, but both the two-legged and eight-legged supporting casts were terrific, especially John Goodman as a pest exterminator with a lower IQ than his adversaries. The screenplay, by Don Jakoby (who co-wrote Alien) and Wesley Strick (who went on to write Scorsese’s Cape Fear), weaves a web of sophisticated variations around a pretty preposterous premise.
Director Frank Marshall was the second-unit director on Raiders, Back To The Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? His first solo effort is a top-class comic thriller, surprisingly unsuccessful at the box office (maybe people didn’t understand the title) and underappreciated by critics who were too quick to dismiss it as a derivative, over-inflated B-movie.
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, Harley Jane Kozak, John Goodman 
