"Eight-Legged Freaks" is a fun and entertaining monster flick which imitates to some degree the old black and white monster movies from the 50's.  There is plenty of sly humor and the special effects are fun and exciting rather than perfect and realistic.  And while I wished the movie would have strived to be more original and creative, it was still a good time at the theatre.

      The film takes place in your usual monster-film town with heroic everyday people and your standard bad guy who wants to change the town for his own personal benefit.  We soon see the young son of the sheriff being friendly with a strange man who just happens to keep hundreds of all kinds of exotic spiders in glass cases inside his home.  Well, it turns out a week earlier a truck had lost a barrel of toxic chemicals which just happen to empty out into a river which runs underground close to the spider keeper's house.  Before you know it, the spiders are growing bigger and bigger every minute and soon start to terrorize (and eat) lots and lots of townspeople.  The sheriff leads a posse of people to try to kill the spiders and I will let you guess on who wins out in the end.

      All the actors in this movie smartly play it straight instead of obviously playing for laughs.  David Arquette is really hilarious as the totally freaked spider fighter. I have to say that the giant spiders were fun to look at and it was good that they were on-screen in most of the movie.  I also like the fact that there were lots of different kinds of spiders on the rampage, many which acted just like the ones we find at times in our own home.  And the scenes with the jumping spiders chasing the jumping motorcycles were really great and well done.

      The film also receives kudos in leaving the violence and gore off-screen in spite of the humorous high body count.  I only wish that the filmmakers would have cut out most of the profanity and minor but totally unnecessary sexual talk in order that younger kids could have fun watching a monster movie.  It would have also been more creative if some other method than just shooting the spiders with guns to kill them would have been used.  But this was still a fun and enjoyable movie to see, too bad it wasn't even better than it was.