Arachnophobia

‘Arachnophobia’ is a recent thriller with some really great chills. The best part about it all is that it didn’t require many fancy special effects. For the most part, it was all done with real live spiders.

The story is fairly basic. Explorers in a remote region of the Amazon find a new type of spider, one that lives in an ant-like colony. When one of the spiders stows away in the coffin of a dead traveller, he gets a free ride to a small American community.

Enter Jeff Daniels and his family. He’s a doctor trying to escape the pressures of big city life, and he has a morbid fear of spiders (hence the title). When people start dying, his concerns are dismissed as hysteria. A football player’s death during practice is attributed to a bad tackle; an old woman’s – a bad heart. Ah, but when the town’s old country doctor gets bitten, and his wife sees the offending spider, things change.

Julian Sands, the spider expert and the leader of that same expedition, comes on the scene. John Goodman is the local exterminator; he’s a priceless bit of comedy relief. The height of creepiness comes when there is an attack by hordes of spiders. If you’re not lifting your feet up off of the floor and looking over your shoulder, you truly have no fear of spiders. And naturally, Daniels has to face his fear of spiders by doing battle with the King Spider.