Arachnophobia

When it comes to fears, most people would admit that "arachnophobia," or fear of spiders, ranks right up there. Director Frank Marshall plays on that fear quite skillfully in this modern horror tale, which stars Jeff Daniels as a San Francisco doctor who relocates to a small California town, and moves his family into a country farmhouse. What Daniels doesn't realize is that he already has company in the barn: a particularly vicious and extremely poisonous strain of South American spider which hitched a ride on a dead photographer's corpse to his home town. When the townfolk start dropping like flies, Daniels realizes that the victims all share one thing in common: a spider bite. Naturally, the town thinks the good doctor's elevator doesn't quite go up to the top floor, so Daniels who, as a result of a childhood incident, has a very bad case of arachnophobia, is forced to pretty much go it alone against the arachnids. We're not talking giant spiders with horrid fangs and weird screeches from the 50s here, we're talking your basic small, furry, scurrying bugger that scares the beejezus out of most of us. That's Arachnophobia's stroke of genius. In other ways, the film goes overboard: Julian Sands is a too somber serious arachnid expert, while John Goodman (Roseanne) overplays a parody of an exterminator. Fortunately, Daniels, an excellent actor, holds the film on course with his average guy confronting a major problem approach to the role. In true Hollywood style, the grand finale is action-packed and rather unbelievable, but to its credit Arachnophobia stands up finally as a strange anomaly: it's a gripping farce. Even though our brain tells us that some of the scenes are ludicrous, our flesh doesn't listen; it simply crawls. Recommended. (R. Pitman)