Eight Legged Freaks - Arac Attack

Eight Legged Freaks, Arac Attack, Angriff Der Achtbeinigen Monster, Les Monstres a Huit Pattes - call it what you will, the film is another big budget B movie that's actually meant to be a B movie. As some bright spark once suggested - Roger Ebert I think - Hollywood never really stopped making B movies, it just gave them huge budgets and sold them as top class film making. It is with certain irony that when there seems to be an active attempt to make a B movie, usually leavened with self referential humour, the results are often more successful than the supposedly more serious efforts. Following in the wake of minor genre classics such as Tremors and erm, Tremors 2, but also amusing creature features Lake Placid (also featuring an Ottman score) and Evolution, we have a spider based effort with giant aracs, as opposed to the tiny poisonous ones of Arachnophobia.

I would be erring on the side of harsh if I were to say that John Ottman rarely fails to disappoint, but for all the praise he receives, I can't honestly say I'm a great fan. While Eight Legged Freaks is hardly a work of musical genius - even Wagner would have had trouble being inspired by giant spiders and David Arquette - but it is a lot of fun and amazingly enough, manages to be more than adequately tuneful. In a time when decent main themes are getting rare, let alone scores with more than one decent theme, it's nice to have something with bold and modestly memorable material. Spider Mania introduces the bouncy main theme, but whether it is supposed to represent the spiders or not, I couldn't say - it isn't really threatening enough. Added to that, Ottman has a game stab at musical wit with his hilariously over the top hero fanfare which is effective and memorable. One touch that seems like something Jerry Goldsmith might have done, is to include snippets of Itsy Bitsy Spider, but invariably in a minor key to give it a disconcerting feel of threat, it usually being quite an innocuous tune.

Perhaps the only down side to the score is that it does get a touch repetitious. Surprisingly, it doesn't feature much suspense music and it seems to bounce along at a fair old lick for most of its running time. This does prevent it ever getting dull, but unfortunately it rarely seems to be heading anywhere, certainly not until the final few cues with the exciting Climactic Plan and the Generic Grand FinaleTM of All's Well that Ends Well. The album ends with an electric guitar/rock remix of the main theme; weird, short, but fun. Yet another score that fits happily into the enjoyable without being great category where the rating belies the enjoyment factor to some extent. It doesn't have quite the genius quirkiness that Danny Elfman or even Jerry Goldsmith might have brought to it, but it's certainly a lot more fun than the tedious synth scores some more grown up creature films (Pitch Black anyone?) have been saddled with. Not great, but enjoyable recommendable.