If Eight Legged Freaks feels a lot like Tarantula, Them!, Arachnophobia, Starship Troopers, or even the previous year's Evolution, that could be because there's not a single original idea in it, and even fewer guilty pleasures. Its absolutely rigid enslavement to formula might be excusable if the spiders looked cool, but they're like jerky Ray Harryhausen creations, and not in a good way. Neither does the film accomplish the opposite goal of serving as intentionally cheap kitsch, because that would have required a certain effort of its own, and everything in Eight Legged Freaks represents a lack thereof. The script and the grungy production design fight for which is the moldiest component, and billing the film as an homage to yesteryear is just a cover-up. The character types are so stock, they might have leapt out of a textbook on how to make B-horror movies before the onset of irony, before anyone knew better. Even if green writer/director Ellory Elkayem falls into that last category, Dean Devlin should not, having presided over some of the bigger-budget and better-looking popcorn movies of recent years. Devlin's track record might not be exactly clean, but he's at least shown a knack for sticking with the times. He abandons that here, permitting such has-been jokes as having the tarantula movie on TV while the real tarantulas roam outside, and pedaling an agenda of square '50s attitudes toward the characters -- never once winking. One pities independent film darling Scarlett Johansson for ending up in this mess. It seems the conventional wisdom still holds true: David Arquette movies should be avoided at all costs, as if they were dripping venom more deadly than these oversized arachnids.