AllMovie

We've smelled this cheese before. A throwback to the big bug movies of the 1950s, Arachnid does for spiders what Them! did for ants in 1954. And it's not much. Arachnid has such B-movie horror conventions as mechanical spiders (puppets) that can only move forward and back -- the big critters always have to back away into their lairs, which is pretty funny in these days of computer generated miracles -- and it's peopled so routinely by central casting formula-characters that you can practically predict the order the secondary characters are going to be devoured. The plot is Alien meets Anaconda, and we only mention Alien because the heroic protagonist is a woman (and Alex Reid does a fine job in the thankless role, but Sigourney Weaver she's not). But you know what? There's a certain brainless charm to it all that will amuse those looking for nothing more than a few cool maulings and no amount of intellectual challenge.