Movie Review: In The Spider's Web

0/10

Wow... I mean... wow!

Imagine, if you will, the most outrageously incompetent film you can, take away about five more percent competence and you have In The Spider's Web, a steaming turd of a film, a suspiciously malodorous patch of stain on the face of film making.

Now... the fact I viewed this movie was not an accidental event - me and Mrs Algo had caught a breathtaking five minutes of it on Sky Three while skipping through channels and knew we had to record it ready for our game weekend we were having (a weekend with friends where we play lots of games and watch films, usually terrible films, for comedy value)

The last movie at such an event was the lame Fear City, but even this was nowhere the sheer mouth open aghast madness inducing, wincingly excruciating embarrassment that is presented by In The Spiders Web. This isn't even an old 50s B-movie. It's a recent full colour effort from 2007.

If you ever see it, just try and get your head around the fact it was made in 2007. Go on. Try it.

I'll try and do justice to the plot...

A group of friends is walking through a studio based jungle when they notice there's a lot of spiders webs about... so they decided to set up camp under a bunch of them (I know, I know...)

Naturally one of them is bitten (well, duh!) and they are forced to seek help at a local village where an inexplicably creepy doctor (played by the frequently unreliable Lance Henriksen) who sports a creepy long fingernailed set of hands, and spouts gibberish about why there's Bolivian spiders in India.

In case he wasn't suspicious enough, his "brother" wanders around in a sack mask due a bone disease. The mere chance that anyone wouldn't run for the safety of town is laughable - and we are instead forced to sit through mad decisions (lets go into the creepy cave full of spiders!), crazy foreign tribesmen (look! they're eating plastic spiders!) and shifting distances (it took us 5 seconds to run down this passage, but the crazy sword wielding guy and his mates who are chasing us, NEVER arrive)

It loses coherence (!) after this and by the half hour point resembles nothing so much as a made for children tv show with a budget of about £50 and an editor who understands nothing about editing.

Several shots are reused a couple of times (at different speeds, no less) and the scripts madder moments are worsened by the editor's juxtaposition of nonsense dialogue with unrelated bits of action. It also manages to contradict itself on a couple of occasions, and to hit virtually every cliche in the book.

For no reason characters take crazy decisions, their supposed guide knows nothing about anything and its intended suspenseful moments bear more resemblance to lousy trick or treat costumes.

Never mind the fact that the extras casting appears to use the rule; "they look a bit foreign" without any regard for place or time. The Indian police force boast what look like the Frenchmen, Spanish and Africans amongst their number, and the villagers are pulled from every asian ethnic group there is.

This... I hesistate to call it this, but.... film... is a prime example of what is wrong with the movie world - it's under budgeted, scripted by those million monkeys, over edited and atrociously acted, with no sense of its own silliness and a failure to grasp even the barest, tiniest rules of filmmaking.

Lastly, if your movie relies on terrifying spiders they'd better be scary.

These aren't... the CGI spiders are atrocious, resembling the quality of ships present in the first Babylon 5 series chucked onto the film, other spiders are clay models that look painted by 5 olds and, the icing on the cake, some are just plastic models hung from fishing line.

You think I'm joking about the plastic spiders, don't you.

I'm not.

Avoid Avoid Avoid.

A