Unfortunately, I didn't see Webs for the first time when I was kid. I saw it for the first time last night, on DVD, as a grown man. And while the inner child in me could recognize that this was something I would have enjoyed thirty years ago, I was not so blinded by my own sense of personal nostalgia that I missed the fact that the movie was pretty bad.

Richard Grieco stars as Dean, the leader of a four-man team of electricians sent in to an abandoned building that is about to be torn down. It seems that there have been some unusual power readings coming from the building, so Dean and his men are there to investigate. They discover an elaborate laboratory in the basement, complete with a nuclear power source, and some strange looking apparatus. Well, it turns out that the whole thing is some sort of portal to another dimension, which Dean and his men stumble in to, finding themselves trapped in a world much like ours. The key difference in this parallel dimension--other than the fact that people don't have tattoos (seriously)--is that super intelligent spiders have also crossed over into this dimension, and devoured most of the human race.

Dean stumbles across a ragtag group of human survivors who battle the last remaining Spider Queen, and her army of spider-freak soldiers--human men who have been transformed into ridiculous looking monsters. Among the survivors--all of whom look surprisingly well fed for people who must scrounge for food--there is the easy-on-the-eyes Elena (Kate Greenhouse), and Dr. Morelli (Colin Fox), the scientist from Dean's dimension, who invented the portal. It seems that Morelli's invention also opened up the portal through which the super spiders came, and he shoulders tremendous guilt (he is, after all, responsible for the near destruction of the entire human race in this dimension). With the help of Dean and his men--who return to their dimension to get help, but can only muster a few guns--Morelli begins work on a new portal, so that the surviving humans can escape the Spider Queen and her army of spider-freak soldiers.

Made for the Sci Fi Channel, Webs is not quite bad enough to be terrible, but not nearly good enough to be good. Edited and directed by David Wu, whose editing credits include Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Bride with White Hair and John Woo's Hard-Boiled, I had hoped for something a little less pedestrian. Everything about this 2003 production screams of poorly made made-for-television, from the lame script to the poor acting to the laughable special effects. It doesn't help that the movie looks like it had next to no budget (which makes the laughable special effects all the more amusing).

There is no way Webs could ever be mistaken for a good movie. At the same time, it is cheesy enough that it manges to entertain on a certain level. That level, of course, is the lowest, no-expectation-having level you can possibly muster while watching a movie about a fake looking giant spider creature with an army of spider-freaks battling the guy who replaced Johnny Depp on 21 Jump Street.

Video:
Webs is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen. The picture quality is good, with a clean transfer and no visible defects or artifacts. Of course, the quality of the picture only helps to call attention to the lack thereof within the script and the acting.

Audio:
Webs is presented in both 5.1 Surround and 2.0 Dolby. Both versions have good sound mixes, clean transfers and consistent audio levels with both dialog and music.

Bonus Material:
There are no bonus materials.

Final Thoughts:
If you happen to stumble across Webs while channel surfing, where it would be enhanced by commercials, then I'd say it was worth watching. But in terms of going to a video store and paying anything more than seventy-five cents to rent it...well...that's something that I just can't recommend.