The Movie:

Tibor Takács is no stranger to horror movies. In fact, he's got some pretty fun credits in his filmography - Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Child, I, Madman and of course The Gate to name just a few. Unfortunately these days he's being doing a lot of TV movie and straight to video work, and the latest of these projects is Spiders 3D, a movie so astonishingly unoriginal that the title pretty much tells you what to expect. And while truth in advertising is generally a good thing, so too is creativity and originality, two traits in which this feature is severely lacking.

When the movie begins, we're in outer space - the starting point of many a creature feature over the years. Here we see a space station once full of space guys now littered with corpses and... spiders. Big ones. Soon enough, some meteors lay waste to what's left of the space station and it basically blows up, but unluckily for those of us in New York City, one piece hurtles towards the big apple complete with some eight legged passengers onboard. This piece of space debris somehow manages to land in the subway where the spiders start wandering around and eating things, and as there are lots of things for spiders to eat in the subways under America's biggest city, they start to grow... and grow... and grow.

Thankfully there's a hot female scientist around named Rachel (Christa Campbell) who quickly realizes that this ties in to some sort of Russian military experiment and notes that the subway tunnels are now littered with spider eggs. That's not good. As if all the rats and urine aren't bad enough. Meanwhile a cop named Jason (Patrick Muldoon) and his daughter Emily (Sydney Sweeny), who just so happen to have family ties to Rachel, gets mixed up in all of this. As the spiders eat more and more people and appear to be on the verge of destroying New York and soon the world, it's up to our heroes to try and figure out how to get rid of them once and for all - meanwhile, military guys are not to be trusted and definitely up to no good.

Does any of this sound like a familiar premise? It should, because it's all been done to death and usually it's handled with a lot more spirit than it is here. That's not to say that the movie doesn't provide a few cheap thrills here and there, because there is some fun to be had watching giant spiders terrorize people and cruise around the subway tunnels causing mayhem, but those moments don't really amount to much. The biggest part of the problem with the movie stems from the fact that you just don't give a rat's ass about anyone in it. Outside of the three characters mentioned everyone is spider fodder, which would be all well and good if the spiders were at least scary or even slightly lifelike - they're not. They're pretty much all done through CGI and they don't move like real spiders nor do they carry any sort of weight once they're integrated into the real world. Nothing in their environment outside of the human actors seems to react to them and it all comes off like a cheap video game.

There have been some pretty awesome killer spider movies made before - Arachnophobia and Eight Legged Freaks were both a lot of fun and proved that you don't need massive Avatar sized budgets and huge dollops of gore to make a fun creature feature. Spiders 3D isn't it though. It's passable entertaining when there's nothing else to do but the whole thing is so unimaginative and uninspired that, outside of the fact that Christa Campbell is really hot, nothing stands out here. Go into this with really low expectations and you could probably wind up doing a lot worse but they really could and should have at least tried to do something interesting here - and it's obvious that the filmmakers didn't even try. The movie is completely devoid of scares or suspense, the tiny bit of character development that does occur doesn't matter or affect anything and most disappointingly, the spiders themselves are bland and dopey.

Video:

Spiders 3D arrives in 3D and 2D versions on the same disc. Without a fancy schmancy 3D TV, on hand, this review can't go into detail on that transfer so you'll just have to use your imagination. As far as the 2D version goes, it's in full AVC encoded 1.78.1 widescreen 1080p high definition and, aside from the CGI which, as mentioned, is pretty lacking the transfer looks good. This was shot on digital video and so there are no problems with any debris or damage to note. Color reproduction looks nice and black levels are strong. Detail is good in some scenes, not exactly mind blowing in others and a lot of that seems to have to do the amount of goofy looking CGI spiders taking up space on the screen. Overall though the image is pretty good.