Eight Legged Freaks wants to be old fashioned B movie with broad acting, some comedy and scares, gooey effects and hopefully remind you of the early 1990s horror comedy Tremors.

A barrel of toxic waste leaks into a lake in Arizona which causes spiders to grow at an alarming rate who get hungry and set about attacking the local town. Just be grateful that the toxic waste did not give rise to Zombeavers.

The female local sheriff (Kari Wuhrer) and Chris McCormack (David Arquette) a bad boy who has returned home after some years lead the town's fight back. Arquette does well as the goofy hero like the type he played in the Scream films, just about likable enough and gets a romance subplot with the sheriff. Scarlett Johansson plays the sheriff's headstrong teenage daughter. Doug E Doug plays the local conspiracy nut. The wealthy town mayor is the bad guy.

The finale at the mall goes on for too long as the entire town throws everything at the giant spiders. The film is fun and goofy enough, not really scary but also not memorable. A fast food snack that you will forget about the next day. Maybe because it cynically was a corporate attempt to be a monster B movie and lacked heart.

With the accent on tongue-in-cheek humour, movie references and in-jokes, this clichéd outing in cinematic excess is a good example of a modern B-movie that gets by on special effects alone more than anything else. The story certainly isn't anything special, managing to incorporate about every modern cliché in the book, whether it be the "toxic drum falling off a truck" scene, the "holed up in a café with chaos reigning outside" spectacle or the oh-so-predictable explosive climax (the minute you hear one character early on say "the mine is filled with methane gas" you just know the whole thing is gonna blow),the surprise level is minimal. Even worse are the movie in-jokes which are dumb beyond belief, consisting of a parrot who says "I see dead people" to a guy who says "It's a spider, man", although astonishingly these got laughs from fellow audience members at the cinema I visited.

The comedy consists of dumb gross-out jokes (somewhat overworked lately in the comedy genre) involving characters wetting themselves and some surprisingly mean-spirited shots of family pets being butchered by the hungry arachnids - although the cat-in-the-wall scene is quite imaginative I wasn't sure that I should have been laughing along with it. Along with the derivative script, there are some rum casting decisions, especially the choice of David Arquette (SCREAM) in the leading role - is it me or does this guy give the exact same performance every film he acts in?

At least Arquette is bearable in comparison to Doug E Doug's Eddie-Murphy-wannabe DJ, all shouty and sweary and not at all clichéd. Kari Wuhrer and Scarlett Johansson provide pretty faces but average performances as the females in trouble, with only Scott Terra impressing with his performance of the knowledgeable kid with a fascination for spiders. Horror fans, keep your eyes peeled for MANHUNTER's Tom Noonan as the first victim and a hilarious scene involving a cameoing Jason Vorhees taking a chainsaw to the spiders!

The action - which consists of about 70% of this movie - is thankfully pretty good, always fast paced and not too repetitive. The spiders themselves are almost entirely created with CGI, which is not that bad a thing anymore considering the recent improvements in special effects. At least we now have the creatures looking realistic every now and then instead of just looking like the colourful animations of a few years ago. Scenes in which the town swarms with hundreds of arachnids, the giant spider mother chasing the dirt bike through the mine, or the hairy tarantulas wreaking havoc in general are quite exciting and fun to watch, although my money's on the oil tanker explosion as the film's best moment. Fans looking for turn-off-the-brain-style pure entertainment, goo, gristle and action may find this to their liking; I enjoyed it for what it's worth, although I have no plans to watch it again any time soon.

Toxic waste lands in the reservoir of Prosperity, Arizona. An exotic spider farmer collects crickets for his spiders, and his spiders grow to enormous size. The townspeople are overrun by the giant spiders, and rallies around mining engineer Chris McCormack (David Arquette),funny paranoid Harlan (Doug E. Doug),sheriff Sam Parker (Kari Wuhrer),her kids Mike (Scott Terra) and Ashley (Scarlett Johansson).

This is a great example of well made creature feature B-movie. The characters are likable and fun. The action is ridiculous and campy. The story is well structure, but it's the actors that we love to root for. It's a movie where there isn't a higher calling than to have a little gleeful fun battling giant spiders.