Review of Arachnoquake

I do not mind low-budget movies at all, in fact some are entertaining. However I do dislike it when a movie comes across as so cheap and literally brainless that you are annoyed by it. Sadly that was the case with Arachnoquake. It is not SyFy's worst, not by a long shot, but it is really not one of their more tolerable ones either. There is one redeeming quality however, and that is the decent, if not great, performance of Tracey Gold. The remaining actors give the impression that they don't want to be there and don't show much if any chemistry with one another. That is especially true of Edward Furlong who spends his screen time looking stiff and bored, and with his shockingly bloated appearance time has not been kind to him. In all fairness though, they are not helped by the characters they play. I don't mind if a character is clichéd, as long as they are well-written. That wasn't the case with Arachnoquake, every single character here is shallow and made to do stupid things that makes you annoyed with them fast. The only exception is the Superman imitation, which was actually quite fun, but little moments like this are like sprinkles of fun in a vast sea of truly horrible. Nor are the actors helped by the script, which even for SyFy is so cheesy that it becomes too much and in the end doesn't give them much to do, or the story, which is very thin, unsurprising and lacking in any kind of atmosphere. The film even manages to look cheap, with the editing very hackneyed and the spider effects crude and artificial in look. The spiders are lacking in any kind of presence, let alone menace, that if you want to be scared, enthralled or even have your phobia of spiders cured then you may want to look elsewhere, as Arachnoquake manages to do neither. All in all, very poor, cheap, intelligence-insulting and badly written and acted. 1/10 for Gold and the Superman imitation. Bethany Cox