User Reviews

Arachnoquake is set in New Orleans where Roy (Ethan Phillips) runs a sightseeing tour company for tourist's, annoyed at his layabout son Paul (Bug Hall) he decides to demote him to driving tourist's through the city on a bus. It's his first run of the day & the bus is almost empty but Paul soldiers on like a professional, however they soon notice that all is not right in New Orleans as a new species of Spider seem to infest the city. These Spider's lay egg's in people & breath fire as well, scary. Paul is appointed leader of the group since he was the tour-guide & takes it upon himself to save his customers but he also wants to warn his father & sister Petra (Olivia Hardt), Paul hopes this will impress his father. The army are called in to battle the Spider's so why Paul thinks he should save New Orleans on his own I don't know...

Edited & directed by Griff Furst who brought to the screen classics such as Universal Soldiers (2007), Wolvesbayne (2009), Lake Placid 3 (2010) & Swamp Shark (2011) it's genuinely hard to decide which of his films is the worst as none of them can be described as anything approaching good. As you might expect Arachnoquake is a disaster from start to finish, character's are idiotic, the plot is idiotic & the entire 85 minute run time is difficult to sit through. It really is awful, dialogue, character decision's, credibility & entertainment value are all well below par. The whole script is really dumb, from the lazy part where if the Queen Spider is killed all the other's will simply just die to the American military that consist of about five men who set-up their base of operations on a car park roof, the bit when Paul finds his assistant in bed with boils all over her face & her looking really ill yet leaving her & not calling an ambulance to the idea that these Spider's have never surfaced before yet when Paul enter's the tunnels they are about five foot under the surface & who was the genius that decided to give the Spider's the ability to breath fire? Also, was it the same genius who decided to have the huge house sized Spider water ski across a river at the end? It's a pretty funny scene actually. Giant Spider films are hardly original either especially considering this was made by the Sy Fy Channel who have also shown the likes of Ice Spiders (2007) & Camel Spiders (2011), did we need another terrible mutant monster Spider film? I am not sure that we did, the cinematic wasteland of creature features would hardly be worse off if Arachnoquake hadn't been made, would it?

Technically Arachnoquake is a mess as well, from the end when the giant Spider explodes yet does not damage the building it's between or leave any trace of itself to Paul firing at it with a shotgun from about a mile away to all sorts of other daft scenes & stupid plotting that just destroys any scares or suspense or tension the makers were trying to achieve. The CGI computer effects are not the worst I have seen in a SyFy Channel film but they are not far behind, they are adequate at best & lousy at worst. There's no blood or gore apart from a couple of exploding boil's on people's skin, none of the annoying character's get deservedly gruesome death's & the who film is very tame & forgettable. There's no sense of scale or destruction or panic here, New Orlean's as a city seems completely uninterested in the fact that it is being overrun by giant fire breathing Spider's.

Filmed in Louisiana the production values are rock bottom, Arachnoquake looks cheap because it was cheap. The acting is bad, the likes of Edward Furlong, Tracey Gold & Ethan Phillips obviously can't get any other work although Olivia Hardt is pretty to look at I suppose. I think those involved knew Arachnoquake was going to be rubbish & treated it accordingly.

Arachnoquake is rubbish, there really is no other way to describe it. It's not even good for a few laughs, I really do have to stop watching these SyFy Channel films. I would feel better for it. I think I would. OK, I know I would. Would I? Bugger it, I'll be there watching the next time a cheap nothing budget creature feature airs like always. One day one of them will be good, right?

Awesome, but a bit strange title; definitely not an awesome movie. An earthquake strikes New Orleans and from the cracks in the earth jump giant white spiders that can spit fire and cause a world of hurt given the chance to bite or sting. They contain enough "gas", they explode when shot. So here we have tourists trying to run away from, when not fighting back, squashing the menacing spiders. These CGI spiders hop and jump about and rack up a body count at a good clip. You can say there is plenty of action. As far as acting...at a minimum and horrible. There is humor attempted and it is as painful as the spiders. A very small budget was applied to this project filmed mostly in Baton Rouge, not New Orleans. SyFy channel once again passes off schlock as horror. Some familiar faces show up for this one, including Tracy Gold, Grant James, Ethan Phillips and Edward Furlong, who absolutely gives the most hideous performance in an awkward role. Along for the ride are: Megan Annabel, Bug Hall, Tiara Ashleigh and Earl Maddox. To be fair, this movie is a time filler.

An earthquake opens up a chasm in New Orleans which unleashes dangerous mutated spiders.

The scariest thing about this film is the fact that you are, or you are going to watch this steaming pile of cack. This is one of the super low budget, no script, over the top CGI kind of film that the Sy-Fy channel is famous for, but after watching a lot of those kind of films I can confidently say this is one of the dumbest and worst I have seen. The biggest star in this is Edward Furlong, yes John Connor from "Terminator 2". It's nice to see he's done a lot with his life and the success of his terminator appearance...oh wait, no he hasn't! He hasn't had any acting lessons to improve himself (if he has they weren't worth it!) and by the look of him he's just sat around eating chips/crisps and drinking beer. Although saying that he still looks fairly young so maybe he uses good moisturizer. This is a fact which actually causes a problem in the film as he son looks just a few years younger than he does and therefor the family dynamic is unbelievable. FTR,Sarah Connor would be royally peed off with his terrible bus driving and inability to escape a pursuing foe! All of the acting is dumb and dire. The most emotive I got was hoping that somebody might just kill those annoying women on the boat and bus with their terrible over acting, emotionless crying and whining.

The best thing about this film, it's not on too long! OK, maybe the tongue in cheek sound effect used when one of the spider gets hit for a home-run by a baseball bat was the amusing... but the rest is not.

The pink CGI spiders are just awful, I expected they would look bad but they are a level of awful which becomes laughable. They can swim, they fly, they breathe fire, they have sonar, they have sensitive hearing, they are missile proof and bulletproof, they can do all the usual spider things too like making webs.... but they have no brains....yet still manage to show more intelligence than the idiots being portrayed on screen. The scale of the CGI spiders seems to vary too, in one shot they may appear small and then the very next shot shows that they are massive, casing point, check the queen spider out at the end.

You will have seen better films in your life, better films with a lot less money spent on them, with a cast that you've never heard of... I'd go as far as saying your son/daughter/nephew/niece could probably come up with something better and more plausible using smartphone camera. I have awarded this 1 out of 10 but that's actually pushing it, I'd have given this 0.25 out of 10 if it had of been possible. I am no stranger to low budget rubbish and this is worse than a lot of the films I've subjected myself too.

I love watching monster/sci-fi movies. I have to give the producers of "ArachnoQuake" credit for casting most of the roles with non-traditional, non-"beautiful people" actors. Some of the male actors looked so similar, though, I was confused as to who was who. And it was a little weird to have a brother/sister relationship that might have been more interesting as a romantic relationship. Spoiler Alert: The viewer was left not knowing if the teacher with asthma died or not. They were right at a drug store. Why didn't they get her a new inhaler?!? At first, I definitely had the sense that she had died. But then she was dragged to an ambulance. Afterwards I thought I heard her daughter telling her father that she had died, but her husband/the father had no reaction! He was very concerned about her in earlier scenes, so his non-reaction made no sense. Overall, it was pretty bad. But I will keep watching these TV movies because sometimes they are very entertaining.

Unfortunately the market for monstrous spider movies is flooded with less than average movies, and only a handful of the movies of this genre actually managed to pull it off decently. "Arachnoquake" is in the lower scale of the genre, that, of course, being not-so-good end, as you might have guessed.

The movie is a SyFy Channel movie, which pretty much sets the bar for expectations. But "Arachnoquake" does deliver what has become the trademark quality of SyFy Channel; that being cheesy effects, campy storyline and mindless entertainment that will actually have you laughing or smiling in disbelief.

An earthquake strikes New Orleans, causing cracks in the ground to open up. But as if earthquakes in this region wasn't strange enough, then the cracks in the ground opened up to subterranean spiders who emerge to prey on the people of New Orleans. These subterranean spiders that no one ever have seen or heard of range in the size from a human fist to actually larger than a school bus. The bayou is in dire threat now from the lurkers of beneath.

That being the storyline, well it is pretty much straight forward textbook approach; natural disaster awakens slumbering beasts, beasts emerge to prey on humans in the area, humans are terrified but manage to fight back (and win, of course) against these unnatural predators. It is as in every other spider movie available. And of course you have the fairly stereotypical character gallery in "Arachnoquake" as well.

As for the acting in "Arachnoquake", well it was actually good enough. Sure, don't expect award-winning performances here, but in overall, then I think the actors and actresses actually did well enough, as what I had expected from it, being a SyFy Channel movie and all.

The effects, well of that I am somewhat swaying in my opinions. Because in some scenes the spiders actually looked nice enough, despite their pinkish-white color, but then in other scenes it just went to awful CGI effects. But if you are familiar with SyFy Channels previous work (well most of it anyway) then you know what level of effects you are in for in this movie.

The movie give the expression that this spider infestation happened all over New Orleans, but the movie didn't manage to pull that off. The movie never managed to make it seem like the entire city was in dire peril, or that the citizens were terrified. And when the spider queen was killed, all other spiders just died as well. Wait, what? So they died in sympathy? Never heard about that before, so you kill the queen, and automatically all spiders in the nest drop over dead from sorrow or shock? That was just hilarious.

One thing that made me crack out laughing was when the spiders started breathing fire. So monstrously large subterranean spiders wasn't enough? No, apparently some writer somewhere thought 'oh yeah, it would be so much better if the spiders breathe fire as well'. Right. Well that just made the movie even more cheesy than it already was.

I think that Ethan Phillips character Roy's death scene was hilarious. I am not spoiling it more by saying how he dies (having said he died is spoiling it enough), but pay attention to the billowing steamy breath from his mouth, showing that he is obviously still alive and breathing, when he just have died. Hooray for the weather there, eh? How could the people behind the camera or the fellow actors around that not see it and point it out? Or did the movie maker just go 'and that's a wrap, no one will notice his steamy breath anyway'? It always makes me curl up my toes in disbelief when there are mistakes like this in movies.

But entertainment wise, then "Arachnoquake" is actually fun to watch. Why? Well because it is just that cheesy and campy, and because you know exactly how the movie will turn out, even before the first scene starts rolling. But unfortunately, this wasn't one of SyFy Channels better movies, nor did it manage to carve itself out from some of the more outstanding spider movies of the same genre, and thus it just becomes a less than mediocre experience.

I read an article once, a study showed apparently people who like to watch bad movies, on purpose, are highly intelligent, so this was good news for me, a year before Sharknado there came this natural phenomenon mixed with a creature people have a fear of, but I could guess what the result would be. Basically an oil company in New Orleans have been fracking for years, and one day this causes an earthquake to occur, and from the crevices the seismic activity has awoken a species of giant fire-breathing, carnivorous spiders from hibernation, they have evolved from deep underground. When a victim is bitten by one of these spiders, they are given a series of horrific number of large blisters, and eventually they burst open to release a new batch of infant spiders ready to attack. Slacker bus drivers Paul (American Pie Presents The Book of Love's Bug Hall) and Charlie (Terminator 2: Judgement Day's Edward Furlong) are two of the many hundreds of people in danger from these monstrous spiders, they must make it to the swamps of Louisiana, but they find out that the creatures can run on water as well. After many nasty deaths and confrontations with the spiders, the surviving characters realise that all of them will die if the queen spider is killed, so a plan is made to find and attack her, in the end the plan is successful, and all spiders can be squashed, destroyed or simply blow into mush. Also starring Tracey Gold as Katelynn, Star Trek: Voyager's Ethan Phillips as Roy, Epic Movie's Olivia Hardt as Petra, Lucky Johnson as Glen, Megan Adelle as Annabel, Grant James as Gramps and Dane Rhodes as Jean Jacques. Most of the actors look like they are trying to take it seriously, but you can tell Furlong has had the curse of the child star, the story is simple, a bunch of nasty large arachnids with evolved abilities attacking everyone, the special effects to create them and the destruction is mostly awful, I will admit I did squirm seeing large pussy lumps on characters bursting and releasing the spiders, but I was not impressed by the stupid script or overall ridiculous, a terrible science-fiction thriller film. Pretty poor!