I wasn’t expecting much out of a movie about, and titled, “Big Ass Spider” but found it wasn’t as offensive as I thought.
Big Ass Spider follows Alex as he responds to a call for his “favorite customer” about a mouse under her house. He is then bitten by a spider and has to go to the hospital. While there, another spider bites a doctor and Alex figures he can barter his services for the waiver of the bill for his “treatment”. What Alex discovers is that the spider in question is much bigger than he thought.
There isn’t much more needed to describe the story of Big Ass Spider. It’s pretty easy to figure out that Alex has to go off and fight the spider that (as the poster shows) grows to a slightly unrealistic size. Along the way Alex meets up with his sidekick Jose and the girl he begins to pine for, Karly. Yes, Alex saves the day, the city, the world even, from the titular Big Ass Spider.
I actually kinda liked this movie, and that surprised me. I figured it would be a very low rent, low budget movie that would rely really heavily on rubber spiders or poorly animated CG ones. What I found was a well animated and (semi) convincing looking spider. The relationship and banter between Alex and Jose was actually pretty well written and while it relied on a lot of racial humor, never felt offensive. There was some campy-ness to the movie, sure, but it never got in the way of itself. There were no forth wall breaking moments, as I expected there would be.
I wouldn’t exactly say this movie is scary, though it could have been way WAY more creepy. In the beginning of the film the spider is about the size of a small dog. It climbs through air vents and at one point it crawls under a mans blanket and attacks him. This actually caused me to be genuinely creeped out. However, though it was at this point still a “big ass spider” I guess you can’t base a movie around a spider that size. Naturally they had to make it as big as a skyscraper, and in doing so, it was far less scary. I understand why they would do this, but it ceased to be a horror movie and then became just a horror-comedy.
Big Ass Spider was surprisingly well made and turned out to be way better than I expected. Will everyone love this movie? Probably not. However it’s way better than it should be or than I gave it credit to be. I just wish it had been more about a decently large spider than one that is comically and scientifically impossibly large spider. That’s just me, I guess. It did get one thing perfect though. It killed off Lloyd Kaufman.
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