Arachnophobia

Arachnophobia

Spiders can be said as one of the most beautiful creations of God; with their delicate legs and infinite patience. And within their tiny minds they hold the formula for a million webs, so when you see a dew wetted net glistening in morning sunlight you know there is order in this world because it was found by a spider that didn’t even know what it was looking for.

Cockroaches though are different. They’re disgusting little amphibious tanks that hide under sinks and eat everything including Brillo pads. A roach-based horror movie would be nearly unbearable, and indeed I still shudder at the memory of George Romero’s “Creepshow,” in which a man is covered with roaches and eaten alive.

Compared to those kinds of horrors, “Arachnophobia” is pretty mild stuff: A few people get killed by spiders, a lot more get scared by them, but they never get really repulsive the way cockroaches would. The movie takes place in the mysterious rain forests of South America, where a new species of spider is discovered. It’s big (about the size of a baseball mitt), and it has an ugly bite.

One member of an expedition is bitten and dies instantly; later his coffin arrives in California, where the spider crosses paths with another (domestic) variety and starts lurking in shoes and toilet bowls in a bucolic little rural town.

There are certain obligatory elements to all movies like this: The old fuddy duddy doctor who refuses to believe anything alarming; the narrow-minded local sheriff who resents outsiders; the bright young doctor whose warnings are ignored; his loyal wife and kids; the plain spoken local woman who sticks up for the new doc, etc., etc., right down to (but not beyond) cats and dogs necessary for the obligatory scene where they sense something has gone wrong before humans do.

In this case the bright young doctor, hero of “Arachnophobia,” is played by Jeff Daniels as a man who has a paralyzing fear of spiders. He and his wife (Harley Jane Kozak) and their kids move into one of those charming little Victorians you only find on back lots; it has a barn suitable for nests, and a cellar full of places where you wouldn’t want to stick your hand in a dark corner if you thought there might be a deadly arachnid the size of a coffee cake in there.

Predictably, bad things start happening. The kindly local widow bites the dust. A young football player drops dead. The old-doc refuses to order an autopsy, but events conspire against him and soon the spider man (Julian Sands) has been called in from the university and is shaking his head gravely.

You would never think that spiders make good visuals for a movie. Right? I mean come on, remember that bad horror film, “The Swarm,” where killer bees were supposed to be scary but didn’t really do anything? It’s different with the spiders in “Arachnophobia,” which are just about the most photogenic monsters ever committed to celluloid. Frank Marshall knows how to put them in the foreground. He knows how to shoot them in closeup.

He knows how their shadows can cast alarming images when the characters aren’t even looking at them. But above all else, he has a special knack for letting us know where they are and then allowing us to cringe as the people in the movie do exactly the wrong thing. The scene with the toilet seat is a gem.

And yet for all its creepy-crawly shocks, “Arachnophobia” is not pure, disgusting horror.

There is still something funny about it, especially when John Goodman appears on screen as an exterminator who throws away his biodegradable chemicals and goes straight for the dangerous stuff because he knows there’s a big spider nearby. This may not be among his greatest performances (or maybe it is), but he does have some good lines: “I hate spiders, you know?” For that matter, this may not be among Mr. Goodman’s best films (or maybe it is), but one thing I can tell you is that if you’re watching it in a theater full of kids who haven’t seen many scary movies before if any they’re probably going to love it.

This is what used to be called a monster movie crossed with a disaster movie, two genres that peaked around 30 years ago but have both enjoyed occasional revivals since then. It’s also what used to be called a B-movie or drive in thriller except it has too much polish and panache for those labels, and too many recognizable faces in the cast (including Julian Sands as a droll spider enthusiast, Harley Jane Kozak as a funny mom and Stuart Pankin as the town mortician) so let’s just say it’s not quite like any other movie I’ve seen about spiders. And that’s good enough for me.

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