Despite having such a silly title, Itsy Bitsy is one of the better spider movies of this millennium, because it actively avoids the three things that sink most of its peers: making the arachnid the size of skyscrapers, treating it like a comedy, or relying heavily on CGI. If only it had stuck the landing …

A prologue depicting a African tribe literally worshipping a spider demonstrates right away Micha Gallo isn’t wasting his feature directorial debut on Syfy-level schlock. That revered creepy crawler makes it way to America via a stolen jar and into the Midwestern home of an MS-stricken collector (Steel and Lace’s Bruce Davison, classing the place up), who pays handsomely for such fenced artifacts. Of course, he doesn’t know of the eight-legged freak awaiting within, so caveat emptor and all.

Nor does his live-in nurse, Kara (Elizabeth Roberts, Black Knight), a single mom who just moved there from New York with her two kids. The surly Jesse (Arman Darbo, a possible clone of Jonathan Taylor Thomas) is angry at his mother for the sudden upheaval, among other things, while little sis Cambria — apparently named after the font — has more important things on her mind to care: kitty cats and butterfly wings. However, Cambria (Chloe Perrin, The Diabolical) does take notice when a spider the size of a dog invades her bedroom at night!

That Gallo, an effects artist by trade, utilizes working models for the spider for a majority of the film is Itsy Bitsy’s greatest strength. As with the subgenre’s reigning kings — that’d be Kingdom of the Spiders and Arachnophobia, of course — the “realism” elicits a serious case of the shivers. Conversely, Itsy Bitsy’s greatest liability is the decision to go full family-drama mode in the climax. While one can appreciate Kara and clan having more than one dimension to their characters, allowing Roberts and Darbo to deliver true performances, the whiplashed shift from thrills to emotions ruins the vibe and derails the third act. —Rod Lott

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Sometime in the 1990s, the unholy promise made by Near Dark was utterly fulfilled when Hollywood started to make purely American vampire flicks in the form of From Dusk Till Dawn, Blade and the underrated Vampires — or John Carpenter’s Vampires — that took the undead mythos and, with a bloody smirk, drove a stake right through them.

Future hatemonger James Woods (Videodrome) leads the cast as acerbic vampire slayer Jack Crow, employed by the Catholic Church to do what he does best: make brutally caustic one-liners while lighting creatures of the night up like a cheap firecracker throughout the scenic desert landscapes of the Southwest. It’s all in a day’s work for Jack and crew until, at a whore-filled party, the vampire master (Thomas Ian Griffith, xXx) shows up and slaughters most of the affiliated hunters, drunken prostitutes and even a priest or two in his search for a relic known as the Béziers Cross that will allow him to walk in the sunlight, apparently the dream of most bloodsuckers.

With the help of chubby sidekick Tony (Daniel Baldwin, Stealing Candy) and the novice Father Adam (Tim Guinee, Iron Man), they use pre-bitten hooker Katrina (Sheryl Lee, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me) and her mental link with the master to track him and his nest of vampires down; she’s usually in one form or another of undress while doing this, which was great in 1998.

Loosely based on the novel Vampire$ by John Steakley, this movie was released during a mostly hit-or-miss time in final act of Carpenter’s career, coming in like a bat out of hell after the (somewhat) highs of Escape from L.A. , about to careen downward with the (somewhat) lows of Ghosts of Mars. It makes sense, though, as Vampires lie dead in the middle: a decently watchable 108 minutes, but by no means a final masterpiece. —Louis Fowler

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Though it’s been repackaged by Blumhouse for primarily horrific purposes, the story of Ma, I believe, is a pretty universal one for many (most?) teens; I mean, how many of us, at one point or another when growing up, hung out at a moderately weird older person’s house, doing things we probably weren’t really supposed to be doing?

I mean … surely I couldn’t have been the only one, right?

Irritating youth Maggie (Diana Silvers, Booksmart) moves with her understanding mother (Juliette Lewis, Natural Born Killers) to a small town in Ohio, mostly to get their feet back on the ground after an ugly divorce. While Mom now has to work overtime at the town’s casino delivering drinks to her high school nemesis, Maggie starts bumming around with other irritating teens down at the local rock pile. You know the type of kids, too: They mostly hang out in front of the liquor store, trying to get adults to buy them booze.

As a matter of fact, that’s exactly how they meet Sue Ann, or as she likes to be called, Ma (Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water). Pretty soon, Ma is hooking the kids up with plenty of liquor and drugs and a place to do it all in, all in an attempt to relive her, as we soon learn, miserable teenage years. Seems that, at the hands of the parents of these kids, she was taunted pretty bad, leading to a traumatic moment in a closet with a boy she really liked.

I guess you really can’t blame Ma all that much when she imprisons and tortures the teens or, in the case of one dude, intravenously feeds him dog’s blood. While very little of it makes sense, the lynchpin of the film is Academy Award winner Spencer, playing a wholly believable kook, mixing the pathos of pain and pathology of a psychotic to create a fully memorable character; too bad she’s trapped in a mostly mediocre movie.

As I was about halfway through the movie though, I started to think about the people I might have bullied in high school; I could definitely believe it if there’s one guy out there who is just plotting revenge on me, planning to do it through my child. Well, the joke’s on you, man, because I am a childless 41-year-old guy with no prospects for the future. Better luck next time. —Louis Fowler

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