It’s appropriate that Spiders’ third act hinges on a trip to a toy store, because what is its sector of science fiction but a big game of pretend? Directed by The Gate’s Tibor Takács, Spiders proves as harmless and hard-hitting as a Nerf football.

A Soviet space station containing experimental arachnids crashes into the New York City subway system, much to the dismay of Pelham-esque transit line supervisor Jason (Starship Troopers vet Patrick Muldoon, really intense and looking like Baby Pacino). He’s recently divorced from health department worker Rachel (2001 Maniacs’ Christa Campbell, increasingly pneumatic), who gets drawn into the resulting cover-up, in which the government spreads word of a highly contagious virus, because “giant spiders” would really freak the fuck out of the Big Apple.

Aggressive and bloodthirsty, the spiders grow 6 inches per hour. They also growl, hiss and cry, and can head-butt Army trucks. Their queen possesses a yell like Godzilla. Initially, these creepy crawlers are icky enough to give arachnophobic viewers a mild case of shivers, but once they balloon into unnaturally grotesque sizes, their computer-generated design is so overly spiky as to be incredibly unrealistic. Muldoon and Campbell look like they’re just running from cartoons.

Then again, no one goes into Spiders expecting smarts. After all, not once in the movie does any unsuspecting citizen exclaim something to the effect of, “Holy shit! Look at that huge fuckin’ spider! What the hell’s happening?,” but you can bet that proverbial bottom dollar that Campbell stupidly walks right into an enormous, super-thick web covering an entire hallway.

Spiders is in no danger of ending up on the list of cinema’s best eight-legged thrillers — heck, it’s not even as good as 2000’s straight-to-video Spiders — and yet, a few scenes play out with an itsy-bitsy amount of fun. I’m looking at you, Muldoon Commandeers a Forklift. —Rod Lott

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For years, I’ve read what a crackling good ghost story The Stone Tape is, what a corker of an ending it holds. (Mind you, most of this came from British entertainment magazines; hence the words “crackling” and “corker.”) Having finally seen it, my reaction is a mix of mild admiration and major disappointment.

Directed by Peter Sasdy (Taste the Blood of Dracula), the BBC telefilm takes place on a palatial estate, derelict since the war, in which researchers from an electronics company are interested in one room in particular: Once marked for storage, it contains a fungus-lined stone wall, a crude staircase and one loud ghost.

The spirit of a screaming Victorian maid is first seen and heard by the lone female team member (The Masque of the Red Death’s Jane Asher, saddled with playing fraidy-cat for the entirety). The idea is that the wall has acted as some kind of recording device, and what a fortune awaits if that could be turned into a revolutionary new medium. It is, as the men say, “the big one”; move over, 8-tracks!

Famously scripted by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale, The Stone Tape holds a gem of an idea within its core, but suffers from overlength. While 90 minutes is considered ideal for features, I’m afraid this plot was better-suited to a 30-minute Twilight Zone episode — 60 if truly generous. Had that happened, we all (rather than the other side of the pond) might be talking about it in shorthand like “the one where Burgess Meredith steps on his glasses.”

As for that supposedly frightening conclusion, it arrives exactly just as one would expect. In other words, wholly predictable, and time has been rather unkind to its primitive effects. Love it or hate it, however, The Stone Tape’s influence on the John Carpenter projects Prince of Darkness and Halloween III: Season of the Witch is evident. —Rod Lott

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