Ice Spiders

When I purchased this little gem at my local video emporium, my friend Robbie was behind the counter. He looked at it and said to let him know if it was good. I told him he didn’t have to wait, it was very, very bad. Have you seen it already, he asked. No, I replied, IT’S GOT A GIANT SPIDER CHASING A SKIER THROUGH THE SNOW ON THE BOXCOVER. How could it be good?

So, you could say I got what I deserved.

In Ice Spiders, the government has been operating a secret military lab in Utah, near a ski resort, to genetically alter spiders so they’ll grow to enormous size. Why? “To save lives” the dim actress playing a scientist says. You scoff, but those babies will be needed when we face a giant fly invasion. As might be expected, the spiders (there are six of them – budget restrictions, I guess) stage a prison break, and escape into the snow, which doesn’t bother them due to genetic manipulation or something. Although the trained military guys with sophisticated weapons are pretty much useless against the arachnid onslaught, fortunately the nearby ski resort has a ski instructor who used to be an Olympic hopeful before blowing out a knee, and he is the perfect person to deal with the critters. Why, again? Because he’s played by Patrick Muldoon, who has bug-fighting experience, having appeared in Starship Troopers. Then again, he got his brain sucked out in that movie, and believe me, the injury shows in his performance.

The movie is as bad as you would imagine, but there is one truly terrifying thing in it: Patrick Muldoon’s hair. It isn’t a natural shade, and hangs jaggedly around his forehead, while rising to a peak in the middle of his head, as if it is hiding something underneath. Probably the scars from the brain-sucking. And the acting, from Muldoon and his co-star Vanessa Williams (not Vanessa the Undressa, the other one) is truly amazingly bad.

Still, the movie was exactly as bad as I thought, so I can’t complain. Except about one thing: Although the spider on the boxcover is truly huge, the spiders in the movie (who are color-coded to tell them apart. Seriously) are usually about the size of a large dog, which is a gyp, although their size varies from scene to scene.