Big Ass Spider! (2013)

I saw this film at the Imagine film festival 2013 in Amsterdam. The plot is straightforward and simple: An alien spider that was planted in a human body, escapes from the hospital where the human was treated. The military takes over the hospital but fails miserably to contain the menace, in spite of showcasing an assortment of weapons and heavily decorated brass. A professional exterminator (Alex) and his volunteer helper (Jose) take over where the military falls short, and simultaneously take care of many hilarious moments that turn this film into an entertaining production, and let us overlook several of its faults.

The spider in question quadruples in size every four hours. In the beginning of the story, the spider was a bit scary while it had a believable size. At first, it traversed the facility tubes of the hospital and could turn up anywhere in the building. Later on, it used the sewer system of the city while moving to a suitable location to plant eggs. But when it started growing exponentially, it became more of a predator (like a lion or a tiger), thereby loosing most of its scariness inherent to crawling insects. Still fierceful, of course, but not in a way fitting in the Horror genre.

The exterminator duo, professional Alex with volunteer Jose, takes care of the humorous aspects, while the rest of the cast is one-dimensional entourage. Some of the military, the general and lieutenant Kelly, show more than one dimension in sparse better moments. The general is unexpectedly flexible in allowing help from outside the army, at moments when he considers himself powerless, in spite of all the guns and gadgets under his command. Lieutenant Kelly sticks to her role as someone who has everything under control (famous quote: "it's my job"). We see that events in this unusual case evidently outgrow her training and eventually overpower her, after which she gets an important role as the maiden in distress, with Alex as the obvious knight to rescue her by whatever unorthodox means.

All in all, we talk about family entertainment here. The label SciFi (IMDb) is not very appropriate, in my opinion. Instead, the Imagine festival website did it better with "Horror – Comedy". The exterminator duo (Alex and Jose) turn this movie into something interesting. Without them there is not much left to admire; not even the animated spider leaves an impression on us. With its 80 minutes running time, this movie is not too long for its minimal contents and yet succeeds in keeping our attention.