By Nick Nitkowski

Arachnophobes beware! There’s a new spider movie crawling around out there and it is very hazardous to your health! It’s called “Madame Web”! Additionally, there is another spider movie coming out called “Sting” but it feels less like a sting and more like a hair pluck; over before you know it and you’ll most likely forget that it even happened.

The film is about an abnormal 12-year-old girl who lives in an apartment building in New York with her mom, her infant sibling and her stepdad who works as maintenance for the building they live in. When she finds a spider in the building, she decides to keep it as a pet. She soon discovers that this spider is not a normal spider as it grows at an alarmingly fast rate, and when it gets loose in the middle of a blizzard, all must survive or be caught like flies in its web.

As somebody who is not particularly fond of spiders, this film just didn’t really do much for me. It didn’t trigger my phobia nor did it give me an uneasy feeling that something might be crawling on me. Not to say that this movie was boring, but it just didn’t do anything for me. I just sat in my seat staring at the screen blankly without even so much as a flinch.

In addition to that, I didn’t find the movie particularly scary. You would think that someone with arachnophobia would be terrified of this film, but I don’t think this movie is very successful in that regard unless you have a more severe case of fear towards spiders. Thankfully, the film didn’t rely too heavily on jump scares. This would have just made the film more annoying to me. I also expected this movie to have way more gruesome imagery, but even that was pretty tame. There was nothing in here that I could possibly consider cringeworthy.

One of the most noticeable things in the film is the CGI on the spider, at least when it is small. It’s unclear if a little more rendering would have helped the look of the spider, but whenever it’s on screen, you can tell that it’s not really there and that could be the reason as to why I found it to be ineffective. They do attempt to use practical effects once the spider is larger, but even that looked a little clunky. I do appreciate the effort though, as they could have easily gone 100% CGI for the whole film.

Running at a mere hour and a half long, it was definitely merciful in terms of length. If the movie was any longer, it definitely would have overstayed its welcome. As it stands, it just felt like a whatever kind of movie. Not necessarily bad to the point of hatred towards the film, but definitely not good to the point of recommendation. It just felt like a throwaway monster movie. My fellow arachnophobes can sleep soundly tonight as this spider is definitely docile and is certain to go unnoticed.

2 stars