What do you get when mix toxic waste, an isolated town, and an exotic spider rancher? Why, a gigantic spider movie, of course. Throw in a dash of David Arquette as the shy-guy hero, and Kari Wuhrer as the head strong local Sheriff, and you've got yourself a modern day "B Movie". Will the hero save the day? Will the boy get the girl? Does a bear...but I digress.

The ingredients are pretty, well...formulaic: a trucker drops a drum of toxic waste just outside the town of Prosperity, Arizona, right next to the local "Exotic Spider Farm". Doesn't every town have one of those? Prosperity just happens to be an old mining town, whose mines have gone dry and so the town is going broke. In comes Chris McCormick (Arquette), who comes back after being out of town for 10 years to try and save the town by starting the mine up again. There's sexual tension between McCormick and the local Sheriff Sam Parker (Wuhrer), who, although the best looking girl in town, doesn't have a man. Parker is also raising her teenage daughter, and the super-intelligent son, who knows everything there is to know abou spiders. After a few weeks, the spiders have grown to monstrous size, and start preying on the locals, and the rest you can probably guess yourself. Throw in a corrupt Mayor, a Conspiracy freak, and a bumbling Deputy and you've pretty much get the rest of the picture.

As far as the genre goes, "Eight Legged Freaks" does what it's designed to do: make you jump a few times, and laugh at the squirmy situations. What the film exceeds at, however, is to bring the 'giant insect' category into the 21st century. As CGI keeps improving, so does the detail of the creatures that come alive on the big screen. Since "Jurrasic Park", fantastic creatures have been coming to realistic life, and in "Eight Legged Freaks," the detail of the enlarged spiders look as if they actually are big enough to be attacking humans. Yes, there are a few scenes that look digitized, but it's still great fun to watch a spider pounce on a full grown woman as if she were a fly. The only problem I have with the film is the sound effects. Making the spiders 'sound' as if they're talking (a-la "Gremlins") is annoying, and takes away from the uncomfortable feeling you have hearing the creatures walking around.

In the end, "Eight Legged Freaks" is basically "Tremors" with spiders. Small town folk fighting giant creatures is an old formula that keeps getting retread over and over again. Is the film a waste? I don't think so. It never looses sight of the fact that even though the filmmakers spent a lot on special effects, it's still just an overblown, campy movie. The comedy is light, the scares abundant, and the story is somewhat coherent. If you like things that make you jump a bit, you'll enjoy it. Otherwise, wait for the DVD.