Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

I gotta be honest with you my friends and confess that it took me four days to watch this here movie ‘Ice Spiders’. I don’t even know why it took so long because in the grand scheme of things the movie really isn’t so bad, at least in the sense that I’ve seen way worse, but I would start watching this movie only to get distracted and then wander off to go do something else. This went on for four days which does kind of disrupt the ‘natural flow’ of the storytelling and thus probably makes whatever I say about this movie completely disposable. But I gotta say something to justify the time I used up to watch this Sci-Fi original movie so here you go.

Somewhere in America where it snows constantly Jed and Bucky (I can’t remember their actual movie names) are hunting Bambi’s mom when Jed spies a crappy CGI giant spider. The giant spider eats Jed and then Bucky. Sucks to be Jed and Bucky.

Say hello to spider scientist Dr. April Sommers played by the always lovely Vanessa Williams. I just saw Ms. Williams in ‘Candyman’ the other day. Ms. Williams was also the defacto African American character on Melrose Place back in the day until the producers of that show came to the apparent conclusion that Black and Melrose don’t mix. This led to my first distraction causing me to revisit Vanessa Williams and her hitman role in ‘New Jack City’.

Anyway, as I pick up where I left off the next day, Dr. Sommers works for a super secret government operation which is creating giant spiders so we can get their super

strong webs in massive amounts to save our fighting men and women. Makes total sense to me. The only side effect of creating giant spiders is that these spiders like to eat people. A lot. Next meet Dash Dashiell (Patrick Muldoon) who is a broke legged Ski Instructor / former Ski Champ / Former Navy SEAL who works for resort owner Frank Stone as played by legendary TV producer Steven J. Cannell. I didn’t know Mr. Cannell acted. Seeing Steven J. led to me digging up some old episodes of ‘Hardcastle and McCormick’ and also had me trying to rip pages off my typewriter to see if I could make them flutter softly onto a stack I had nearby. Will attempt to pick up ‘Ice Spiders’ the next day.

So the spiders break loose and start eating everybody, and I mean everybody. One might wonder who thought it was a good idea to build a giant man eating spider facility next to a ski resort / Buffet, but there you go. That would be like building a Wendy’s in my basement. Great for me but really bad for Baconator’s. So now we listen to Evil Mad Doctor John Marks (David Milbern), because you know you gotta have an evil mad doctor in these things, claims that there’s nothing to worry about because spiders can’t function in the cold. Since spiders also generally don’t eat people I found the whole ‘don’t like the cold’ argument a bit empty. Curious to see if this were true I grabbed some compressed air and starting blasting spiders around the house. The spiders did not like this. I slept with one eye open and am determined to finish watching this movie the next day.

Our spiders are steadily eating teenage skiers, soldiers, forest park rangers, vacationers and bus drivers with the only ones capable of stopping them being our voluptuous spider scientist and the former ski champ / navy SEAL with the bum knees. I don’t want to spoil it for you but they totally kick those stupid spiders in the ass.

If we were to take ‘Ice Spiders’ and access it from its individual parts, say investigating the special effects which were summarily awful or isolating on the majority of the acting, particularly Patrick Muldoon’s raspy broke down Ski Instructor / Navy SEAL or the nonsensical narrative in addition to the other elements of this movie, then we would be forced to say that ‘Ice Spiders’ is pretty damn bad. However a film is not judged on its individual elements but on the sum of its parts and in this we must conclude that ‘Ice Spiders’ is pretty damn bad. Sure I could have led off with that and saved us all some time but I have a word quota to fill.

All of ‘Ice Spiders’ wasn’t so bad though. Vanessa Williams was fun to look at as she ran with the opportunity to be that altogether rare African American ‘Final Girl’ while blessing us with some good cleavage throughout the movie despite the sub zero temperatures. And listening to her justify the need for giant man-eating spiders had me convinced that this could really be a good thing for the world at large. Though the spiders were pretty fake looking they were plenty violent and… lets see… what else? Director Tibor Takacs also directed ‘Mansquito’ in addition to ‘Mega Snake’, both of which were better than this.

Again, take what I say with a grain of salt since I watched ‘Ice Spiders’ mini-series style which might’ve affected my warped view of the film and altered its final output. I doubt this, but it is possible.