Call it Arachnophobia II… or Peur des Araignées if you want to get French about it (since this killer spider movie is French). What we have here is a particularly skin-crawling creature feature that works great in its first two acts but is underwhelming in its final act.

This Shudder killer bug flick is about an apartment complex overrun by spiders of unusual size. The tenants have to fight – but mostly run – to find an unblocked exit.

Most of this movie works when the spiders act like spiders… it understands how spiders move – or don’t move – very well. How they hold still… until they rapidly attack or run and hide (with a creepy musical stings too). They are oversized but not unrealistically so… and there are a lot of them. I’m not particularly scared of spiders (unless they are on me) so getting the heebie jeebies when they lunge in this flick says a lot about how effective its scares are.

That is, until the later half. The film seems to think spiders don’t move in direct light and I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. They move when you aren’t looking at them and that’s much scarier. But the flick uses this fear-of-light as an engine for suspense but it just made me overthink the film’s logic.

Plus once the spiders reach unrealistic size, they are pure CGI which hurts the tension (some of the earlier, smaller spiders were also probably CG but with less detail so they worked better).

And there are some third act human interactions that bogged the film down (and annoyed me). The entire finale was a mess and would have been a lot better more straight-forward or if it had learned earlier on its police themes.

This flick has a pretty terrific first two acts that will get under your spider-hatin’ skin. But it flames out a bit in its finale… but your tolerance might depend on how scary spiders are to you, regardless of how CGI they look. That said, the film as a whole is still quite good. I highly recommend it if you want to voluntarily trigger your arachnophobia.

Score: 84