Recent earthquake activity in New Orleans is being attributed to fracking that has undermined the integrity of the substratum of the area. The earthquakes open fissures. Out of the fissures come blind, fire breathing, white spiders.
Roy (Ethan Phillips) runs a small company that gives both Louisiana swamp and bus tours of New Orleans. Working for him are his daughter Petra (Olivia Hardt) and his lazy son Paul (Bug Hall). As punishment for being late Roy gives Paul the bus tour. His customers are an old man he calls Gramps (Grant James), a young married couple, Glen (Lucky Johnson) and Tina (Tiara Ashleigh) and another family, Katelynn (Tracey Gold), Charlie (Edward Furlong) and their two children Annabel (Megan Adelle) and Justin (Skyy Moore). Charlie is the coach of a girls’ softball team who just finished a game. Charlie is forced to bow out of the tour when his assistant gets sick and can’t drive the bus to take the softball team back to Texas.
The tour is interrupted when the earth opens up in front of the bus and spiders start coming out. When they start to attack, everyone panics and jumps back on the bus. Eventually Paul has to stop for gas at a convenience store. They are attacked at the store. Trying to get back on the bus, Gramps is killed. When Katelynn has an asthma attack, Paul races back to the marina, hoping that the air used for diving will open up her bronchial passages. When the bus group meets up with Roy and Petra, they try to escape down the river but end up with more casualties.
In the meantime, Charlie and the softball team encounter their share of spiders. Charlie ends up crashing the bus. When the spiders attack, they try to take refuge in the bus while spiders encase it in webbing.
“Arachnoquake” was released in2012 and was directed by Griff Furst. It is a horror movie with comedic undertones, created for the Syfy channel.
Some reviewers portray the movie as a comedy, so I expected a lot of humor. Yes, there was comedy, but it seemed to be mostly part of character development. I found it to be more of a serious film especially since some of the characters that died were sympathetic. Of course, there were some throw away characters but there also were some victims that I liked. I was expecting something like “Lavalantula” 2015, but this was more subdued in the comedy area.
I’m constantly amazed at how much these kinds of movies are trashed. It’s a Syfy channel movie about fire breathing spiders. The plot is the same no matter what the creature is, and the mayhem is standard. You know what it is, and you know what you’re going to get. Why are you watching it? If you can’t handle marginal CGI, lame scripts and high death counts than stay away from Syfy channel horror movies. If you like implausible story lines, explosions, gunfire and overall pandemonium with a high body count than this is right up your alley. It’s stupid and it’s fun.