Camel Spiders Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Camel Spiders Blu-ray Movie Review

Unintentionally funny and boring and cheap all at once!

Reviewed by Martin Liebman March 23, 2012

Very large, very dangerous.

Acclaimed B-movie Producer Roger Corman really seems to be establishing himself as the new, well, Roger Corman. The man behind movies like Humanoids from the Deep and StarCrash hasn't reinvented himself but has rather taken his game into the 21st century, turned his attention to the small screen, embraced digital monsters, and created some tacky low-budget clunkers for the SyFy channel. Needless to say the movie's aren't all that good, but pictures like Dinocroc vs. Supergator and Sharktopus have earned SyFy some good numbers as the channel, now with Corman's help and blessing, takes B-moviemaking into the 21st century and plays to its market like a finely-tuned fiddle. SyFy's latest is Camel Spiders, a familiarly cheap, goofy, and micro-budgeted Cormanesque picture that does leave behind hybrid creatures big enough to eat a man alive in favor of smaller but no less deadly and far-greater-in-number creepy-crawlies that, as one might expect, must overcome dimwitted characters and their own digital shoddiness if they are to defeat the undeserving-of-victory humans.

If my busted gun doesn't kill the spiders, maybe my awful technique will!

Somewhere in the Middle East, U.S. forcing are battling determined terrorists. A fierce gunfight erupts, wounding one American officer and killing a soldier. But the battle ends abruptly when something disposes of the enemy, something other than good old American firepower. It turns out the bad guys have fallen victim to what is known in the Middle East as "beshbesh" or "devils of the sand," a large, violent, and deadly species of six-legged spider. Unfortunately, several of the nasties catch a ride back to the United States inside the corpse of the dead soldier. They're let loose in the Arizona desert when the casket is disturbed during a highway accident. Now, they're multiplying quickly, and they're hungry. Several locals, including a small-town sherif, two military veterans, a broken family, a few college students, shady businessmen, and the co-owners of a small town diner must band together and shoot their way out of trouble before the deadly spiders have their fill of Arizonians.

What a disaster. Camel Spiders sinks to a dreadful low that Corman films generally manage to avoid. Gone is the fun undercurrent of the recent SyFY aquatic monster movies, replaced by terribly paced, poorly executed, dully acted, and lazily assembled rubbish that's certainly not original and that is never once entertaining. The movie borrows its premise from both the vastly superior Arachnophobia and the endlessly fun Eight Legged Freaks: an exotic spider catches a ride back to the United States by way of a dead body to wreak havoc on a small group of isolated desert-small-town individuals. But instead of smartly-drawn characters, good performances, a breezy script, and quality special effects, Camel Spiders takes the lazy way and gives no thought whatsoever to any of its elements. The movie accomplishes little more than showcasing terribly boring characters unrealistically shooting at spiders. And if they're not shooting, they're standing around talking about things which never help the pace or advance the story -- not that there's a story here to begin with. Truly, this is the epitome of mindless filmmaking. For as awful as the special effects may be, one can only be led to believe that there was more time spent cranking out these SyFy-typical dime store visuals than there was honing whatever semblance of plot that might have been, that might have led to something a little more viable and enjoyable than this.

Indeed, there's not one single scene where a character doesn't act stupidly, behave unrealistically, or the movie does something wrong that would catch the attention of even the most jaded, one-quarter-paying-attention viewer. Of course the special effects suffer from budget constraints and look phony, but that's par for the course for a SyFy movie. So are shoddy production values and poor acting and questionable stylistic choices, but Camel Spiders takes all of those in a whole new direction of bad. Did the filmmakers really think they could fool the audience into believing that these military folks are the real deal? A camo uniform and a toy gun a soldier does not make. The female military character is undoubtedly the worst military character in the entire history of film. Not only is the acting bad and the provided dialogue worse, but chances are most people watching Camel Spiders have seen better gun handling on the original 8-bit Nintendo game Contra. Check out some of her grips and stances. Yikes. Where's R. Lee Ermey when he's really needed? Hey, speaking of people MIA from the set, where the heck was the armorer or, at the very least, the prop guy? Broken toy gun on isle three! That same character runs around with the barrel broken off of her M4. Seriously? And of course it magically reappears in a handful of scenes. Is it too much to ask for even a smidgen of professionalism and attention to detail? The gunplay in general is severely lacking, but this isn't Saving Private Ryan and nobody expects it to be. But spending a few minutes drilling in some common sense to the actors (hey, we know the spider isn't actually on the set and you have nothing real to pretend shoot at, but for goodness sakes if it is supposed to be on the ground don't aim up at the sky to shoot it) and making sure their toy guns aren't broken would at least give the movie a little dignity and show a touch of respect for the audience. Then of course there's the terribly misplaced music. At start the score sounds like some strange hybrid between a James Bond movie a surfing picture. Then there's random techno beats, something that sounds sort of like Southern Rock, and the list goes on.

Then, of course, there's the character development, which is usually a fairly necessary element, even in a movie without human characters, but that comes pretty close to worthless in a movie like Camel Spiders, particularly when the story boils down to "see spider, kill spider or die trying." Certainly the movie sees more than its fair share of generic characters who appear just long enough to die. These people are given minimal development, only enough to set the scene because even these filmmakers know that just populating the movie with random shots of equally random people being eaten won't fly. But Camel Spiders fills much of its middle act assembling fairly detailed backgrounds for the survivors, including a couple that's recently been married on the sly, a couple in dire marital straits with a teenage daughter caught in the middle, and a couple of shady businessmen working on a land deal. None of it matters one lick when CGI spider carnage is the order of the day, and for as slow and repetitive as the movie already is, such just slows it down even further. But that's just about par for the course for Camel Spiders. Try as it might, it gets absolutely nothing right, not in terms of its script, acting, direction, or even props and common sense. It's a bomb even by SyFy channel standards, which is saying a lot considering that "SyFy" has become synonymous with "cheap."

Camel Spiders Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Camel Spiders delivers a satisfying 1080p viewing experience. The smooth HD image delivers crisp, sharp, well-defined details that never look flat or that feature that overly glossy appearance. Human faces, pebbly and sandy terrain, the textures of clothes, the heavy stitches of military uniforms, even the little ridges and bumps on the fake guns all prove quite revealing in high definition. Colors are vibrant and true. Bright American flag patches, colorful clothes, green foliage, earthy terrains, even red blood seeping through a white bandage all appear even and accurate. Flesh tones are neutral, and blacks are good, though a little prone to crush in the darkest scenes. Skies are often susceptible to banding, but the image is otherwise largely free of unwanted eyesores. All told, this is a quality transfer from Anchor Bay.

Camel Spiders Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Camel Spiders crawls onto Blu-ray with a loud and energetic Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless soundtrack. Gunfire is the name of the game and the one constant throughout, aside from dialogue. The opening shootout between soldiers and terrorists features shots popping all over the listening area, putting the audience in the middle of the frenzy. The final action scene featuring most of the survivors blasting away at the spiders offers up a similar immersive sensation. The opening title music comes across with a slightly sharp edge to it, though it plays with solid bass and good spacing. Screeching spiders, helicopter rotors, and zooming cars are all nicely spread around the listening area, the track making good use of the back channels. Dialogue is steady and plays cleanly through the center channel. This is a satisfying, solid-performing soundtrack from Anchor Bay.

Camel Spiders Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Camel Spiders contains no supplemental features.

Camel Spiders Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Even Roger Corman, king of the B-movie, is entitled to a dud every now and then. Camel Spiders is probably the worst movie that's ever had his name attached to it. There's nothing in the movie that doesn't scream "cheap" or "wrong" or "what were they thinking?". The picture gives SyFy a bad name, and that's really hard to do. Miserable acting, almost no continuity, clearly broken props, odd music, terrible special effects, choppy direction, this one has it all, but true lovers of terrible cinema might find it bad enough to warrant a watch. Anchor Bay's Blu-ray release of Camel Spiders features good video and audio but no extras. All but the most diehard Corman fans and admirers of bad movies should skip it.