Synopsis
A large spider from the jungles of South America is accidentally transported in a crate with a dead body to America where it mates with a local spider. Soon after, the residents of a small California town disappear as the result of spider bites from the deadly spider offspring. It's up to a couple of doctors with the help of an insect exterminator to annihilate these eight legged freaks.
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Cast
- Jeff DanielsDr. Ross Jennings
- Harley Jane KozakMolly Jennings
- John GoodmanDelbert McClintock
- Julian SandsDoctor James Atherton
- Brian McNamaraChris Collins
- Stuart PankinSheriff Lloyd Parsons
- Henry JonesDoctor Sam Metcalf
- Peter JasonHenry Beechwood
- Mark L. TaylorJerry Manley
- James HandyMilton Briggs
Recommendations
- 83
Entertainment Weekly
Arachnophobia is a skin-crawling horror film that never loses its cheeky, throwaway edge. - 80
Empire
An exciting and thoroughly enjoyable, experience. - 80
Newsweek
It pushes the audience's buttons with Pavlovian finesse, manufacturing industrial-strength adrenaline. First-time director Frank Marshall has long been Steven Spielberg's producer, and he's learned the master's lessons well. - 75
Chicago Sun-Times
This is the kind of movie where you squirm out of enjoyment, not terror, and it's probably going to be popular with younger audiences - it doesn't pound you over the head with violence. Like the spider itself, it has a certain respect for structure. - 70
Time Out
Frank Marshall has crammed the screen with plenty of knee-jerk thrills interlaced with black humour. Designed to reduce the audience to a squirming mass, the film yields plenty of grisly pleasures. - 63
Slant Magazine
Arachnophobia isn’t great filmmaking, appearing to be kept in check by vaguely resembling Spielbergian entertainment without rising to its altitudes. But it’s a pleasant, acutely nostalgic elicitation of the VHS era and the woozy, preadolescent excitement of awaiting the next cranked-out Spielberg Xerox picture. - 60
The New York Times
The specifics of the spider rampage have been very enjoyably executed by Mr. Marshall and particularly well played by Mr. Daniels, whose dryly self-deprecating manner and underlying decency make him an irresistible hero. Arachnophobia falters only when it becomes too broad, as in a dopey nod to Psycho that captures none of Hitchcock's formal elegance, and in various minor characters who serve as comic grotesques, like the town's potato-chip-munching mortician. - 60
Washington Post
It's a one-joke movie, a funhouse ride, the cinematic equivalent of having a rubber spider thrown in your lap. But it doesn't matter if you reject the wispy script or the plot, which has as much substance as a spider's web; you'll jump every time.
