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When my buddy was stationed in the Middle East, the first thing I asked him was how big the camel spiders actually got. He assured me that although they were rather large, they were pretty shy but very fast and all the rumors about them biting a soldiers ass off were just tall tales. Finally able to sleep, I was content that my nightmares of giant alien-looking arachnids would finally be snuffed out. Well, leave it to Roger Corman’s production budget to bring the eight-legged (the movie claims they only have six legs but I think someone screwed up their digital renders, so they just ran with it) horror to America… just on a tight budget. I guess I didn’t need to mention that if I already mentioned Corman. So, American soldiers battle the Taliban in the desert and get a helping hand… uhm, leg… from those giant creepy crawlers. The soldiers have no idea why the ambush suddenly ceased but are thankful to be alive. A local lets them know what was responsible even if Captain Sturges (Brian Krause) doesn’t exactly believe a spider (well, they are actually neither spider or scorpion) could have done this. Sturges takes a bullet to the leg and is getting sent home, he escorts the corpse of his unit’s sole casualty back to the states and you better believe that body has some dangerous passengers coming home with him. During transport in Arizona, a police chase (sheriff C. Thomas Howell is in pursuit of a criminal) leads to a collision which shoots the coffin into the road. The spiders escape and take very little time to raise some hell. Random folks are introduced and soon these random folks meet a janky cgi death. A bevy of unlikable dopes gather together (some actually become pretty likable, some remain pretty rancid and most I couldn’t name if you had a gun to my head) and get eaten while some small town drama and dreams fill out the runtime. Military weapons, various secrets, C. Thomas Howell’s mustache, American know-how and American greed all play into things. There’s also a group of college students holding up in an abandoned house that I completely forgot about. It’s only eighty minutes long and still feels like it could lose thirty of those minutes and be fine. There’s that SyFy channel nostalgia that at least brings me some joy and I love me some C. Thomas Howell but it’s still a very mid-level creature feature that feels like it was processed in a factory with very little heart.
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