Camel Spiders

At my house we have a lot of fun watching those b movies that everyone else in the world will probably think are horrible. It’s a time when we can yell at the television and no one is going to get mad. It’s a time when muting the film and ad-libbing dialogue is totally accepted (within reason). It’s a good time had by all. That being said I was a bit excited to see that I was getting Camel Spiders, the latest Roger Corman Presents B movie fodder. I had seen the trailer for this one and thought it might be cool, maybe a little Starship Troopers meets Area 51. So how was it?

Unfortunately Camel Spiders has all the really horrible B movie acting, poorly looking special effects, and a storyline that was probably jotted down with a  crayon but to put it plainly, it’s bad. You come to except this as a kind of badge of honor when watching a really good (bad) B movie. What ended up ruining the film is that it took itself way to seriously. There were flashes of comical cliché (see drinking teenagers frolicking off to their doom with sex on the brain) and a few funny one liners, but Camel Spiders doesn’t offer up enough moments where the film laughs at itself to really get that usual B movie flow going. Such a shame considering C. Thomas Howell being brought on board as a quirky small town sheriff and all the zaniness that could have come with it. Instead you get the promises of camp with green plastic looking helicopters that look like they fell out of a green army man collection and hundreds of flesh tearing CGI spiders against, well, just people with limitless ammo spewing guns who act as if their being paid to perform in a B movie without the usual campy humor that makes it okay to appear in a film this bad.

PICTURE QUALITY:
For what it’s worth the film does look fantastic on Blu-Ray. You’ll be amazed at how amazing the intro to the credits look at the beginning of the film, almost 3D like.  Color, detail, and clarity are amazingly life like. The skies are a startling beautiful blue, skin tones natural, textures lifelike, definition crisp and sharp. Of course as with any BD that looks too good it’s CGI counterparts suffer and come out looking twice as bad, especially when this is a cheap B movie presentation. The camel spiders look ridiculous, those choppers, ugh. If you want BD quality though you’ll be more then happy with the presentation here. Audio is good. Not a whole lot of immersion because it’s mostly all screaming and machine gun fire with some small amounts of spider screeches giving you just the slightest amount of soundscape potential. Dialogue sounds good.

BONUS FEATURE:
None