I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

I FIND THAT TRYING TO BE 'NORMAL' WILL BE THE FASTEST WAY TO KILL ME, PEOPLE ARE STILL WILLING TO BELIEVE THE STUPIDEST THINGS YET NOT BELIEVE THE REAL THINGS, BEING NORMAL IS NO LONGER 'PC', AND OH YEAH, A MOVIE...

Big Ass Spider! (2013)

I'm hella-pissed. Yeah, I know, welcome back from the 90's, right? Well in the 90's I never used the word 'hella' so I guess I get a few free ones, right? (For those with that gut-dropping feeling that I'm about to go on a rant, congratulations, you may know me a little) Now let me say first that I totally understand the never-ending battle for human beings to be, well, human to each other and treat each other with the respect and peace we all desperately crave. But then I found out that calling somebody 'normal' is now insulting? Did we go through Idiocracy already and I was just sleeping when that was called out?

...and now, this cartoon for absolutely no reason...

For those who are scratching your heads (don't, it stirs up bugs), the PROPER way to refer to a person who, well, lives, breathes, sleeps, and not much else is Cisgender. Ummm what? Well (the muckrakers desperately looking for muck to rake will tell you), when you call yourself 'normal', you're actually showing ignorance because you are labeling those different from yourself as 'abnormal' and we JUST CAN'T HAVE THAT IN THIS EQUAL, LOVING AND PEACEFUL SOCIETY, CAN WE?

Did you believe this picture of the 'giant crab'
was real? If you did, there's a special label for you, too.

Ahem. Sorry about that. To be more clear, a cisgender is a person who identifies with the sex they were born with. So what's next? To be more clear about more things, such as what kind of air we usually breathe? Let's see, that means soon we will be using labels ('cause that's all they are folks, don't try to pretend you're being all superior or anything) Mountainbreathers (for those who live in or near the mountains), seabreathers (self-explanatory I hope), citybreathers (ditto), countrybreathers (also ditto), and so on.

Big Ass Spider! For real. As best as they know
right now anyway, the Goliath bird-eating spider
is officially the 'biggest' arachnid we've
got so far.... HEY, GET BACK HERE COWARDS!!!
While they don't think it really eats birds, the
fact that it actually COULD is terrifying enough...

Well, I have (as I have mentioned hella-times) fibromyalgia, so where is my label? If lifestyle gets one, and gender preference gets one, then we better get our dictionaries out and figure out labels for people with different disabilities. Hmm? Disabled IS a label? Well that's freaking boring. I want a 'special' hella-label to go with the illness that prevents me from doing simple things in a reasonable period of time without becoming so ill I get (symptom deleted due to gross description), my feet swell like they've been bitten by hella-spiders, I get so dizzy and weak I sleep for a month and then I look at all the reviews I have to do and hella-cry.

Hmm? Okay, okay, NO MORE HELLA. No, wait a minute, I have rights. I'm a CISHELLA! GET USED TO IT!


So. Let's talk about bad movies. Big Ass Spider! is one of those fun ones that wasn't supposed to be serious (or good either, apparently), and also was NOT made by either The Asylum OR SyFy. It polarized critics (a fancy way of saying they either thought it was lovely or a piece of crap) but hey, any movie with an exclamation point at the end is all right by me. To rip apart. Oh and since the Google pictures are all copies of each other's picture and I get screamed at for using copyrighted material anyway, I'll be using my own screenshots for my (ahem) unique perspective.

The hubby had to watch this with me, anticipating a bit of fun watching all the mistakes, bad CGI effects, and huge plot holes... and got really, really, bored. Yeah, unfortunately, they pushed the word 'comedy' really hard in this thing but - nope. Horror comedy as a genre is pretty difficult to pull off, and a nasty spider that's bigger than a cruise ship isn't really a reason to yuk it up.

Our movie opens with a picture of a guy watching this big ass spider (to make this easier we'll just use BAS) tear the top off a building as a really weak copy of the song 'Where Is My Mind' by Pixies plays in the background (which, by some weird coincidence, is the only Pixies song I actually know). People are screaming, running, burning (for some reason) and shooting weapons at something that's 73 stories up (uh, don't think bullets travel that far guys). Let the bad CGI begin NOW!


He's an average guy with a blue collar job who's lonely. Okay, so our first lesson of the movie: Unless you're movie gorgeous and have an exciting career, you can't get a date. Nice. Somebody needs to have a talk with Mike Rowe. No, not for a date you potatoheads, because real work is... ah skip it.

His day started twelve hours earlier (cue flashback) and we get to see that he's a kind hearted hard worker even if he doesn't get paid much. Sounds like a great guy to me but this is Hollywood's view of blue collar workers so they make him out like he's a loser. His day starts with doing a favor for a crazy cat lady (a puzzling appearance by Lin Shaye, who you would know from the Insidious series) who pays him in fruitcake (oh, that's subtle) and goes downhill as he has to go to the hospital for a brown recluse bite.

Lloyd Kaufman (Troma Films) appears 

briefly as himself and as spider bait.

Just for info - a Brown Recluse spider is mainly found towards the Gulf Of Mexico and people scoff at the thought of them being anywhere near California. I'm not going to argue with the where and the when and the why. I'll just say from personal experience that while living in Washington state, a friend was bitten by one (they're not supposed to be there either) and was hours from death by the time he got to a hospital (not that it's that lethal, the friend was that stubborn about going for treatment).

So. While at the hospital our hero, Alex, notices a body bag go by... yeah, that happens a lot at hospitals. Not. But it's a convenient plot device to tell us how this spider got into the hospital in the first place - inside the body of the dead guy. Nice. It starts the size of a puppy and will grow exponentially according to the Army guys who suddenly show up and explain that it's not a real Earth spider 'cause they took some stuff from extraterrestrial sources so it's a...

...and that's the best I could come up with for this movie, sorry.

The rest of the story is simply Alex and his new sidekick, a Hispanic security guard from the hospital cleverly named Jose, to catch the spider before she (It's always a she isn't it?) lays her eggs and infests the world...

Just one Kardashian butt could
feed a giant spider for a month...

Sigh. I wish I had a lot more jokes for this but with the two repeating that they need to 'shoot it in the butt' a thousand times, there's not much comedy material there. Oh, they want to shoot the spinneret because apparently the flaxen material is highly flammable so they believe that will cause the spider to explode from the inside out.

Despite the fact that she does lay her eggs and there are tons of baby spiders running around toward the end of the movie, they conveniently forget about those when they manage to bring the big girl down. Duh.

It's okay, he's was just a weekend dad anyway...

All the movie seems to care about is Alex getting the girl, in this case some Army chick named Karly who of course IS movie gorgeous so even though they've known each other for an hour, tops, they're in love and everything is in flames and destroyed but they're happy so it's good, right? Right?