By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * * )
It's a Hollywood story, all right: young film-maker from the other end of the world makes short feature; it's picked up by all the right film festivals and before you know it, he's in Tinseltown with the bucks to make the story
into a full-length
feature starring an almost-famous actor with the right family connections.
That's what happened to 30-year-old Christchurch film
student Ellory Elkayem and this revival of the 50s B-movie is the result (you can see the original, 13-minute short on the DVD).
Prosperity, Arizona, is a bankrupt mining town that's under threat from a couple of directions. One is the ever-encroaching desert; the other is the developers, who want to bulldoze what's left of the town to put up malls and apartments.
Many locals will sell but not Chris McCormack (David Arquette) and his cantankerous aunt Gladys (Eileen Ryan), who own a large swathe of the town including the local mines. That puts the development in jeopardy.
Something is about to
happen that will dwarf all this, however.
There's a chemical spill on the outskirts of town which infects the nearby spider farm. Hundreds of the beasts mutate into monsters that invade the town through the mines, eating everyone and everything in their way.
Led by sheriff Sam Parker (Kari Wuhrer) and his deputy Pete Willis (Rick Overton), the townspeople must fight back ...
Great fun, especially the jibes at another recent web-slinging blockbuster.
DVD features: movie (99min); commentary by Overton, Arquette, Elkayem and producer Dean Devlin; eight deleted scenes; Larger Than Life short film; Creepy Crawly Giants essay; trailer; cast and crew highlights.
