Filthy Review - Camel Spiders

Camel Spiders (2012)

Review by Jude Felton

When approaching a movie with the title Camel Spiders you can pretty much guarantee that you aren’t going to get a movie that requires much use of the old grey matter. Add to this the fact that it is directed by Jim Wynorski, under the pseudonym Jay Andrews, a director that has brought us such faire as The Da Vinci Coed and Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade, and you can get a rough idea of where this puppy is heading. Don’t get ready to condemn this to the basement just yet though.

In Camel Spiders, which Roger Corman lends his name as Executive Producer, we join Captain Sturges (Brian Krause) and his platoon, in a gun battle in the Middle East. Just when things don’t seem to be going to well a swarm of giant spiders attack the platoon’s enemy. Before you can say “spiders don’t swarm”, the battle is over. Hightailing out of there Sturges and company head on back to the States, with some extra passengers on board. From here on in it’s Arachnophobia meets Tremors in the land of awful CGI as Sturges, along with Sheriff Beaumont (C. Thomas Howell complete with a rather excellent mustache) and your usual band of rag-tag survivors/potential victims to escape the Camel spider attack.

Aside from the basic plot, which runs through the movie as the central theme, we get subjected to an insane amount of side plots. Some are more relevant than others, whereas some look as though they were shot for an entirely different movie. The dialogue is at times quite painful, and as mentioned the CGI is pretty bad, although at times it does approach acceptable.

This all being said, the movie does have a quite enjoyable schlocky B-movie charm about it. I mean, who doesn’t like a killer spider flick? It’s daft for sure, but certainly no worse than the majority of flicks that hit SyFy, or any other in a long production line of freaks of nature flicks. You have to take this sort of film for what it is, and don’t go looking for any higher meaning or purpose. Is it good? Not really. Was it fun? Hell yes. I sat and watched it with my 6 year old son and we had a blast with it.

Now, I am not going to say that you should rush out and buy, or rent, this movie under the impression you’ll be witnessing a quality flick. What I will say is that if you like cheesy flicks of this nature, you could do a lot worse.

Brian Kraus, who was nasty as hell in Cyrus: Mind of a Serial Killer, plays his role straight, and is pretty good in it all being said. C. Thomas Howell, however, seems to be in on the joke, and although he plays his role fairly straight you can tell he is just having fun with it. Aside from these two the rest of the cast, who have turned up here and there in bit roles in fairly large films, vary from okay to pretty poor.

Personally I would have liked to have seen the script streamlined a little, in order to lose some of the superfluous side stories. And some of the dialogue is just plain bad, but overall this was good harmless fun. It is the sort of flick you can watch with your kids without fear of scarring them for life. There are a few scenes of bloodshed and whatnot, but no bad language and unfortunately no nudity, so it’s all fairly harmless stuff.

Sometimes bad films can still be fun, and for me this was one of those occasions. Oh, and one last thing, the spiders aren’t really spiders because, depending on what you see or hear in this movie, they either have 6 legs or ten legs. Yes, it is that sort of movie folks!

Camel Spiders is released on Blu-ray and DVD on March 27 from Anchor Bay Entertainment