Something disconcerting about twenty-year-old movies that still work is the immortal trope of the sequel setup. For some reason, the formulaically produced Eight Legged Freaks had a sequel in development, but it was canned before the can was even filled. The closing scene for the twenty-year-old giant spider movie did more than just tease a sequel. It was practically a promise. Here’s the problem: They took their shot, but they didn’t swing for the fences.
Eight Legged Freaks played it safe to cater to wider audiences, probably with hopes the creators could have more leverage to mess around with what happens in a world where giant spiders attack a second time around. Freaks is in the title. That was your shot, my dude. Instead of being a completely bonkers freak show with hundreds of over-sized antagonists scaring the bejeezus out of audiences, this homage to giant bug movies from the late 1950s and early 1960s was packaged as a family comedy that did little to pave the way for the sequel it probably needed to turn the concept into a franchise.
Let’s not get this twisted, though. I recommend you go and watch Eight Legged Freaks again if you’ve already seen it with 2002 eyes. And if you haven’t seen it, go scratch this off your bucket of ooze list. You’re one or the other, or you probably wouldn’t have even found yourself reading this.
We all have our “lazy Saturday movies” or “rainy Sunday movies.” Eight Legged Freaks fits the bill for either, and you’ll find a plethora of intentional and unintentional Easter—scratch that— spider eggs along the way. Let’s dive into some of the character tropes the film includes.

The nerd boy who knows what’s going on, but no one believes him until the danger is already upon us. Scott Terra is perfect in his role as Mike Parker. He’s a dead ringer for the animated Nightmare Ned and an anchor of information for the audience. They even play up the trope, giving Mike lines like, “No one’s going to believe me, ’cause I’m a kid, and they never listen to kids.”
As a cliche character, he could have grown into someone with a more direct connection to the action. Someone on set had to have whispered, “This kid will play Peter Parker someday.”
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The crazy old coot who’s at the bottom of the problem. He’s not the catalyst or the cause, but he’s the one who’s been handling the problem before it is a problem. Some outsider is always the spark that lights the fire. Mike Parker is secret friends with Joshua of Taft’s Exotic Spider Farm in the middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere is exactly where taxi waste gets hauled through. It’s no coincidence. What could possibly go wrong?
The accidental catalyst. There’s no time to waste when you want eight-legged freaks to get started in their mayhem. The catalyst is the sleepy-headed truck driver hauling toxic waste. The absolutions least believable moment in this movie about freak-sized spiders overrunning a town is the truck driver’s decision to swerve when he sees a bunny on the road.
While the opening credits are still wiping through the first few moments of the story, we are asked to suspend our belief just a little more than expected. A loose barrel of toxic waste rolls into a local creek near Taft’s Exotic Spider Farm—set up complete.

The conspiracy theorist. Doug E. Doug brings a fresh take on the Art Bell-style late-night radio host trope. Typically this trope character serves a story-telling role Mike Parker is already serving, so instead, his theories are there to play up the comedic element. You may not laugh once through the entire movie, but Harlan Griffith helps keep it light.
The greedy mayor who’s keeping the town in the dark about his corruption is Wade (Leon Rippy). He’s the one who is harboring the fuel that will eventually light this fire. In this case, it’s barrels of toxic waste he’s secretly agreed to have disposed of in the local abandoned mine. He’s the reason toxic waste is passing through the outskirts of town, specifically not far from…you guessed it: Taft’s Exotic Spider Farm.
Nerd boy and crazy old coot spend a few minutes early on exposition dialogue, giving us the details on what kind of spiders we’ll be dealing with when it all goes down.
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The independent teen distraction. In one of her early roles, Scarlett Johansson plays Ashey Parker, Mike Parker’s older sister. There’s far too little sibling rivalry here, so she’s in the picture almost solely to be the scream queen who barely gets to scream much at all. Instead, she serves, in some convoluted way, to help redeem her horny boyfriend.
Early on, he’s a quick outcast trying to rush through Meatloaf’s greatest hits, but he shows up later as a surprise semi-hero. He can be trope 6, part B.

The wacky old aunt. She’s the root system for our hero, Chris McCormick (David Arquette); his chain-smoking, one-liner joking, gonna quit by the end cause it’s too dangerous — no more toking Aunt Gladys. She’s the character who is totally expendable but will never die in a family film.
As trope-ish as Chris is in the grand scheme (he’s the character who comes back to town for unfinished business after having been gone for a decade), he’s our hero. He can be trope 7, part B.
True to early century cinema, the easiest trope to identify is the single mother, bad-ass authority figure. Sheriff Samantha Parker (horror and sci-fi veteran Kari Wuhrer) looked the part and played her role to perfection. She never needed to be rescued. In fact, the hero could not have completed his task without her. She’s more the main protagonist than Chris McCormick is, except Chris is the heir to the mines in question, so his ties to the eight-legged franchise have more… legs.
It’s crawling with trope characters, but stopping at eight seems appropriate. Despite, or perhaps because of the adherence to these prototypical characters and the unfurling of a predictable plot, Eight Legged Freaks never drops the ball. When creators don’t color outside the lines, the final picture is never a masterpiece. It’s always safe, but in this case, it works.

A few embellishments and nods to the family of genres make it watchable for multiple viewings. Keep your eyes open for nods to Jason Voorhees, The Evil Dead, Them! (the best giant bug movie that ever happened), the original Godzilla, Earth vs. The Spider, and even Return of the Jedi for some odd reason (no, not the B’omarr monks).