Watched on Apple TV

Frank Marshall is a well-known man in Hollywood. He usually produces Steven Spielberg's films or has a good hand for lucrative projects. As a director, he is responsible for "Congo" or "Alive". With "Arachnophobia" in 1990, he took on a material that was amazingly distributed by Disney Studios and even made a small profit at the box office. Despite spider crawling and a nice creepy touch.

If there are critters that cause disgust, fear or even panic in people, spiders are usually in the top 3. Maybe next to snakes and rats. That's why there are so many movies on the subject. Be it "Tarantula", "Kingdom of Spiders" or also "Eight Legged Freaks" from 2002. In these films the roles are clearly distributed. The spiders are the bad guys, the humans the good guys. And this even though it is usually the humans themselves who are responsible for the spider's aggressiveness or mutation.

"Arachnophobia" runs under the same motto. Crawlers living in the deep jungle are torn from their environment and strike back. This results in some creepy scenes in the dark basement, sucked out corpses (aha, a spider sucks out a whole human....), lots of little spiders running over the edge of the toilet or coming into the bathroom through the sink's sewage pipes and of course the very fine scene when such a small animal disappears into a big bowl of popcorn and you make extra sure in front of the TV yourself that there is none in your own potato chips.

Yes, "Arachnophobia" is fun. The film starts exciting and you know after a few minutes that something bad is going to happen. Then the story gets a rather average interlude inserted, where Jeff Daniels has to deal with the characters of the weird little village he just moved to. The grand finale, when the spiders finally step on the gas, and of course the marvelous performances of "Verminator" John Goodman, however, allow us to generously overlook this middle section.

If you only like spiders when they are behind thick glass or on TV, you don't have to be afraid of Arachnophobia. It's creepy and gross, but always with a nice gag attached. And those who dare to put a hairy tarantula on their hand will like the movie anyway.