🟨 Spiders on a Plane (2024) Review - More Stupid Sexy Spiders | Film Waffle

 

Spiders on a Plane (2024) directed by Ben Williams

So. Spiders on a Plane. 

Seriously.

Not sure why I thought filling the beginning of my docket with B-movie horror was a good idea, but here we are. Guess I thought it would be good to pair with my recent review of Ice Spiders.

Never have sat through Snakes on a Plane before. Always ended up getting bored and walking off. Sorry Samuel L! Let's see if its eight-legged cousin is able to give me something better.

Quick Summary

Spiders on a Plane follows four UK friends; although, you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given how often they call each other by their names.

"Those are some ugly shoes, Beth."

"Oh, Grace. You are so silly."

"Don't mock me, Beth."

"Grace, I'm just making sure I look good."

The four friends hop on a plane to Colombia. They're on holiday or something.

Unfortunately for them, a mad scientist with a nigh unintelligible accent has smuggled a cadre of mutant spider specimens onboard! After sitting through one of those insufferably quirky Delta Airlines videos about airline safety, a bout of air turbulence hits. Soon, the crazed, bloodthirsty arachnids are free to roam about the cabin. Good luck!

Story & Characters

We open with generic brunette protagonist and punk girl BFF exposition dumping with unrealistic dialogue and parental flashbacks.

Yo. Am I watching Ted Bunny again? Is this a prequel?

Well that's a bit mean. The acting and dialogue are better than that. That's not to say that the dialogue is particularly good. But in the small moments, it's decent.

Small moments like when the friends banter with each other early on. Or when the flight attendants jab at each other. I couldn't help but think, "Wow. Some of this actually sounds like real conversation."

High praise, I know.

That said, I don't believe the movie did a good enough job at forging the friendship between the four friends before shit starts hitting the fan. 

We see them interact for the first 10 minutes or so. Then they split up like Scooby-Doo and the gang. One guy gets sick. Another joins the mile-high club. The remaining two, the film forgets about for the next 30 minutes. 

It's a very strange choice considering that we, as the audience, are meant to be emotionally attached to these people. Felt like I didn't get to know who our protagonists were at all. 

I empathized more with the flight attendants. Whether that's because the chemistry the friends was so lacking, idk. In any case, kudos to our flight attendant duo Danielle Scott and Connor Powles. You two were great.

Also, random note, something like three different people are sick on the plane. One guy has diarrhea. Another has a hangover. Not exactly sure why this was such a prominent plot point at the start. It doesn't go anywhere. Should've committed and given us a proper Spider Flu.

The film struggles with tone. For much of the runtime, it is tense and foreboding. This makes sense, as the viewer is cued in on the mutant spider baddies soon to rampage through the aircraft. 

It does have a few funny nods. There's a famous restroom scene from Snakes on a Plane where the dude's todger gets nibbled on. That is recreated here. And I liked that. It was a nice little allusion that fit within the story.

But then, as people are getting murdered in the background, the wisecracks come crawling out.

"I might need to get a new job. LOL."

"Any chance of that drink yet? LOL."

"Let's all give the bad man a middle finger on one. Two! Three!"

Yeah. No. Don't start with that. Please.

It's not quirky. It's not fun. It's not #relatable. Sucks the seriousness right out of the scene. I know this film was released in 2024, but c'mon, guys. This was a lesson the entertainment industry should have learned in the 2010s. 

There's a silly "Suit Up!" montage. Looking like they're about to pair up with Arnie and take on the Predator. I didn't hate that as much because it was more camp and less Joss Whedon.

That's not to say characters can't use humor to cope with a tense situation. But there's a right and a wrong way to do that if you want to maintain the atmosphere. Joss Whedon is always the wrong way.

It's made all the more strange when the humor abruptly ends just before the climax. Suddenly people are crying and sacrificing themselves, and I'm just like "Where did the comedy-horror about fighting mutant spiders with tennis rackets and a dream go?"

Mechanics & Structure

Having the movie set in a stationary place can make things a tad boring and stale. For Spiders on a Plane, it is nonstop airplane cabin action for 80% of the movie. The team does their best to make use of the situation. 

The way the lighting changes and how the spiders overrun the place with webbing. It gives a sense of evolution and variety that worked well. All this while preserving the claustrophobic nature of being isolated with no way out. Maybe that's my love of minimalism talking, but I thought it was nice to see.

The music is fine. It communicates the sci-fi thriller vibe it was going for. Fitting, but not outstanding.

The sound design is more varied. The screeches of the spiders and the ambient plane noises are all right, but sometimes the mixing is so poor I couldn't understand what people in the scene were saying over the local arachnid doing the Cha-Cha Slide on some poor sod's corpse.

Speaking of not understanding what in the hell people are saying, can we talk about the mad scientist? He's Russian, big ass baseball cap that says DENMARK with the crest of the House of Estridsen notwithstanding. And the dude talks in this nervous, mumbling way that, combined with the accent, makes it so I cannot understand what in the fuck he is saying half the time. 

Are you an anime schoolgirl, man!? Speak up!

Another problem I have specifically relates to the editing. There are more than a couple of occasions where two events happening back-to-back seemed like non sequiturs. 

For instance, an attendant will hear a banal sound after a bout of turbulence. Then suddenly she's climbing down and exploring the cargo hold.

Sorry, did I miss something?

Later, a guy bursts into the cabin and says there are giant spiders. Five seconds later, we are treated to Parkinson's cam with everyone dead or dying. Giant tarantulas crawling over their bodies.

There should be some kind of transition between those two scenes, right? Something substantial that bridges those two events? It feels like something was cut.

There are a couple more instances of that, but I think you get the point. This very well might be a writing issue, but I think editing is the more likely culprit. Things have to follow a logical progression, my man.

Since I went in so hard on Ice Spiders's CGI, I wanted to touch on the graphics briefly. In Spiders on a Plane the graphics are all right. 

I think the lighting does a lot of the heavy lifting here. Ice Spiders was mainly set outdoors amidst a bright snowscape. Here we are in a much darker environment that is cluttered with airplane seats and baggage. It helps.

That's not to say that Spiders on a Plane doesn't do its best to even the field. 

The daddy fuck ass spiders are the size of a horse. How they fit those babies into the cargo hold, the world may never know. It makes the fake-ness of the CGI very prominent. Doubly so considering the animator decided to give the spiders a furry appearance and the shadows are nonexistent.

Unsure why that was the chosen design. It makes the creature blurry. Like a low-quality JPG that was scaled up in MS Paint.

Conclusion

So where does that leave us? Well, the first phrase that comes to mind is "aggressively mediocre."

Aside from the occasional fun banter, everything was distinctly meh. I get that it's a monster movie and those aren't exactly reaching for the stars, especially when it's a film explicitly derivative of a more popular film in the genre. So, in that respect, it did well. I wasn't bored to tears. And it didn't make me mad. 

A high bar for horror films, to be sure.

Unironically.

Unfortunately.

I do think this was good to orient my new rating system though. Something to establish a firm center. This is just the third movie review with me rating X/10, after all. There were bound to be some growing pains as I get back into picking apart movies. And watching the mediocrity that was Spiders on a Plane made me realize that previous films did indeed cross the line of boring me to tears and/or making me mad.

On a completely unrelated note, I am bumping last week's review of Ted Bunny down to 2/10.

🟨 Rating: 4/10