31 Days of Halloween: Itsy Bitsy

2019, Micah Gallo (feature debut) -- Amazon

The second in the spider trilogy we are imposing upon ourselves. Luckily, this spider was so obviously animated, I did not react in the bit. The movie also smacked of Straight to VHS level (and I mean .. from the VHS days) that any hint of "scariness" melted away in bad drama and lack of any real tension. 

If Infested had the spider coming from a Jordanian desert (would have been scarier to write 'dessert') and collected by capitalistic opportunists, this spider comes from a ... tomb raider in ... Asia? In a mildly interesting bit of backstory, the tomb raider is stealing the egg jar from a weird spider-god cult out of spite, for they killed the woman who raised him, the wife of a known treasure/antiquity collector... the seedy kind, not the Indiana Jones kind. Either way, the tomb raider tries to gift the egg jar to the collector, Walter Clark (Bruce Davison, The Lords of Salem), but they argue and the tomb raider smashes the egg jar before running off.

Meanwhile, Clark's new live in caregiver, a single mom with two kids in tow, arrives in time to see the tomb raider run out. The caregiver Kara (Elizabeth Roberts, Days of Our Lives) also comes with a major amount of PTSD from an accident that killed one of her children, and ended her marriage, and an oxy addiction. She is not a good mom. But the movie wants to set her up to be seen as a Good Mom, or at least a protective mom, but really, I side with her kid, she is not a good mom. Even on her good days, she leaves the 12 year old Jesse (Arman Darbo, Defenders of Life) to take care of his younger sister -- like everything: food, cleaning, dressing, etc.

So, yeah the egg jar had a spider egg in it, and the spider bit the tomb raider, who crashed his van soon after. But don't pay attention to that, as it doesn't really play into the plot. Pay closer attention to the not-really-ever-hidden puppy sized spider running around Clark's house. Oh, it moults a time or two, but it never really becomes sizeable, just enough to look icky big.

And that's the rub of this movie. It may be the 80s VHS style lack of tension (I mean, Bruce Davison was the king of these bad movies) and cheesy effects, but I was not scared of the spider one bit. Usually spider scenes make me jump out of my skin but..... not so much here. And despite them focusing on seeing the spider lay eggs in two places, we don't end up dealing with more than one spider. They leave that to the lame attempt to hint at a sequel.

Also, I am kind of annoyed that they would associate the movie with kid's nursery rhyme but not play into it. But it did lead to amusing Search Results when I entered into Amazon's search bar.