Arachnophobia

A fast-paced thriller with a wicked bite and a sure sense of humor, it traps you in a web of suspense and makes you squeal with pleasure. [18 July 1990, p.E1]

As the corpses pile up and the cocoons hatch, the spiders become more brazen and finally start invading houses. The last 45 minutes of Arachnophobia is a blast, with attack-of-the-killer-spider scenes coming nonstop. This is not great art, but it's a good time, and the climax is terrific. [18 July 1990, p.E1]

Arachnophobia expertly blends horror and tongue-in cheek comedy in the tale of a small California coastal town overrun by Venezuelan killer spiders. Frank Marshall’s sophisticated feature directing debut never indulges in ultimate gross-out effects and carefully chooses both its victims and its means of depicting their dispatch. Read full review

Arachnophobia is a skin-crawling horror film that never loses its cheeky, throwaway edge.  Read full review

An exciting and thoroughly enjoyable, experience. Read full review

It pushes the audience's buttons with Pavlovian finesse, manufacturing industrial-strength adrenaline. First-time director Frank Marshall has long been Steven Spielberg's producer, and he's learned the master's lessons well. Read full review

Arachnophobia manages to be genuinely frightening without being '80s-style revolting. Marshall has gauged his pattern of frights and laughs carefully, to let the audience giggle at its own jumpiness, and his cast, which includes a sprinkling of the best-known American character actors, is a clue to his affection for the form. [18 July 1990, p.F1]

This is the kind of movie where you squirm out of enjoyment, not terror, and it's probably going to be popular with younger audiences - it doesn't pound you over the head with violence. Like the spider itself, it has a certain respect for structure. Read full review

In the end, the highly manipulative Arachnophobia succeeds because it plays off our deepest fears and dramatizes that most common of nightmares in which man is pursued by a ravenous, largely unseen evil. [18 July 1990, p.D1]

The first-time director, Frank Marshall, has said that he modeled the film on The Birds, and the structure of Arachnophobia does follow the pattern set up by Hitchcock. But it's definitely a Disney/Spielberg movie, smooth and neatly packaged and more interested in the gimmicks than the central enigma of Hitchcock's movie. [18 July 1990, p.E1]

Arachnophobia marks the directing debut of Frank Marshall, who has worked as Steven Spielberg's producer on many films. He has learned one lesson from Spielberg very well-namely, that getting the small details right about contemporary life can make the most fanciful story seem credible. He also has cast his horror film very unusually well. Read full review

Arachnophobia is a movie spun as carefully as a cobweb, and a whole lot more likeable than you'd expect from a film about creepy crawlers chomping on townsfolks. Credit first-time director Frank Marshall for the success as he expertly wrangles cast and spiders into an entertaining, three-star movie that moves so swiftly along that there's barely a minute to catch your breath. [20 July 1990, p.18]

Frank Marshall has crammed the screen with plenty of knee-jerk thrills interlaced with black humour. Designed to reduce the audience to a squirming mass, the film yields plenty of grisly pleasures. Read full review

Arachnophobia isn’t great filmmaking, appearing to be kept in check by vaguely resembling Spielbergian entertainment without rising to its altitudes. But it’s a pleasant, acutely nostalgic elicitation of the VHS era and the woozy, preadolescent excitement of awaiting the next cranked-out Spielberg Xerox picture. Read full review

For a movie that generally delivers the goods while you're watching it, mild irritants abound. Arachnophobia is soft at the center, but at least it won't traumatize (and thus repel) the mass audience. [18 July 1990, p.1D]

The specifics of the spider rampage have been very enjoyably executed by Mr. Marshall and particularly well played by Mr. Daniels, whose dryly self-deprecating manner and underlying decency make him an irresistible hero. Arachnophobia falters only when it becomes too broad, as in a dopey nod to Psycho that captures none of Hitchcock's formal elegance, and in various minor characters who serve as comic grotesques, like the town's potato-chip-munching mortician.  Read full review

It's a one-joke movie, a funhouse ride, the cinematic equivalent of having a rubber spider thrown in your lap. But it doesn't matter if you reject the wispy script or the plot, which has as much substance as a spider's web; you'll jump every time. Read full review

It may be a seamless tongue-in-cheek thriller, but it lacks the superbly developed psychological tension of its illustrious predecessors. Director Marshall's film is nothing more than a diversion, and if you personally have no fear of spiders, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Read full review

This is Disney's idea of a fright fest -- about as threatening as Jaws with Flipper in the title role. Read full review

In the end, about all Arachnophobia has going for it is the irrational fear the title refers to: a pre-existing fear Marshall does little more than exploit. It doesn't take a lot of skill to make people jump when you shove a spider at them. Nor does it really seem fair. Read full review

Arachnophobia wants to be Jaws or The Birds, with killer spiders. It isn't. The movie lacks the skill really to tap our primal fears, and the spiders are the only things that don't seem mechanical in Arachnophobia. [18 July 1990, p.65P]

A rip-off of The Birds, but not as scary. [21 July 1990]