Spiders 2 (2001)
Director: Sam Firstenberg

review by Christopher Geary

This is a sequel in name only with no narrative continuity whatsoever, the only link being that both films were adapted from stories by co-producer Boaz Davidson. This one mixes Dead Calm (1989) and Virus (1999), and like its predecessor plays well enough as admirably re-invented schlock without even bothering to strive for any higher purpose.
   Happily married Jason and Alex (Greg Cromer and Stephanie Niznik) are out sailing when they find a floating shipwreck, which we saw attacked and left to burn by kidnapping pirates in the film's prologue. Caught in a storm, the couple are washed overboard from their yacht, and rescued by the crew of a mysterious cargo ship where bearded and brusque Dr Gabec (Richard Moll) treats Jason's injuries with an injection that eventually makes him worse, not better. Of course, Gabec is a traditionally amoral mad scientist, conducting DNA experiments using people abducted from passing boats as living hosts to incubate the eggs of giant spiders kept in the ship's hold.
   Despite hammy acting by the villainous Moll, there are decent performances from Niznik as the tough heroine, and Daniel Quinn as the cargo ship's charming yet corrupt Captain Bigelow, and Spiders 2 (aka - Spiders II: Breeding Ground) has a far more serious tone, overall, than the first movie. This is certainly an advantage in the scenes of dramatic horror when hatchling spiders burst messily from comatose human victims in Gabec's secret lab. It's only in the later action sequences that director Sam Firstenberg loses control of the thriller atmosphere and a sense of shameless absurdity takes over. After heroine Alex rescues drugged hubby Jason, and defends herself against the big bugs with an improvised propane gas flamethrower and a fire extinguisher, Spiders 2 succumbs to narrative clumsiness, and replaces convincing details with dodgy visual effects and laughable sound effects (the largest hairy monsters shriek like trumpeting elephants as they scramble about below decks!), making the film's climax ridiculously comical and stupid.