A few weeks after the death of Roger Corman, Kiah Roache-Turner is here to confirm the great man’s spirit is alive and thumping. We can be more specific. This lively Australian horror is very much in the spirit of Corman graduate Joe Dante. It is a horror film. Following luminous visitations from the beyond, a young girl named (hang to this) Charlotte happens upon a tiny spider that, after adoption as a pet, proceeds to grow at an alarming rate. Soon residents of the apartment block and their poor parrots are becoming arachnid lunchmeat.
The film certainly has its gruesome moments. You wouldn’t be putting it before the youngest kids. But like Dante films such as Gremlins and Small Soldiers, it plays to the beats of family entertainment. The mayhem is all good clean fun. The strained domestic relations are at least as important as the chewed limbs. The word “charming” almost covers it.
Whether by accident or design, Alyla Browne, who plays the juvenile Furiosa in the new Mad Max film, takes her second lead of the month as young Charlotte – surely named for the most famous spider in literature. As was often the case in the films of Dante or Steven Spielberg, the protagonist has a complicated relationship with at least one parent. She and her stepdad, also janitor of the building, are writing a comic, but tensions won’t entirely dissipate. She takes solace in Sting the spider, as Elliot once did in ET.
None of which musing is to imply there isn’t some serious horror action afoot. Set (fairly convincingly) in Brooklyn, the film makes an eerie hunting ground of the crumbling apartment building. As the beast, created by the good people at Wētā Workshop, accumulates mass at alarming rate and makes cunning use of shadowy corners, debts are repaid to the spirit of Alien. Building on her work in Furiosa, Browne – here allowed her own face, unaltered by Anya Taylor-Joyish CGI – proves to be a spirited trooper of the old sort. She swaggers. She swats. She shrieks when necessary.
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All in all, a diverting entertainment that, unlike so much contemporary horror, is prepared to have a good time. Fun for all the family. Well, all the family over 16.
