Lavalantula (2015) Review

WEEK 1: THREE CRAZY CREATURE FEATURES

Lavalantula (2015) Review

Welcome to the second year of Clayton’s Creepy Cinema! As you know from the preview last week (if you missed it, check it out to know what’s on the schedule this month) the theme this year is natural horror films, a sub-genre which goes by many other names: killer animal, killer creature, animal attack, animal amok, etc. As opposed to last year, where I started with classic horror films and moved forward to recent productions, this year has no chronology with release dates. I’m kicking things off with the newest killer animal film I could find, and what a film to start with!

Lavalantula premiered on the Syfy channel (A.K.A Space Channel in Canada) this past July, a few days after the premiere of Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (Actual title). People seemed more excited about a third Sharknado—one of the stupidest series of films ever conceived—than they were about Lavalantula, which is an original concept, but does have a similar premise (scary natural disaster + scary animal = mayhem). Going into Lavalantula, I had absolutely no hope for this movie. I was expecting a complete piece of garbage right in line with Sharknado or Avalanche Sharks, and what I ended up seeing took me completely by surprise.

The hero of this movie is a former 90’s action star (played by Steve Guttenberg) who is still trying to work in movies, but he’s starting to feel outdated as an actor, and is struggling to keep up in the world of Hollywood. Then, all of a sudden, a volcano erupts in Los Angeles and releases vicious lava-spewing tarantulas, varying in size, but most often described as being “as big as a man” by the action hero. The film wastes no time getting to the events viewers have tuned in to see: an avalanche of giant, magma-filled tarantulas attacking people. Not only do the spiders attack and kill people, they set their victims on fire before doing so. Action Hero Man hijacks a tour bus in the Hollywood hills to get back to the city to warn everyone about the impending danger (which everyone takes a long time to notice, by the way) and he encounters a fan who becomes his ass-kicking sidekick, played by...one of the kids from The Sandlot? That’s right folks, the actor who portrayed Ham Porter in the classic 1994 coming-of-age-baseball film The Sandlot, is in Lavalantula. “You’re Killing Me Smalls!”

Action Hero Man tries to warn his kick-boxing-wife about the Lavalantulas, but of course she’s initially skeptical—that is, until she fights one of them in her own home using props from Action Hero Man’s early films, such as a sword and a shield and a shotgun. She later joins up with her husband and they form a rag-tag group with some other survivors to fight back against the angry arachnids. They discover from a scientist that the Lavalantulas are what brought down the Mayans (the Mayans also coined the name apparently?) and the only way to defeat them is to kill the Queen. Using explosives supplied by the pyrotechnicians Action Hero Man has worked with in the past, they fight back against the Lavalantulas, with Action Hero Man leading the assault.

To be perfectly honest, I was shocked by Lavalantula. I expected this movie to be a humongous waste of time, and I unfairly assumed it would be when I had nothing to go on except the description on the TV guide. I had not seen a trailer, not read any interviews with the cast or crew, and not even seen a poster. I can safely say Lavalantula does not fall into the “trying-so-hard-to-be-so-bad-it’s-good-that-it’s-just-bad” category Sharknado falls into, and is simply entertaining. Lavalantula knows it’s silly, but it’s not forcing the silliness. The director actually said in an interview that he wasn’t trying to make a Sharknado-type film—he wanted it to be fun in an earnest way. Sure, the concept of fire-breathing tarantulas is ridiculous, but it’s actually enjoyable! The visual effects, for a SyFy made-for-TV movie, are decent. Legit effort was put in to these creatures. There’s an adequate amount of action scenes with the spiders attacking people, setting them on fire, tackling them, and the people fighting back— shooting them, hitting them with vehicles, etc.—and the final showdown, without spoiling too much, was like a scene out of a Godzilla movie. While not in any way scary, Lavalantula still tries to give audiences something different, and as someone who has seen many killer animal films and low-budget sci-fi movies, I greatly appreciated this.

When it comes to reviewing these sorts of killer animal films, and Syfy original productions in particular, it’s hard to really offer much criticism. This sort of film is critic-proof, essentially, but I’m going to try and identify some things I thought could have been improved. First of all, I loved that it wasted no time getting into the main plot and action. Within ten minutes I understood the main character, where he was coming from, what the main problem in the film was, and there was enough fun action to keep me watching. Then, the film detours into a corresponding storyline following Action Hero Man’s son and his friends trying (unsuccessfully) to survive the killer spiders, and this aspect of the film really dragged, despite some fun action set pieces that ensued. The first two acts are mostly made up of solid action scenes, but the third act slows down a little, and essentially becomes an imitation of Aliens and a parody/tribute to Independence Day, copying the same sort of endgame and even having Action Hero Man give an awesome speech before the final onslaught. The whole concept of destroying the main threat that’s controlling the armada of subsequent threats, and when the main threat is dead, all the lesser threats instantly die, is a tired concept, even for a Syfy film.

One final theme running throughout the movie stood out to me, both as a negative and a positive. The director chose to make a few references to other films, but not just subtle nods to some cinema classics. There’s literally a shot of a guy dressed in an Indiana Jones costume running away from a giant boulder. References range from Jurassic Park to Pirates of the Caribbean, and there’s even a cameo/reference to the Sharknado series. Though many of the references throughout were fun, most of them just reminded me how much better those movies are compared to this one.

Given the title, concept, and studio involved, Lavalantula is significantly better than it could have (or should have) been. It’s clear the filmmakers and the actors were having fun, but they were also putting in some honest effort, and not trying to make it so-bad-it’s-good. If you like killer creature films, and you haven’t seen a whole pile of them in your life, I would recommend checking this out on a repeat on SyFy. Even if you’re a fan of Sharknado, or any of the other SyFy films in the past few years, I think you’ll still like Lavalantula. It’s self-aware, silly, and all-around entertaining.