This had ALL the ingredients to be a terrific, fun, cheesy Friday-night B-movie special until it took itself too seriously and ruined everything. The "spider" was so laughably bad, it looked (at first) like something out of _The Muppet Show_ and then they made it so enormously large that it just looked like what it was: a paper-maché animatronic robot spider with wooden planks as its "spines" (the super-sensitive hairs that you see on a spider's legs). Even with that, however, the film could have been a lot of fun, as it was just so terrifickly awful that it was one of those _"so bad it's good"_ films...until they decided to make the heroine "Marci" (Lana Parrilla) this super-tough female version of Rambo or something. Had they used perhaps a more mature (or mature-looking) female lead, they might could have pulled it off, but this girl looked ... well, like a college kid writing for a hack college newspaper, which is what she was portraying. So you have this college girl who - in the blink of an eye - becomes a commando that throws a punch like Clubber Lang, outmaneuvers and wrests a handgun away from a trained FBI agent, gets the drop on him, then later manages to fire the killing shot from a LAW (Light Anti-Tank Weapon) while dangling from a hijacked helicopter just above the toxic-laden fangs of said giant spider. Like I said, this had all the ingredients of a great Friday-night cheesy B-movie horror flick, but they ruined it by trying to take themselves seriously. I mean, aside from the "fun" factor, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to watch this: it's a ridiculous storyline to begin with, and it doesn't get any clearer or make any more sense throughout the film; the acting is completely horrid (no A-listers in this one, sorry), the dialogue is as canned and weak as you'll ever find, the creature itself is just laughably bad, and the characters themselves are too flimsy to buy into. There was one decent "gore" scene early on, but even that made me literally laugh out loud because it was so bizarre. If you're looking for something to kill an hour and a half on a Friday evening, this will make you laugh...up until they start with the Commando gimmick from "Marci" (about 2/3 of the way through). After that, it just becomes annoying and you want it to end because they've taken all the fun out of it and actually tried to make it an honest-to-goodness "scary movie" and there's nothing scary about it but you've watched too much by now and you have to see how it ends. I give it a "3" when I was almost certain at the beginning that it would garner a "7" or possibly even an "8" from me. That's how badly they ruined it. Otherwise, it's great for some laughs if you're just bored, as I was.