Movies

The Avocado Movie Club #55: Arachnophobia (1990) 

Welcome to the movie club! Today’s movie is Frank Marshall’s horror comedy Arachnophobia!

Seems to be the only real poster for the film!

Arachnophobia stars Jeff Daniels as Ross Jennings, a general practitioner with a paralysing fear of spiders who moves to a small town in hopes of taking over for their current doctor. Unbeknownst to him and his family, the barn on their property has also become home to a newly discovered and ultra deadly spider from a Venezuelan tepui.

Arachnophobia was first released in Canada and the US on July 18th, 1990, before a staggered international release throughout the rest of the year and the next.1 It was shot on a budget of $31 million and was well-received by critics, earning a 94% on RottenTomatoes, but was a bit more lukewarmly received by audiences and only earned $53 million domestic, with no international numbers available.23

Trivia:4 

  • Frank Marshall held what he called the “Spider Olympics” to find the best spider to use for the film. They settled on the Avondale spider from New Zealand that is not poisonous, but they thought looked good and found easy to get moving for the camera.
  • The animatronic for the lead spider was named Big Bob, and it was created by special effects artist Chris Wala and his team, who have worked on films such as Gremlins and The Fly. 
  • Many of the spider scenes were “improvised” and not exactly planned. The popcorn scene is given as an example of one that required many takes and the final shot we see is the spider “ad-libbing”.

Up Next: Our next film will be Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi action satire Robocop! We will meet to discuss it on September 4, at 12PM EST. Check out the trailer and where it’s playing below:

USA

  • Stream: Prime Video
  • Rent or Buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango At Home, Google Play, YouTube, Spectrum+ (rental only), Plex (rental only)

Canada

  • Stream: Prime Video, Crave (also via Prime Video)
  • Rent or Buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Google Play, YouTube, CosmoGO

UK 

  • Stream: Prime Video, itvX
  • Rent or Buy: Apple TV, Prime Video, Sky Store, Rakuten TV, Google Play (purchase only), YouTube (purchase only)
  1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099052/releaseinfo/ ↩︎
  2. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/arachnophobia ↩︎
  3. https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Arachnophobia-(1990) ↩︎
  4. https://amblin.com/article/along-came-a-director/ ↩︎