Rating: 
Summary: Not a direct sequel
Review: Although the first Spiders movie was quite good, this one lacks most of what made the first enjoyable.There is no solid plotline, no interesting lead characters, no conspiracies, aliens, Men in Black, etc. All it really has going for it is seeing Bull, from TV's Night Court, as the villain. A couple are rescued at sea by a large freighter. On board is a doctor who is conducting experiments on giant spiders. The couple figures out what is going on, realize they are intended as victims and accidently release all of the spiders. In the original movie, the spiders were fearsome and nasty. Here they are almost backdrops. With the surface of the ship literally crawling with the beasts, they mostly just stand around and do nothing, not even chase their prey. Stick with the first movie and avoid this thematic sequel.
Rating: 
Summary: Never Look A Gift Spider in The PediPalps
Review: First, it has to be said that this movie is lacking in a few crucial elements. It doesn't have that essential heavy-handed plot that most movies need, nor does it have a cast of stunning stars (although having Richard Moll in it was really fun) to make up for the lack of a plot, and it also lacks a budget to throw to any sorts of effects wizardry in to cover up the casting/plot problem. So, if you have to have these things to enjoy yourself, I'd suggest you turn away from this review now, shaking your head in disgust at the four stars I'm going to give it, asking yourself what on Earth would possess someone to give such a movie such high marks. For anyone who's left (i hope there's one or two) here's my answer.
Being a fan of movies that are a bit - lacking - in monetary constraints, I saw this as a real hit-or-miss picture that was spawned from another movie that wasn't received with opened arms. It also has to do with something I'm terribly fond of, that of giant insects and the efforts they go to while trying to establish some semblance of control on an otherwise mundane planet. In this movie the director take the idea that the first movie was hinged upon, that of experimentation leading to super-spiders, and leads it down darker alleyways as it mingles human hosts, flesh-feasts in oversized gladbags, lots of fangs, and boatnapping into the fray. Without trying to give too much of the move away and warning those who are interested in seeing this movie to basically rent it as a trial and skip this for fear of spoilers, the movie begins with people having fun, playing cards and drinking, on the high seas. Their fun is quickly put to an end as they find their ship boarded, their heads and fists meeting in the most loving of manners before they are unceremoniously bagged in what appear to be some really spacious gunnysacks, their boat torched and annoying captain/bartender murdered in the process. Enter our two main, horribly naive, characters - one a bumbling male and the other a slightly more intuitive female - that stumble across the charred wreckage while kicking it in their overglorified sailboat, take some pictures of it in the process before finding themselves in the midst of a horrendous storm. Fearing that navigating might actually get them out of this mess, they start sending out SOS calls out frantically and then, through a manner of mishaps that prove that any idiot can get a boat and sail it, they manage to sink their vessel. As luck would have it, a sizable freight vessel is in the area and notices their rescue flares, picking them up from certain death and letting the esteemed Doctor Grbac (Richard Moll) check them out. Well, curiosity gets to our male lead and he has to prod around while on board, knowing that something is amiss because the boat, strangely enough, seems to be going around in circles (and ignoring his wife's calls of "who cares, they can be smuggling drugs for all I care" in the process). Well, after finding a room full of bodies in cold storage and evidence of some eight-legged horrors being bred in the sublevels of the boat, its up to the real brains - the heroine -to find out what's up and how to calm the nerve that her obviously ignorant husband has rubbed wrong. Despite its flaws, there are some good effects in the movie, especially with the splattering births of the cute baby spiders. These, of course, look like sock-puppets when they crawl away, but laundry can be fearsome depending on how long its been away from the wash. Besides, there are also some really wonderful prosthetic effects showcased here as well, the kind my friends and I - with a vast amount of effort - made out of silly straws and then threw around in drunken fits, to go with the computer generated one that might keep someone with arachnophobia from laughing. So, why did I give it four stars? Because all of those elements combined into something not intentionally funny but really good, keeping me rolling for hours on end.
Rating: 
Summary: Really lousy
Review: I haven't seen Spiders 1, so I can't compare it to its sequel, but for its sake I hope that the old saw about a sequel being worse than the original is true. Spiders 2 was awful. Terrible. Stupid. Poorly acted. Badly written. Unimaginative. Even badly lit. Now, granted, a B (or C or D) movie like this isn't going to have a plot out of Shakespeare, but why not have a story that makes a modicum of sense? There are so many flaws I can't possibly enumerate them all, but here are a few: Spiders 2 takes place on a cargo ship containing a secret lab in which spider and human DNA has been combined--what better place than a ship rolling on the high seas to have a lab full of glassware for experimentation? Human DNA does nothing but make the spiders supersized, like a McDonald's Value Meal--there are no hideous human/spider creatures (think The Fly or Alien Resurrection), just big bugs. At the end of the movie a truly gigantic spider as wide as the entire ship and ten times larger than the human sized spiders we'd seen before emerges--where this beast could have been throughout the rest of the film we have no idea, and it does nothing more than go down with the ship. In the final scene, guys in the rescue helicopter drop a hand grenade down to the heroine, who's holding on to her husband with one hand, being pulled down by a giant spider on one leg, with the wash of the helicopter rotor affecting her from above and the motion of the sea on the crate the spider is in from below--and she catches it one handed. Sign the girl up as an outfielder in the big leagues! Even the shoes the heroine wears are stupid--she was rescued from a sailboat where she'd undoubtedly be wearing deck shoes, and we're told that she's the only woman on board so the clothes they give her will probably be too big for her (fortunately, they aren't, and the tank top she wears is quite fetching)--where did the pumps with two inch heels come from? Is the ship not only infested with giant spiders, but also drag queens? Hmm, come to think of it, that would have made a better movie. There are a few decent special effects, but some really awful ones. Frankly, much of the film looks like what my son did when he was about five years old, playing with his rubber toys. The only two reasons to see this are if you think it's campy enough to be funny (maybe, especially if you're influenced by hallucinogenic substances, but remember, the drag queens were my idea) or if you've got the hots for Stephanie Niznik. She's a fox, but can't save the film for me. Better spend your money on Deep Rising, a terrific, scary, funny film with another gorgeous heroine.
Rating:
Summary: Really lousy
Review: I haven't seen Spiders 1, so I can't compare it to its sequel, but for its sake I hope that the old saw about a sequel being worse than the original is true. Spiders 2 was awful. Terrible. Stupid. Poorly acted. Badly written. Unimaginative. Even badly lit. Now, granted, a B (or C or D) movie like this isn't going to have a plot out of Shakespeare, but why not have a story that makes a modicum of sense? There are so many flaws I can't possibly enumerate them all, but here are a few: Spiders 2 takes place on a cargo ship containing a secret lab in which spider and human DNA has been combined--what better place than a ship rolling on the high seas to have a lab full of glassware for experimentation? Human DNA does nothing but make the spiders supersized, like a McDonald's Value Meal--there are no hideous human/spider creatures (think The Fly or Alien Resurrection), just big bugs. At the end of the movie a truly gigantic spider as wide as the entire ship and ten times larger than the human sized spiders we'd seen before emerges--where this beast could have been throughout the rest of the film we have no idea, and it does nothing more than go down with the ship. In the final scene, guys in the rescue helicopter drop a hand grenade down to the heroine, who's holding on to her husband with one hand, being pulled down by a giant spider on one leg, with the wash of the helicopter rotor affecting her from above and the motion of the sea on the crate the spider is in from below--and she catches it one handed. Sign the girl up as an outfielder in the big leagues! Even the shoes the heroine wears are stupid--she was rescued from a sailboat where she'd undoubtedly be wearing deck shoes, and we're told that she's the only woman on board so the clothes they give her will probably be too big for her (fortunately, they aren't, and the tank top she wears is quite fetching)--where did the pumps with two inch heels come from? Is the ship not only infested with giant spiders, but also drag queens? Hmm, come to think of it, that would have made a better movie. There are a few decent special effects, but some really awful ones. Frankly, much of the film looks like what my son did when he was about five years old, playing with his rubber toys. The only two reasons to see this are if you think it's campy enough to be funny (maybe, especially if you're influenced by hallucinogenic substances, but remember, the drag queens were my idea) or if you've got the hots for Stephanie Niznik. She's a fox, but can't save the film for me. Better spend your money on Deep Rising, a terrific, scary, funny film with another gorgeous heroine.
Rating:
Summary: if you liked the first one, don't plan to like this one!!
Review: I knew when I saw that this movie didn't have ANY of the same actors in it that the first one did, it was probably pretty bad. "Spiders" at least had some charm and some good special effects, but since this "sequel" movie has unlikable characters and quite cartoony special effects, it's hard to get into or enjoy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the first one and Richard Moll stars in it. That should be all you need to know to stay away from this piece of dreck!!
Rating:
Summary: if you liked the first one, don't plan to like this one!!
Review: I knew when I saw that this movie didn't have ANY of the same actors in it that the first one did, it was probably pretty bad. "Spiders" at least had some charm and some good special effects, but since this "sequel" movie has unlikable characters and quite cartoony special effects, it's hard to get into or enjoy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the first one and Richard Moll stars in it. That should be all you need to know to stay away from this piece of dreck!!
Rating:
Summary: Spiders 2: Mad Scientist Meets "Aliens"
Review: There is absolutely no connection between the original SPIDERS and SPIDERS 2, except for the inevitable big crawling and bouncing arachnids. Director Sam Firstenberg tries with middling success to meld the traditional Big Bug movies of the 50s with the claustrophobic feel of Sigourney Weaver battling the slimy Aliens of that series. The result is a mess that does not allow for either plot believability or character/audience involvement. Stephanie Niznik is Alexandra, who, with her remarkably wimpy husband, is picked up out of the ocean by a sea captain (Daniel Quinn) and a mad scientist type (Richard Moll), both of whom are conducting experiments to combine spider with human DNA. Naturally, no explanation is given as to why this should inevitably lead to spiders growing as big as Buicks. SPIDERS 2 starts out more as a dramatic mystery that only hints at the existence of huge spiders. Alexandra's husband is less interesting than the Daniel Quinn character who takes a liking to her. Richard Moll gets to prance about waving his arms as he shouts out, "My experiments will revolutionize genetic science!" The second half bogs down into a scene by scene ripoff of ALIENS 2 and 3. Ms. Niznik battles both evil henchmen and mutated spiders, even as she wears the same T-shirt worn by Sigourney Weaver. The assorted spiders seem more disgusting than threatening. SPIDERS 2 would have been greatly improved had director Firstenberg tried for originality rather than variations on the tough broad in a T-shirt theme.
Rating:
Summary: Spiders 2: Mad Scientist Meets "Aliens"
Review: There is absolutely no connection between the original SPIDERS and SPIDERS 2, except for the inevitable big crawling and bouncing arachnids. Director Sam Firstenberg tries with middling success to meld the traditional Big Bug movies of the 50s with the claustrophobic feel of Sigourney Weaver battling the slimy Aliens of that series. The result is a mess that does not allow for either plot believability or character/audience involvement. Stephanie Niznik is Alexandra, who, with her remarkably wimpy husband, is picked up out of the ocean by a sea captain (Daniel Quinn) and a mad scientist type (Richard Moll), both of whom are conducting experiments to combine spider with human DNA. Naturally, no explanation is given as to why this should inevitably lead to spiders growing as big as Buicks. SPIDERS 2 starts out more as a dramatic mystery that only hints at the existence of huge spiders. Alexandra's husband is less interesting than the Daniel Quinn character who takes a liking to her. Richard Moll gets to prance about waving his arms as he shouts out, "My experiments will revolutionize genetic science!" The second half bogs down into a scene by scene ripoff of ALIENS 2 and 3. Ms. Niznik battles both evil henchmen and mutated spiders, even as she wears the same T-shirt worn by Sigourney Weaver. The assorted spiders seem more disgusting than threatening. SPIDERS 2 would have been greatly improved had director Firstenberg tried for originality rather than variations on the tough broad in a T-shirt theme.
Rating: 
Summary: It's really not that terrible
Review: This movie doesn't have anything to do with the first Spiders, but that's okay with me. It's about a couple that are shipwrecked, and picked up by another ship. The husband is ill, and the ship's doctor is giving him drugs to, supposedly, cure him. He starts to suspect something odd is going on aboard the ship, but his wife won't believe him (because maybe he's hallucinating from the drugs you know). Basically, the captain of the ship is trying to woo her away from her husband. There is some good chemistry between the wife and the ship's captain, and I found that part of the movie to be pretty good. As far as the spiders, that whole plot line is almost an afterthought. About two thirds of the movie goes by without them even being involved. And the special effects aren't very special at all. They're pretty bad.
But, all in all, the plot kept me at least vaguely interested and the characters were really quite good. I'd watch it again if I was bored and there wasn't anything else on.
Rating:
Summary: my oh my
Review: what are people thinking when they make a film anyways? the first spiders was actually a pretty good movie but then they make a complete disaster here in the sequeal, i mean just terrible, good god what happened?? one scene it looks like toy spiders crawling on a boat made from legos or somethin, i mean just terrible. nothing realistic looking at all in this film. i wouldn't pay a penny for this flick. its just that bad people!
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