Big Ass Spider! needs a lesson in basic punctuation. Its title includes an exclamation point that is not needed, yet excludes the hyphen that is. After all, this is a movie about a big-ass spider, not an ass spider that also is big. (I do not know what an ass spider is. Oh, if only a porn parody existed to explain it!)
As an L.A. exterminator named Alex, Greg Grunberg (TV’s Heroes) gets the Bill Murray/Vince Vaughn role of the affable, dumpy slob who nonetheless saves the day and gets the girl (in this case, Bring It On’s Clare Kramer). With the aid of a hospital security guard named José (Candyman: Day of the Dead’s Lombardo Boyar, who makes not-that-funny lines funny in his scene-stealing delivery), Alex chases a deadly spider that gets exponentially larger over the course of one crazy day.
Even before this arachnid has grown large enough to scale the Deloitte office tower King Kong-style, the military is summoned. Immediately, it’s clear the troops have little to no experience dealing with giant spiders that spray some liquid with the power to melt your face like the Ark of the Covenant and take out a public park full of volleyball-playing bikini hussies in nothing flat. (That last part is the best.)
Working from a script by Centipede! scribe Gregory Gieras (I smell a trend), Mike Mendez (The Gravedancers) directs with such a featherweight touch, one practically can sense him smiling from behind the camera. The eight-legged freak’s utter CGI phoniness keeps Big Ass Spider! from venturing beyond a comic vibe into anything approaching fright; I doubt the giving of the willies ever was a goal. At times, the movie feels like you’re watching a video game — the Call of Duty-esque first-person shooter POV sees to that — and that sensibility ultimately seeps into an overall verdict of harmless.
After 75 fleet-footed minutes, the end credits begin. A few seconds later, a stinger suggests a sequel, presumably to be titled Big Ass Cockroach! Fine, boys, but let’s not neglect the hyphen again. —Rod Lott