When her estranged brother vanishes while looking for life-extending pharmaceuticals in an abandoned mine in the Chinese desert, venomous animal expert Dr. Jia Le (Li Bingbing, The Meg) joins a team to find him. Leading the charge is the brother’s boss (Kelsey Grammer, The Expendables 3), co-founder of the biotech firm for which the siblings’ father was CEO. As if Grammer’s presence weren’t off-putting enough, Kellan Lutz (The Legend of Hercules) is on hand as the search-and-rescue expert.
After the team members encounter dried-out livestock at ground level and manage to outrun a lightning storm, they descend into the mine — actually a series of secret tunnels from an ancient emperor’s underground palace. There they find the movie’s raison d’être: spiders genetically engineered to breed and kill — and, per the closed captioning, “chitter.”
7 Guardians of the Tomb is a Chinese-funded production helmed by Australia’s Kimble Rendall, the former founding Hoodoo Guru whose 3D sharksploitation effort, 2012’s Bait, is not dissimilar in spirit, but boasts less convincing effects. That the CGI spiders don’t look as “added in post” as expected is one of 7 Guardians’ two strongest points; the other is that Rendall doesn’t skimp on them, with spiders small, medium and big-ass crawling all over his film’s frames and cast members.
But one cannot depend on all that arachnageddon alone, which is why a heavy dullness soon sets in. Overwhelming crudity drags the proceedings down to such a level of Syfy silliness that not even Grammer’s hammy God-complex speechifying can distract from it, no matter how loudly he yells. —Rod Lott