Butt News Movie Club #5: Arachnophobia

The Spider House Rules

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We’re in the Amazon, and great news: the whites are figuring out a brand new way to do crimes against the earth! Today they’re not burning rainforests—they’re searching for undiscovered bugs, which, turns out, maybe just leave them? Maybe we have enough? A photographer named Mr. Manley (Mark L. Taylor, the most in-everything-est actor of the entire ‘90s, look up his face and send me $5 when I’m right) is there to accompany a bug scientist named Dr. Atherton (Julian Sands, looking UNSETTLINGLY like an exact cross between Lucius Malfoy and a Weasley twin) on an expedition into a big sinkhole to look for monstrosities.

Atherton says they’re hitting a brand new “tepui” today, which means tabletop mountain or mesa, so they chopper away over the river and the jungle and it’s so beautiful!!!!! I feel like if they made this movie in 2021 they would not bother to shoot on location in Venezuela and pay for an actual helicopter to get a shot of Mark L. Taylor in a second helicopter hovering over Amazonia with a deadly ant on his leg. Right? There’s something about a 1990 blockbuster that’s so luscious! Yum!

They land near a giant sinkhole on the tepui--“it’s very deep, 2000 feet and dark at the bottom”--and Atherton cannot wait to get down there and fuck up some untouched ecosystems! He says his specialty is identifying new insects and spiders (more like arachnoPHILIA, am I right, in a sex way) and Mr. Manley counters that his specialty is “football” to signify that he is a regular middle American schmoe who will not live by the laws of the jungle, no way, no sir. Which is weird, because I follow A LOT of wildlife photographers on Instagram because the only thing I truly care about is videos of snakes drinking water, and those people are hardcore as hell!!!!!!!!! They’re not showing up in Venezuela in a Miami Dolphins hat being like GWUUUUUUUUUHHHHHH!!!!??!?!!?!?!??! They LIVE in Venezuela and a hat is their house and an actual dolphin is their landlord!

But Mr. Manley, professional nature photographer supposedly, seems totally caught off guard by the news that they’re about to climb down into this spider pit--like, you accepted the job and flew all the way to Venezuela and hung out with Atherton at the bug camp and never at any point did you read the brief? Or ASK???

Awwww! Parrots!

They’ve hired an Indigenous guide who leads them most of the way down into the sinkhole, until at some point he stops and is like “No voy, no voy,” and Manley says “What’s with him?” and someone is like, “This is as far as he’ll go,” and THAT’S A RED FLAG, YOU GUYS! ACCEPT HIS GUIDANCE!!!!!! Haven’t you seen a movie before??????

They keep going anyway and Mr. Manley walks immediately into a gigantic gnarly web. Then one of the other guides tells Manley that he should be careful because he’s too fat for them to carry out, which honestly is the kind of practical fat shaming that I don’t really mind! Please let me know that kind of thing in advance!

At this point my husband informs me that you can currently buy Mr. Manley’s exact throwback Miami Dolphins hat via a targeted ad on Instagram! FYI!

The science team sets up a bunch of bug-catching funnels all around this big tree and then spray a cloud of poison smoke up into the tree. The mechanics of how these funnels are helpful is lost on me--like, how about… just tarps? How many bugs will actually even fall in the funnels? One percent? I like when movies invent Science Business that they think looks cool but actually makes no sense. It’s so cute! Manley (who has to be CONSTANTLY REMINDED TO TAKE PICTURES--my god, the grace afforded to white men who like football) inquires about what they are doing (READTHEBRIEF). Atherton explains.

Atherton: “Did you ever throw a large firecracker into a pond?”

Manley: “Maybe as a kid. Why?”

Atherton: “What happened?”

Manley: “Lots of stuff floated to the surface.”

Atherton: “Exactly.”

I’m sorry, is that some sort of widely relatable childhood experience? Throwing a large firecracker into a pond???? Here’s how that conversation would go with me.

Atherton: “Did you ever throw a large firecracker into a pond?”

Me: “What?”

Atherton: “A large firecracker. Did you ever throw one into a pond?”

Me: “What???????”

Atherton: “You never threw a large firecracker into a pond?”

Me: “No!!!! What???? Why would I throw a large firecracker into a pond?????”

Atherton: “To kill everything in the pond and make it float to the surface.”

Me: “What????????????????”

Anyway, then a billion big butterflies and bugs plop down DEAD into the cones. This is so fucking violent! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MAN? Is this what bug scientists do? Just Vince-McMahon out into pristine biomes and genocide butterflies!? How does this benefit me, a human?

Atherton thinks he finds a new species of butterfly and says they could call it “Photius manlii,” which, funny, but does he really deserve it? How about you name it after the guide who tried to save all your dumbass lives!

Rule #1 of jungle: don’t go into the jungle with a cocky blond British!

There’s a “quite dead” giant spider in one of the funnels, so Manley goes over to photograph it, and then BANG! It resurrects itself out of spite and jumps right on to Manley’s camera lens! Then another “dead” spider comes back to life in another jar! The scientists are surprised, because apparently the poison they sprayed “will kill an elephant” (AN UNFATHOMABLE THING TO DO, THEN!). But Atherton is also excited. “It is potentially a new species of spider, potentially unchanged for thousands of years!” “Very aggressive!!!!!” Just what I’m looking for in a spider! Especially one that I’m currently bothering!!!

You know where this is going. There’s a bunch of ominous footage of men carelessly brushing against foliage, and then the biggest spider of all time hitches a ride back to camp on their luggage. A pivotal part of this movie’s plot is that this spider species was geographically contained by the sinkhole and would never have even encountered a human toe to munch if Atherton hadn’t hubristically dropped his ass down into the pit--and I agree that he shouldn’t have!!--but aren’t spiders, like, literally a billion times better at climbing out of a pit than a human? Do the writers of this movie think that it’s the human part of Spiderman that makes him good at walking up a building?? These guys could have creepy-crawled to Caracas whenever they wanted to! If I’m a spider I’m suing this movie for libel.

Atherton and his bros look at the dead spider under the microscope and discover: “These spiders have no reproductive organs, almost like worker bees or soldier ants.”

Somebody (I didn’t write down who): “If these are the soldiers, I’d hate to see the general.” (<--you will!!!!!!!!!!)

Atherton tells Manley to go lie down because of the fever he picked up in Caracas. Remember the past, when your friend had a fever but you just made them go on your jungle cruise anyway?

The general spide crawls out of the backpack and into Manley’s cot. Manley feels the spide walking on him. He reaches down under the blanket. BOP BOP! The general bites him! He instantly dies! The spider runs away like “HAHA SUCKER!” and, sincerely, the best thing about this movie is that they walk this line where they give the spiders just enough personality to make it feel alarming and silly without being a total goofball farce? Like here it kind of feels like maybe this spider bit Manley for revenge bc Manley squished his friend, or maybe he was just wandering around instinctually hungry for toe like spiders do???????? It’s good! It’s a fun movie!

Okay, so they seal Manley up in a coffin to mail him back to California, and do u think there IS or ISN’T a giant evil spider in the coffin????????

Now we are in idyllic America town. The bumpkin mortician cracks open Manley’s coffin and discovers that Manley is all shriveled up and gray, because unbeknownst to everyone he was the in-flight meal for a jumbo demon. Then the mortician’s kitty-cat steals his BLT and for a second you think that she is going to be the BLT for the spider but she escapes out the dog door. And the dog escapes out the dog door, and then the spider escapes out the dog door, and that little sequence is the exact vibe of this movie.

Is it a British thing to say “cat flap” instead of “dog door”? Or are there regions in America that say “cat flap”? Cat flap is better!

The spider gets picked up by a crow who flies off with it to a nearby farmhouse, then drops dead. Thanks for the ride, CHUMP!

This farmhouse is the new home of Jeff Daniels and family, who are relocating there from the big city of San Francisco. Jeff Daniels is going to replace the smalltown doctor after his retirement. Jeff Daniels takes a biiiiiiiig sniff of the country air and… ACHOO!

HOLY SHIT.

WE’VE GOT ALLERGIES AGAIN.

Jeff Daniels has allergies to signify that he’s a big weenie and he’s a big weenie because he has arachnophobia. The ‘90s were from another planet.

One of Jeff Daniels’s kids chases his ball over by where the spider is hanging out and picks up the ball and leaves and doesn’t notice the spider at all and the spider is like wow, thanks. Think of all the lives that could have been saved if that boy had just played catch with that spider!

Then they go inside to unpack and find a spider in a box and we painstakingly establish that allergic weenie Jeff Daniels is very, very afraid of spiders. He has arachnophobia. This becomes important later!

Jeff Daniels’s wife does not have arachnophobia, so she scoops up this (FUCKING HUGE, GROSS, TERRIFYING, I AM TERRIFIED ALREADY) normal American house spider and carries it (IN HER HANDS) out to the barn to give it a new home.

The Amazon spider sees the sexy little American house spider and is like KA-BOIOIOIOIOIOING. Massive painful Amazonian spider boner!

Jeff Daniels yawns and expositions that he has a big day tomorrow because the old coot is going to pass him the doctor torch at 10 am sharp. Then Jeff Daniels and his wife drink brandy and fuck (“it’s bad luck not to make love the first night in a new house”) and MEANWHILE IN THE BARN THE LITTLE SPIDER AND THE BIG SPIDER ARE FUCKING BECAUSE IT’S BAD LUCK NOT TO MAKE LOVE THE FIRST NIGHT IN A NEW HOUSE!!!!!

WOOOOOOOO

Jeff Daniels goes to the retiring doctor’s office and receives some tough news: the coot is KEEPING THE TORCH. Dr. Coot tells Dr. Jeff Daniels that he’s decided to postpone his retirement because he feels like without a life’s purpose he’s just going to die. Dude, it’s fine if you changed your mind about retiring, but USE A PHONE! JEFF DANIELS MOVED HIS ENTIRE FAMILY THERE FOR THIS JOB! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

A forlorn Jeff Daniels trudges out to his car and finds the dinky sheriff giving him a parking ticket. He starts to argue and the Sheriff Lloyd is like wow you’re that hotshot new doctor who thinks he’s such a fancy big city bitch, huh???? which just doesn’t seem like how you would treat a normal regular perfectly nice man you just met? But it doesn’t matter because a hot old lady shows up and rescues Jeff Daniels’s ass. She rips up the ticket and is like, “Lloyd’s been a bully since the 5th grade. I oughtta know. I held him back. Walk me to my automobile.” Then she hires Jeff Daniels to be her doctor because she thinks Dr. Coot is an old piece of shit.

Jeff Daniels gives his wife the bad news and she’s like “What are we gonna do?” and he says “Kill him,” and LOL.

He’s having his first consult with the old lady the next day, and he’s like, “Maybe we’ll get lucky and all her systems will be ravaged by disease--like having seven patients in one,” and LOL again!

He checks the old lady out and tells her that the coot has been giving her blood pressure medicine she doesn’t need, and actually her blood pressure is pretty good, so he takes her off of it. She recommends that he throw a big party and invite the whole town to make them fall in love with him and want him to check on their tonsils and heartbeats and buttholes, the whole deal, instead of the coot. He agrees.

Meanwhile, wife goes to check out the barn and discovers a whole bunch of enormous thick and ropey spider webs all over the place, aka big poppa’s fuck nest. She takes some pics and it gets to the end of the roll and the film rewinds and your kids don’t know what that sounds meeeeeeeans!!!!

When Jeff gets home, wife takes him out to the barn to show him the webs, an objectively shitty thing to do to an arachnophobe you supposedly love.

She’s like, “Our little spider made himself a hell of a home. I think even you would appreciate it!” and first of all NO HE WON’T, and second of all, why on earth would you assume that there was only one spider in the barn? It’s a barn!

Jeff Daniels reminds her (us) of why he’s afraid of spiders even though she’s obviously heard this story fifty fucking thousand times. It’s because one time when he was two he was lying in his crib and a spider crawled through the bars of the crib and then walked on him. “I was physically unable to stop it from crawling along my naked skin…just the feeling of utter helplessness, being explored by an alien thing, that’s all.” Sounds awful! People who really love you should respect that boundary, Jeff!

But they go and look at the web anyway and, supposing we accept their weird assumption that the spider they rescued the day before made this entire web, it’s extra strange that nobody says, hey, don’t you think it’s a little weird that that one small spider made the BIGGEST SPIDER WEB OF ALL TIME?

Then she forces Jeff Daniels to climb up the ladder to look at the spider web MORE, and it’s just shocking. Leave this man alone! Go get the pictures developed! His fingers brush against cobwebs behind the ladder as he climbs, and I absolutely could not do it. I have both a spider phobia AND a ladder phobia and fuuuuuck no!

THEN the LADDER BREAKS and JD falls to the ground with a bunch of spider shit on his face and in his mouth, including a dead rat, and his WIFE LAUGHS AT HIM!!! Hey, lady! A dangling paralyzed rat corpse in the mouth is not “arachnophobia,” it would be traumatizing to anyone!! I have wife-o-phobia now because of you!

Then, unbeknownst to JD & wife, a giant, pulsating egg sac starts to hatch up in the rafters.

You know what? I think this movie’s good, but I don’t want it.

Now it’s time for the New Doctor Garden Party, a standard kind of event with which we are all familiar. Remember when there were old people around who were just “in the war”????

While the humans party, the baby spiders head out into the town.

If they remade this movie now they would use animated spiders and it would suck. Real living practical spiders and spider puppets ONLY!!!

Now there is an extended scene in which the mortician’s fat wife, Mimi from the Drew Carey Show, takes and eats a comical number of cookies.

Mr. Manley’s parents are there, drunk and screaming because nobody will even tell them the cause of death. (But wait, why not? Seriously nobody even tried to figure out why Manley came back from Venezuela a dead gray jerky stick???)

The mortician and Mimi leave the party with heaping plates of cookies and hot dogs and the hot old lady is like, “Would you like a doggie bag?” and Mimi is like “OM GROMPH OMPH CRUNCH GRUMPCH WE’RE FINE,” and that’s a cumulative 2.5 minutes we’ve spent on this fat lady eat food bit.

A spider goes into the old lady’s house and almost bites her cat but she saves the cat and then she’s having a tender moment remembering her dead husband and she goes to turn out the light and SPIDER DROPS DOWN ON A STRING FROM INSIDE THE LAMPSHADE AND BITES HER HAND! DANG!!!!

I genuinely screamed!

She’s toast!

Question. A spider is only a certain size. So where is it putting all the blood when it drains all these people?? Is it making one big long spider turd???? Wouldn’t Manley’s coffin have been full of brown spider log??

Jeff Daniels is down in the wine cellar and discovers that the basement beams are all rotten and maybe the whole house is going to fall down. Wife says they should call an exterminator to check for termites and let me tell you I am tingling in anticipation of who’s about to show up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She also mentions that she’s been trying to call the old lady and her line’s been busy all day and Jeff Daniels says, “She’s probably been GABBING.” I see you, 1990!

Man, I love Jeff Daniels. The real guy, not the character whose name I’m not bothering to remember or use at any point in this review. He never fucks anything up! You want your movie to not get fucked up by the lead actor? Hire Jeff Daniels!

JD goes over there and discovers the old lady is dead. The fucking coot says she died of a heart attack and blames JD for taking her off her heart medication. Unbelievable.

Coot: “You come from a big city where people don’t care about each other, I don’t expect you to understand.”

Jeff Daniels: “Cardiac victims don’t usually bite their tongues off, doctor.”

The coot says he’s going to try and get Jeff Daniels investigated for medical malpractice and Lloyd the dick is there being all SMUG about Jeff Daniels getting in trouble and it’s like… really, man? You’ve known that lady your whole life! She was your teacher! The only thing on your mind right now is that you’re mad at this random doctor because you couldn’t give him the parking ticket you wanted?

Anyway, note to Dr. Daniels: MOVE IMMEDIATELY. You have no job, you don’t like it there, the only person who liked you in the whole town just died, and your house is rotting. Just move!

The next morning the exterminator comes by, which means it’s my guy John Goodman time!!!!!!!!!!!!! He rolls in with an incredible vibe and an incredible saxophone theme and the name DELBERT.

He checks out the basement and doesn’t find any termites.

Delbert: “I didn’t find anything.”

Jeff Daniels: “Then why is all the wood rotting?”

Delbert: “Bad wood.”

Jeff Daniels: “Then what do we do?”

Delbert: “Tear out bad wood. Put in good wood.”

Give me a reason not to retire from writing right now in honor of this dialogue!

Jeff Daniels goes down to the high school to check all the boys’ scrotums because he needs the scrotum money. WHY DID THEY DO THIS AT SCHOOL? They don’t still do this at school, do they? Is this why we have school shooters? That’s not REALLY a joke question!

After the scrotum line JD goes out to the football field to watch football practice, and the star player puts on his helmet with a spider inside and it bites him on the head. He gone! These spiders are just taking people out right and left!

The coot shows up, of fucking course, and tells everyone that Jeff Daniels examined the star football player last, implying that he somehow… poisoned him in the scrotum???????? Sir!

Luckily, that dude goes home and sticks his foot right into a spider’s mouth that’s hiding inside his old bitch slipper.

Coot: “Some damn thing bit me!”

Mrs. Coot: “It’s just a spider!”

Coot: “Spider? It felt like a damn cougar!” [dies]

Jeff Daniels and the coroner examine the doctor’s toe, which is nasty and rotten already. The coroner is like, “This seems fine.” But Jeff Daniels manages to convince him to at least look into the possibility of killer spiders taking over the town. They decide that they’ve got no choice but to exhume the old lady and the football kid.

JD tries to tell his daughter and her friends that there are some dangerous spiders joyriding around town and they should be careful and they ABSOLUTELY CLOWN HIM. The girls go have a sleepover and they’re telling scary spider stories and then there’s a DEATH SPIDER dangling down right by them! It almost gets them but they narrowly escape by inadvertently squishing it with a book. Suddenly I feel like an MRA. That football player was also a child! So it’s okay for the teenage BOY to die but not these GIRL KIDS? Male disposability in action!!!!!!! Did you know that 9/10 spider bite fatalities are men!!?!? And they’re usually bitten by FEMALE spiders! What happened to all the male spiders???? Maybe you should look at their suicide rate! And how many of them died in the spider war! I do not actually believe any of this; please do not write to me.

Jeff Daniels is going through a list of spider scientists (?????) and circles Atherton’s name. OMG, it’s all coming together! The Jetsons are gonna meet the Flintstones! Just then a cricket jumps on to the paper and I SCREAMED.

Jeff Daniels: “Where are all the other crickets, huh? Where are your buddies?” (Significant!!!)

JD calls Atherton and Atherton says that small towns often have health scares and it’s easy to blame them on spiders (is that true?). Atherton gives him a condescending spider lecture about why ACTUALLY spiders are BENEFICIAL because they EAT INSECTS and I could have used a trigger warning for that.

But then JD says he’s from Canaima and Atherton is like “Canaima????” bc that’s where Manley was from!! Atherton asks his assistant Collins to go check it out.

They find spider bites on all three of the corpses and now it’s really on! Collins calls Atherton and is like “SPIDER EMERGENCY” and Atherton says he’ll be right over. Unclear from a storytelling perspective why we need Collins? He basically spends the rest of the movie stressing me out by almost dying of spider bites but never quite getting there. He does have a sort of puzzling Chris-Cuomo-adjacent bangability, though, so I will allow him!

Collins, Lloyd, JD, and the coroner go to search the dead coot’s house for spiders. “Perk up, Lloyd! If we find the spider that did this you can arrest them!” LOL, good one.

Now stuff is really rolling. We have Lloyd peeking inside of every coffee mug. We have Lloyd pulling a dead spider out of a cereal box. We have the famous part where the spider jumps on to the girl’s body in the shower and this is the largest no-thanks from me, but, again, absolutely brilliant use of real fucking spiders. MAKE COMPUTERS ILLEGAL.

Collins moves a painting and a spider jumps out at him and on to the dining room table. He manages to trap it under a way too small glass while Jeff Daniels cowers in the corner. Sorry, but why does the arachnophobic town doctor even need to be here for the spider search part? Can’t he just handle the bodies part?

Now John Goodman is back!!!!!!! He’s at the football coach’s house looking for the shower spider, but it narrowly escapes him.

Delbert: “There’s no spider here. But I will hunt down the alleged arachnid and spritz him to kingdom come.”

On his way out, he meets a spider and spritzes him to kingdom come, but the spider does not even notice. It just keeps walking along. Delbert is pissed, so he walks over and just squishes it with his boot (it’s full of CARAMEL!) and the family dog is like BORK BORK BORK GOOD JOB and Delbert is like “Yeah, that’s right! I’m bad!” and who among us is not horny for this?

Atherton dissects the spider and finds three poison sacs and no sex organs. They bring Delbert in on the action and Atherton tells everyone what’s probably going on: this Amazon spider came here in Manley’s coffin and fucked a domestic house spider. Their kids include a bunch of smal drone spiders (those are the ones going nuts all over the town) and a big fat queen (this makes no sense because what about the original woman spider but ok?), and the queen will eventually produce more mating pairs who will produce a bunch more drones and more queens, and then eventually at some point every town in California will completely eaten by spiders. “So the original male is the granddaddy of them all and he’s acting like a general sending his troops out to battle.” Sure!

Over at the mortician’s house, he and Mimi are eating, as usual. They loooooooove food! A spider crawls into their microwave popcorn and they die. I hated watching this scene so much that you should all consider upgrading your Butt News subscriptions from unpaid to paid in order to make me feel better!

They all put their heads together to try and find the general and the queen and their apocalyptic sex nest. Atherton (or it could have been Delbert--I didn’t write it down, sorry, please still send me money) explains what they’re looking for: “The area would be dark, warm, moist, there’d be kind of a musty smell, and you’d probably see an egg sac…the size of a softball, pulsating.” I don’t know how he would know what the egg sac of the unprecedented new hybrid spider species would look like, but nevertheless, that’s what she said!!!!!!

Atherton also notes that there would be no other spiders around the nest because spiders are cannibals and the queen would not want cannibals near her offspring. (That’s ALSO what she said, meaning me, about her [my] vagina! Very few spiders!)

Jeff Daniels and Delbert and Collins run over to the coroner’s house for some reason (I forget). Atherton notices one of JD’s wife’s photos of the barn spiderwebs hanging in the sheriff’s office--because apparently in the four days since they moved there, off-camera, she’s managed to take these photos, develop them, have them framed, and get city approval for a public art exhibition in a municipal building--and he’s like that’s it! That small, contextless, undated photograph of one spider web tells me exactly where I need to go! He bops over to Jeff Daniels’s house alone.

The other guys get to the mortician’s house but they’re already dead, obviously, because of gluttony, and a spider crawls out of the mortician’s nose.

They pull out a map of town and mark all the spots where everyone died and realize that there’s one building right at the epicenter.

Collins: “This here in the center--that’s the mortuary, right?

Jeff Daniels: “No, it’s a house.”

Collins: “Well, who the hell lives there.”

"Jeff Daniels: “I DO.”

I’ve got goosebumps!!!!!!!

On the way over to the Jeff Daniels Spider Farm, Delbert and JD argue about whether or not the barn is the most likely location for the nest. JD says obviously the nest is in the barn. Delbert says it’s too breezy in there--the queen wouldn’t like it. Meanwhile, Atherton, on the scene, heads into the barn alone and climbs up into the loft to check out the big web. HEY, MAN, JUST WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE ELSE GETS THERE!

He doesn’t wait until everyone else gets there, though. Instead, he climbs INTO THE BIG WEB and sensually plucks a spider string--tink tink!--and is like, “My you’ve been busy--incredible,” a real clever girl moment, and you know what that means! EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! SPIDER GENERAL JUMPS DOWN FROM THE RAFTERS AND EATS THE HELL OUT OF HIM! Good riddance!

The rest of the boys arrive at the property (WOW, just noticed that women are really doing NOTHING in this movie!) and JD and Collins go over to the house to check on the wife and kids while Delbert heads for the barn. He tries to climb up the ladder and finds Dr. Atherton all wrapped in spiderwebs and crawling with spiders! Good! Riddance!

In the house, they’re watching Family Ties and all of a sudden spiders are crawling out from everywhere. There’s spiders on the TV. There’s spiders on the walls. There’s spiders on the throw pillows. Spiders pouring out of the drains. Spiders dangling down from the ceiling fans. Jesus Christ, I could not even be on set for this. Call Business Affairs! I’ll take a pay cut! There are not enough spider wranglers in the world to wrangle all of these spiders sufficiently! I cannot believe Jeff Daniels had to experience this with his actual body!

Congressional Medal of Honor for Spider Spotter Jurgen Heimann!

The spiders chase them all over the house, until they all finally crawl out the second-story bathroom window and on to the roof and down the trellis. All except for Jeff Daniels! He was too busy swatting at spiders with a rolled-up towel, and now spiders have blocked his access to the window! He is trapped in hell!

FUCKING LUCKILY HERE COMES ROCK & ROLL DELBERT. Delbert is not here to play. He is in full spider armor and he has a spider sprayer filled with spider-dissolving acid. He begins making his way over to the house, which is now entirely engulfed in spiders, much as my body is now entirely engulfed in vomit.

Just when Jeff Daniels is about to be devoured by thousands of spiders, the rotten house beams finally give way and he falls through the floor all the way down into the cellar, a two-story drop that a soft big-city blond doctor boy would definitely survive.

Alone in the cellar, JD looks around. Quiet. Dark. Warm. Musty smell. No spiders??? A giant pulsating egg sac?????

THE TRUE SPIDER NEST WAS THE ONE YOU CARRIED INSIDE YOUR CELLAR ALL ALONG, JEFF DANIELS!

If this is confusing, because there definitely is a giant spider nest in the barn, so WTF, think about it like this: the barn was the general’s man-cave and the cellar is the queen’s she-shed. Got it?

Now the queen is coming for Jeff Daniels with a vengeance. He manages to impale her on a shovel and javelin her into the circuit breaker and that bitch is electrocuted! He’s finally safe, right!? Nu uh! There’s still the pulsating egg sac, and whatever happened to my man the general????

Jeff gets a lighter and splashes one of his expensive wines on the sac intending to fireball it (this is part of a running gag that I didn’t mention earlier, where JD is humorously precious about fine wines), but then AAAAHHHHH the general pops out! He isn’t in the man-cave right now! He came over to see his wife in the she-shed because he got hornay! Shit!

JD gets a can of spray paint and the lighter and he chases the general all over the basement, setting everything on fire--the basement that he also is trapped in--while laughing. He cares not for his own safety, he cares only for burning the general.

The general jumps out of a pipe and on to JD’s face; they tussle. JD throws the general off, then falls down. He is incapacitated for some reason. The general approaches, slowly. JD is frozen in fear. The general approaches his face. It is just like what happened in his crib! He thought he knew, but he had no idea!

(Please do not miss the fact that these absolute masters of the craft made sure you could see the reflection of Jeff Daniels in the close-up of the general’s spider eyeballs!)

But then, at the exact right moment, JD’s like NOT TODAY BITCH, GO CRY TO SHAQ and catapults the general right into the fire!

But THEN

THE GENERAL COMES SCREAMING OUT OF THE FIRE

HE IS A SPIDER ON FIRE

HE IS RUNNING AROUND SCREAMING literally screaming, they gave this spider vocal cords

HE MAKES ONE LAST BIG LEAP AT JD WHO FIRES A NAIL GUN AT THE GENERAL, ROCKETING HIM STRAIGHT INTO THE NOW-HATCHING EGG SAC

THE EGG SAC BURNS AND ALL THE BABIES BURN

CALIFORNIA IS SAVED

Then Delbert bursts in and rescues JD from the flames. THE REAL HERO OF THE MOVIE!

They immediately move back to San Francisco. Being around a buncha gays doesn’t sound so bad anymore, huh???

The end! …..?

Oh, but Arachnophobia has one big chill left to come! Over the closing credits they play a song called “Don’t Bug Me” by Jimmy Buffett, an original song written for this movie, by Jimmy Buffett, about spiders, and according to my 12 seconds of internet research no one has ever publicly acknowledged the existence of this song, which as far as I can tell Jimmy Buffett wrote in 15 minutes while shitting into a coconut, and I’m going to need you to listen to it right now and also read all of the lyrics out loud to yourself in the mirror:

“Don’t Bug Me Don’t mug me
I’m better left alone
Let me twirl In my world
Out in the wild unknown
Night Crawlin’ Free Fallin’
Just don’t get in my way
Don’t squish me Or death wish me
That’s all I have to say

I can spin a web
I can spin a tale
Leave me in the jungle
Take me to the town
Right side up or upside down

I’m fakey Real Flakey
8 legs and one pea brain
So don’t bug me Don’t mug me
Just try and act humane

I can cover tracks
And never leave a trail
Leave me in the jungle
Take me to the town
Right side up or upside down

Don’t bug me Don’t mug me
I’m better left alone
Let me twirl In my world
Out in the wild unknown
Don’t bug me
Don’t mug me
That’s all I have to say”

Literally a spider could have written a better song. Are we supposed to leave you in the jungle or take you to the town????? Make up your mind! What about a spider is fakey? Or flakey? Why can’t we death wish you if your plan was to first-degree-murder all of California? I don’t know if listening to Jimmy Buffett’s “Don’t Bug Me” is worse than living and dying in Jeff Daniels’s decomposing spider house, but I can’t confidently say that it’s better. Either way, it’s yours now and we’re all trauma-bonded! Discuss in comments, plz! Goodbye!