In an act of great parenting, I thought it would be a swell idea to instill a fear of spiders into my son Joseph by making him watch the 1990 horror comedy Arachnophobia. Did it work? As you’ll see in this week’s episode of the Film After 11 podcast, not really. Did I actually expect it to? Also not really.
You’ll note that no other movie either before or after Arachnophobia has ever been marketed as a “thrillomedy,” and with good reason. Although successful at the box office, the film wasn’t nearly the monster hit the studio expected. I think a lot of that had to do with the dumb advertising campaign.
Arachnophobia isn’t exactly one of my favorite movies of all time or anything, but I think it strikes a pretty good balance of mild horror thrills at a PG-13 level with some effective comedy. Does Joseph agree? Watch to find out.
| Title: | Arachnophobia |
| Year of Release: | 1990 |
| Director: | Frank Marshall |
| Watched On: | Amazon Prime Video |
| Also Available On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Blu-ray Hulu Tubi Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
Video Streaming
Buena Vista Home Entertainment (in other words, Disney) released Arachnophobia on Blu-ray in 2012. I don’t own a copy so I had to stream the movie. My main options in that regard, from streaming services I already subscribe to and don’t need to pay a rental fee for, were either Hulu or Amazon Prime Video. Hulu has a positively ancient and fuzzy full-screen 16:9 video transfer with only Dolby 2.0 sound. Amazon is clearly the better option, with a newer 1.85:1 transfer (I assume the same as the Blu-ray) and 5.1 surround.
The movie isn’t any sort of visual wonder, but it looks fine. The picture’s a little soft, or maybe more than a little. However, it has an appropriate texture of grain, neither overwhelming nor digitally scrubbed away. Colors are very nice, especially the sunset that opens the film.
The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack makes really good use of the surround channels. Jungle sounds at the beginning come from every direction, the musical score wraps around the entire listening space, and directional effects are well-employed. Despite technically only being encoded for 5.1, the track upmixes very well to higher speaker counts. In fact, using Dolby Surround Upmixer, this is one of the very rare soundtracks with noticeable discrete sounds in both my Front Wide and Surround Back speakers. Even Dolby Atmos is rarely noticeable from those directions.
Related
- Jeff Daniels
- The Martian (2015) – Film at 11 podcast
- John Goodman
Note: Any screenshots on this page were grabbed off a web browser, and came out looking much softer than actually watching the movie on a streaming device. They are used for illustration purposes only.
