He wasn’t wearing shoes before the bite
Tale
The residents of a run-down French apartment building are battling an army of deadly, rapidly reproducing spiders. The visually striking buildings in which the action takes place were not created for the film; these are Picasso’s Arenas in Noisy-le-Grand, near Paris, designed by architect Manuel Núñez Yanowsky in the 1980s. When TN is feeling the effects of a spider bite, he is seen wearing one of his new shoes. He wouldn’t have put on the right shoes after being attacked/poisoned..
Greedy creatures like this must be taken out alive
Keroué. In search of a special gift, a man decides to help overcome his life’s fate by caring for an exotic spider to go along with the rest of the animals in his collection, but when it turns out that the spider has escaped and is starting to multiply more. This was a disappointing and somewhat underwhelming effort in the genre. The main part that works here is the very interesting and sometimes downright terrifying work of a spider being unleashed on the community.
What holds it back, unfortunately, is everything else that happens here
With a fantastic opening that provides a stellar example of the ferocity and consistency of the species, there’s plenty to like about the gradual revelation of something loose in the building as their lives are interrupted by the discovery of dead residents, attacks by strange animals, or the presence of strange webs found throughout the building. A series of scenes involving a swarm of voracious creatures emerging from the crevices of the building and attacking in basements, kitchens, bathrooms, or pretty much anywhere else, while also providing plenty of plot context about surviving the extermination techniques thanks to their rapid-reproduction style or invulnerability to any tactics used against them. With the current stellar pacing keeping them much more focused in the second half, so that these terrifying scenes can happen at a breakneck clip, they’re what manage to deliver the best moments. Most of that is the extremely slow and generally uninteresting first half, which spends far too much time on the apartment dwellers and the nowhere they’re going.
the inclusion of spiders here
With a very original series of urban stereotypes involving drug pushers, counterfeiters, sex offenders, or other forms of deviance taking place in this hooligan milieu, it all creates a simple enough setup that provides all the necessary set-up to get you to know the group, but as a result, it’s all clichéd and uninteresting. Very little of this sets this group apart from any other community of hapless individuals in low-rent misery and fearing for their lives because of the society they maintain, stuck in a situation that is only going to get worse. This makes for a fairly lengthy affair without offering any genre work or interest at this point, so it takes much longer than it needs to get to the spider action, and therefore the running time is disproportionately longer than it should be. this is a downer overall.