★★★☆☆
Influencers vs spinfluencers: content creators take on a horde of deadly spiders at a luxury island resort, in this beer-and-pizza creature feature with a savage take on online culture.
Christopher Smith, the reliably inventive hand behind Creep, Severance and Triangle, goes broad and gleeful here, and knows exactly the film he is making. A pack of high-profile social-media influencers is flown to the opening of the Oceania Pearl, a luxury resort on a secluded tropical island, to promote its exclusivity, unaware that construction has disturbed the subterranean caves and woken a horde of deadly spiders bent on reclaiming the place. Booze, bikinis and content creation give way to a fight for survival, with Rose Williams and Tim McInnerny among the ensemble and real-life influencers such as Avani Gregg and Léna Mahfouf folded into the victim list.
Written by David Quantick and Christopher Jolley, it runs on old-fashioned craft: careful set-up and pay-off gags that work in both the comedic and the horror registers, so a throwaway detail early on comes back to bite, sometimes literally. Smith stages the arachnid mayhem with obvious relish, and the influencer-culture satire plays broad and good-natured rather than sneering.
Nobody will mistake this for Smith’s knottier work, and it is not trying to be. It’s a beer-and-pizza movie in the best sense, a Saturday-night crowd-pleaser happy to jump from “like and subscribe” to “scream and die”. Ideal with a rowdy audience peppered with passionate social-media-haters and ardent arachnophobes; it’s influencers vs spinfluencers.
Spider Island played at Tubi FrightFest in London.