Eight Legged Freaks

Filmed in Panavision, the 2.35:1 anamorphic picture looks brilliant, with terrific colours and vivid detail on the CGI spiders. Hardly any problems to be had outside of the occasional edge enhancement. A very good picture indeed.

The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack isn't so cool. The surround use is not as constant as I would have liked. The .1LFE come through well in a couple of explosions and spider stampedes, although it's still pretty sporadic. The opportunity to be assaulted from all speakers by spider sound effects isn't taken advantage of. John Ottman's humorous score, perfectly appropriate with no "stinger" effects, used all too often in other movies, sounds great and carries the crazy action well.

The commentary is rather good, although there are too many silent moments and you forget it's is on. The participants have quite a few interesting things to say about the movie, as well as joke around with each other. Ellory Elkayem hardly says anything at all, which is weird. Mostly, it's David Arquette and Dean Devlin talking about how scenes were shot so quickly that artistic sacrifices had to be made and where others were cut out altogether.

The deleted scenes run for 13 minutes and contain an alternate opening, in which we see the evil barrels being stored in the mine, plus some dull character building sequences. It's obvious why these were chopped, as they slow the pace immensely. They are shown in quite muddy looking widescreen.

Bug Movie facts give a brief history of select movies from the Fifties onwards, but there is no mention of Bug, or Phase IV, or William Shatner's "classic" Kingdom Of The Spiders, which is odd since it bears a striking resemblance to ELF.

Ellory Elkayem's original short movie 'Larger Than Life', made in New Zealand, is another extra and it's pretty good for a short movie. Most, if not all, British shorts are pretentious piles of crap, so it's cool to see one that's fun and original. It's basically about a woman who moves into a new house and is terrorised by a gigantic spider (radiation is the cause). Not even the best exterminator in town can help. The movie is in black- and-white and is shown in non-anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen.

If you like Easter eggs, then look out for the bugs crawling on the menu screens, because when you click on them, you are taken to spider info pages.

A widescreen trailer is also included.