Director: Paolo Bertola
Year: 2016
Country: Italy
Alternate Titles: L6 Commando
Genre: Spider
Plot:
Following their successes around the world, a multinational commando team is gathered together to lead an operation on one of the largest drug trafficking organizations in the world, but when they arrive at their target they find the area overrun by massive spiders and try to get away alive.
Review:
This here was a generally awful genre effort. Among the many problems here is the fact that so much of the film’s running time is spent on areas outside the field of interest for genre fans. Those exploits of the military team take up far too much of the film here, seeing them first take out the drug runners in Mexico before going to the jungle commandoes getting into position to take out the random headquarters in the jungle serve as fine low-budget action scenes but to segue from those into one of the most drawn-out, pointless exposition means on a worldwide drug conspiracy organization just makes this one feels so boring and uninteresting during this section. None of it has anything to do with the creatures and has very little of any interest in watching people sit around a conference listening to pseudo-scientific jibberish about the organization while it shows the drug-dealers listening in on their meeting only to follow it up with another military meeting bringing everyone together.
The other major issue with the film is the generally cheap and underwhelming look that comes off here. The low-budget here is apparent with bland and unappealing settings featured for the endless scenes of the team engaging in their strategy meetings, the laughably awful background plates for the sense of scope that means people are placed into obvious CGI scenes for no reason or the dark and confined laboratory that never comes close to looking like the massive facility used to house a major drug-trafficking ring. That also leads to the other bad CGI work for the giant spiders themselves, which is quite a shame with them being on-screen for so little but their scenes are inept and badly handled where the distortion is obvious, the movement is completely wrong and they behave nothing like general spiders while they’re growth scenes are as believable as a cut-scene video in a video-game. Altogether, these make for a decidedly cheap and cheesy genre effort.
As mentioned, the lack of time with the spiders is a major issue here with them being supposedly at the heart of the film and what ties this into being part of the genre. There’s no mention of them at all and just randomly appear in the film nearly an hour into it with no warning, setup or explanation for what happened, why the drug-traffickers are using them or how they turn into gigantic beings the same size as the soldiers around them which really make for quite a few problems here. Still, the film has a fun action-movie charm in the scenes with the soldiers shooting away endless rounds at the approaching hordes and seeing the spiders get blown to pieces as a result, and with the confrontations taking place in extremely dark rooms there’s a nice atmosphere to be had here when they’re confronting the creatures as there’s a highly enjoyable energy to this section of the film as well as the thrilling escape attempt which is about all this one has going for it.
Overview: */5
A generally dull and bland creature feature without much in the way of excitement or action, for the most part, the few glimmers of hope featured here aren't enough to overcome the crippling deficiencies featured elsewhere. Really only go into this one if you're a hardcore creature feature fan or looking for every killer spider effort out there while those with more discerning tastes should look at other entries in the genre before this one.
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