FrightFest review – Spider Island
An ‘eco-resort’ opens on a formerly unspoiled tropical island and a horde of influencers are shipped in for a massive freebie – on the assumption that they’ll shovel out positive content and boost business. Only – dangit – corporate weasel David (Andy Nyman) has dodged all sorts of international laws through bribery and corruption and imported a massive load of concrete which has clogged up the cave system habitat of a horde of large, venomous spiders. The arachs attack the fluencers and oohs and aahs and free cocktails give way to running, screaming, frothing deaths with spider poison, crawling through air vents and the occasional session of stamping on bugs.
There’s a bit of plot with an eco-activist young woman (Rose Williams) out to expose corruption and her estranged ‘West End legend’ gone-to-seed-in-a-tropical-bar Dad (Tim McInnerny) and a longstanding family issue … but apart from giving McInnerny a splendid opportunity to be boozily laid-back next to Nyman doing uptight-to-the-max the story doesn’t get in the way of scenes in which a wide range of influencers – I’d say caricature influencers, but it’s a profession which proves remarkably difficult to parody since the real deal is already doing such a great job of being ridiculously shallow and sparkly – do their schtick then get overwhelmed by spiders. Christopher Smith gets back into the horror comic mode of his Severance – which also had Nyman being hyper – and a canny decision was made to add David Quantick to the writing team (Smith, Christopher Jolly, Ben Jacques) to add a bit more venom to the jokiness.
Obviously, it looks back to spider flicks like Arachnophobia and Kingdom of the Spiders – though for all the eco footnotes it stays away from the eerie webby side of things. The bug effects are okay but not outstanding – the spiders deliver more shivers when scuttling in the background than when swarming en masse. For all the advances in effects over the years, contemporary do-it-digital insect horrors can’t match the Ken Middleham micro-photography of The Hellstrom Chronicle, Phase IV or Bug. Spider Island feels a lot like a 2026 reboot for the ant-themed TV 1977 movie classic Panic at Lakewood Manor – which is a good thing in my book.
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