At The Movies: Like The Spider

Venom. Worse than poison, it literally dissolves the unsuspecting prey from the inside out, leaving nothing but a dry, translucent exoskeleton. To witness it’s power, you only need to watch as a tiny spider immobilizes a much larger insect with just a few fast injections.

 In humans, anger has the same affect—like the spider’s venom, it eats it’s way from the inside out, leaving nothing but a dried, unfeeling shell of what once was. All the potential, all the dreams, all the desires—destroyed.

 “Like The Spider” from Huckabone Films is about unmanageable anger, turned inward, can destroy life, transforming a previously sane, rational, happy individual, into the human equivalent of the dried and discarded bits of prey left in a spider’s web.

Dallas (Alida Serrano), who suffered through years of abuse by her father, is now out on her own. She needs to deal with her past—to some how get over it—but she can’t. She’s become an abuser herself, hooked on the hard stuff, offering up the only thing she has—herself—to find temporary relief from that venomous anger that eats at her soul.

At just 18, she’s lost the will to live, but has not the strength to die. So she seeks a professional to help her solve her problems. She meets Jock (Jon Peterson), an over the hill hit man, and tries to persuade him to take out the one person she hates the most. But it’s not that simple and what would appear to be easy solutions are complicated by others in it for themselves.

Written, produced and directed by Independent Rochester film maker, Randy Huckabone, Like The Spider was shot in Rochester, NY over eighteen days last February. The city is in hibernation. It’s bleak and cold—a fitting background as the story unfolds. As your interest and understanding of each character grows, you begin to understand their needs and desires, and hope that some how there can be happy ending—but that all depends on your point of view. It’s dark, haunting and quite revetting. And, you’ll never look at a spider the same way again.