INFESTED (Vermines) is a very good French giant spider movie I watched on Shudder a while back and I’m happy to recommend it for your October viewing (or otherwise). It’s a movie with tons of style, energy and personality as well as, you know, spiders. The opening has almost an INDIANA JONES, adventure movie kind of feel, as we follow a pick up truck of Arab smugglers into the desert where they smoke a swarm of rare spiders out of a hole to capture in plastic containers. These things are so deadly that when one of their crew gets bit they have to put him out of his misery with a machete, but they still pack some of them up. And one of them will end up in Paris.

This is a good creature movie, but for me it could go in some other genre direction and still be amazing, because it’s just so good at establishing this setting and the main character Kaleb (Theo Christine, GRAN TURISMO), and you may assume one thing or another about him but you keep finding out he’s more odd and complicated than you had previously assumed.

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t even realize at first that Kaleb would be the protagonist. He’s introduced in a little shop hassling Ali (Samir Nait) about the poor selection of jewelry he has for sale, eventually talking his way into the back office to see some better merchandise not everybody gets to see. Among other things Ali has a bunch of terrariums and containers with exotic lizards and, of course, one of the spiders. Kaleb notices it and marvels that “It looks so dope!,” so he ends up leaving with the spider as well as the earrings he came to get as a gift.

He goes home to the building where he lives, helps the janitor Ms. Zhao (Xing Xing Cheng) with the garbage, and gets in a scuffle with some other residents for being mean to her. So we know he’s got a heart. And we fear he’s gonna drop the spider during all this, but he doesn’t.

He goes to his storage space, where he keeps stacks and stacks of collectable sneakers obtained through unspecified means. His partner Mathys (Jerome Niel, LOST BULLET 2) also steals bikes, which Kaleb doesn’t necessarily disapprove of, but he tells him not to steal from their neighborhood.

Okay, so now we get that he’s a black market shoe reseller or whatever, but here’s one of his quirks: he holds himself to very high standards. Even though he has the shoes that Toumani (Ike Zacsongo) wants he refuses to sell them to him until he can replace their box, because it was slightly water damaged by a leaky pipe in the storage space. Toumani doesn’t give a shit about the box at all, in fact he immediately discards it, but to Kaleb it’s a matter or principle. When he gives Toumani the shoes he also gives him a little speech about taking care of them, like it would just pain him to see them get scuffed up.

We keep getting these little reveals about his life that we wouldn’t expect. #1, he and his sister Manon (Lisa Nyarko) actually own the building, having inherited it from their mother. Manon is doing repairs herself because they can’t afford to hire anyone, and they’re fighting because he refuses to sell it, caring about the neighbors too much to allow them to be priced out by a new owner. (Likewise, when the killer spider shit goes down, he’ll refuse to leave anyone behind.)

#2, the earrings he was buying as a gift at the beginning were not for a girlfriend, they were for an older neighbor named Claudia (Marie-Philomene Nga, KIRIKOU AND THE WILD BEASTS) who’s moving out and she’s kind of an auntie figure to him. He’s a fuck up, but he’s a nice kid too.

#3, the most important and craziest surprise, is that like Ali he collects rare species and has his bedroom filled with terrariums. (Another frequent fight with Manon is her repairs causing the power to go out and turn off their heat lamps.) He has frogs and grasshoppers and snakes and stuff, and he talks to them, as he does to the spider when he (very stupidly) puts it in the damaged shoebox as a temporary nesting place until he gets a tank set up.

#3b, when former friend Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield, NOCTURAMA) comes to help Manon remodel the bathroom, and there’s tension between them, it turns out they grew up together and dreamed of opening a reptile zoo but had a falling out related to Kaleb’s illegal iguana biting Jordy on the leg. It sounds funny but it’s really not played for laughs, unless it’s too dry for me to detect. It’s just what these characters are about. I personally do not expect iguana-related beef in the French equivalent of a hood movie, but I respect it.

It’s embarrassing but I’m one of those people who somehow retains that primal instinct from the ancient days when mankind (I’m assuming) carried magic swords and battled giant spiders, so when I see the big brown ones we have around here my body reacts in fear. It’s not as bad with movies but this particular one is well done enough that I found myself flinching and shuddering more than I’m proud to admit. The visual FX are well done and they use real spiders whenever they can. I have a friend who has it worse than me and I actually advised him not to watch it. But if you share this affliction I offer the good news that at least for me the outlandish monster movie rules made it more tolerable as it goes along. The things quickly grow to a preposterous enough size that I didn’t have to think of them as real anymore.

But even when I wasn’t reacting viscerally I was able to enjoy the design and execution of suspense sequences, the dread created when we don’t know where the things are paid off by them eventually being all over the damn place. There are all kinds of threads set up: Kaleb not telling anyone he’s missing a spider and found an egg sac, the expectation that the spider is gonna be in Toumani’s shoe, Toumani’s dog eating a spider and then acting weird, that kind of stuff. There’s an asshole neighbor (Emmanuel Bonami, MARS EXPRESS) who thinks Kaleb is a drug dealer and other ones who stay in their apartments and don’t find out what’s going on. Kaleb tries to account for everybody, and meanwhile spiders crawl out of vents, shower drains and the mouths of the dead, and for a while people foolishly try regular methods like catching them in a cup or spraying or hitting them with a sandal. Even when they’re not recklessly poking their heads into cramped areas, they end up having to navigate through a labyrinth of webs with those fuckers crawling around in a variety of sizes.

Director Sébastien Vanicek seems to have a strong sense for how to move the camera, employing both very controlled movements and handheld really effectively. The cinematographer is Alexandre Jamin, whose experience is in shorts and music videos.

One thing I really liked, and never could’ve guessed to expect, is that this is the most ACAB killer spider movie of all time! Okay, you’re right, it’s not saying that all cops are bastards because Manon’s friend Lila (Sofia Lesaffre, Ganglands) is said to be an off duty “municipal cop,” and we like her. But she’s not really there as a token good cop, she’s there to have her eyes opened about what the big boy departments are actually like. When she tries to call the police for help she can’t believe they’re not responding, and the others all laugh. “Obviously you didn’t grow up here.”

What rings very true is that the residents call the police for help, but the only thing they know to do is repress and terrorize the people who live there. So first they think there’s a disease spreading, and force the residents to stay inside the building. Okay, that gets a ton of people killed, but it was a mistake. Nobody would’ve guessed it was killer spiders. Fair enough.

But then there’s this big set piece where the survivors must courageously maneuver through a long hallway covered in webs and thousands of spiders. They figure out that the spiders won’t move if there’s light shining on them, but it’s already been established that the only light in the hall is on a one minute timer and the dial for it only works on one end. Harrowing shit, but they make it and… (spoiler)… the motherfucking cops block the door, won’t let them through, spray tear gas in at them, throw flash-bangs. So to escape the spiders they have to break through the door and then bare-handed fight a platoon of angry, armed and armored riot cop assholes. Even a little later, when they’re about to face off with spiders bigger than large dogs, the cops keep Kaleb zip-tied and want to arrest him for shooting a cop’s less-lethal weapon in self defense. Petty and useless to the end. Almost a documentary.

Not that it’s a message movie. It’s just a fun time that takes place in a specific world. It provides a wide variety of horror, suspense and action. I was really nervous that they weren’t gonna fulfill the Chekov’s-MMA-skills set up during Claudia’s party, but it does come up briefly. There’s a trajectory to the whole thing because the bigger the spiders grow and the more the building gets webbed up the more it seems removed from reality.

This is the first feature for director Sébastien Vanicek, who is credited with the idea and co-writing with Florent Bernard. Sam Raimi saw INFESTED and was so impressed he hired Vanicek to direct a new EVIL DEAD movie of some kind. Raimi has proven really good at seeing potential in shorts and first features and helping their directors flourish – I never would’ve guessed how good a director Fede Alvarez would become just based on that Panic Attack! short. So this is the first time I’ve been able to say “oh shit, yeah, this guy is great, can’t wait to see what he does with an EVIL DEAD!”