A movie named “Big Ass Spider” probably doesn’t put one in the mind of “Remains of the Day” or “The King’s Speech;” which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  What it does do is to remind me of those Saturday afternoon matinee-type movies that came on Channel 11 (WPIX) in Manhattan when I was growing up, though unlike those films, this one appears to have modern special effects.

The director of “Big Ass Spider,” Mike Mendez, who also directed “The Gravedancers”–a movie worth catching, despite the giant Time Bandits-sized head at the end–seems like a director that takes his material seriously, though not seriously enough that he drains all the fun out of it (kind of the way I tend to feel after seeing a Christopher Nolan ‘Batman’ film).

After all, instead of those pretty cool looking spiders in the trailer, they could have substituted a furry VW Beetle, like in “The Giant Spider Invasion” (Number 21 on List25’s “The 25 Worse Movies Ever”).