Review by W. Schaeffer Tolliver
A group of electricians, led by an unusually introspective Richard Grieco, are shutting off power in a Chicago building that is about to be demolished when they find a hidden room. That room contains a decades old device that creates a portal to a parallel dimension. The other world is similar to ours but it has a spider problem. Humanoid spider zombies! An opening to yet another dimension caused by the opening of the first portal brought a Queen Spider from the other dimension to the middle one where guys from our Earth ended up getting trapped.
The Queen Spider turns human males into Spider Soldiers, sort of like zombie vampire things, they feed on people but don't live for very long. They have gruesome looking spidery claws for fingers and weird spider mouths. (Cheap special effects, but they work for this movie.)
The Soldiers are controlled by the Queen and have hunted humanity nearly to extinction on the parallel Earth. The last survivors live as pitiful refugees eating cold meals to avoid scent and living in empty buildings making as little noise as possible. In the early part of the Spider Invasion humans had used guns to kill the Soldiers, but turns out there are more spider-people than bullets, and the noise of the bullets draws more of the things to the humans that are doing the shooting.
The acting is not terrible, the dialog is just enough to get the point across about what their situation is and the action of the story keeps up a decent pace. There are several fights throughout the movie and one really good fight scene at the end as one of the survivors, Crane played by David Nerman does a decent impression of a bigger budget action hero with bad dialog like Rambo, fighting off waves and waves of spider soldiers.
Like a long episode of Sliders or Stargate SG-1, but really well done on a fairly low-budget. Decent music, a creepy atmosphere with deserted streets where spider webs cover everything. A couple of well done scenes where scary things jump out, but basically a zombie survival movie.
With extra legs.
Best quote: the freaky sound all the spider soldiers make! It's like a metallic grinding hissing whisper...5/10