Main cast: Elizabeth Roberts (Kara), Arman Darbo (Jesse), Chloe Perrin (Cambria), Treva Etienne (Ahkeeba), Denise Crosby (Sheriff Jane Dunne), and Bruce Davison (Walter Clark)
Director: Micah Gallo
Itsy Bitsy has a split personality issue. On paper, it is about live-in nurse Kara and her kids Jesse and Cambria moving into her new employer’s Walter Clark’s big house. Walter collects relics and other expensive things, and he has angered a seller, Ahkeeba, during his purchase of a mysterious relic called the Black Egg of Maa-Kalaratri. Ahkeeba quietly sneaks back into the house to smash the egg, only to release a large spider that kills him before running off to lay eggs around the house. Naturally, this spider is into attacking people and injecting its venom into its victims to kill them, and hooray, we have two kids running wild around the house.
Normally, movies like this will use those kids as a shamelessly lazy source of scares. Indeed, the youngest kid Cambria would do things like poking and squeezing slimy spider egg sacs like it’s take-whatever-you-want-for-free day at some toy store, which only makes me wonder whether the girl is tad special in the head.
However, in this movie, the biggest kid, figuratively speaking, is Kara. A drug-addled useless sourpuss that blames herself for the death of one kid (how predictable a back story this is), she neglects her other two kids to steal painkillers and other fun pills from her employers. For the most part of this movie, she acts like she’s in a completely different film altogether, perhaps a Lifetime movie about drug-addled people, and her kids basically have to fend for themselves. It’s not surprising that Jesse bonds with Walter, while Cambria seeks the comfort of the company of her beloved cat. Even Sheriff Jane Dunne behaves more like a mother to these kids than Kara is for basically two-thirds of the movie.
It is one thing if the whole junkie woes drama is well done, but just like in those movies where a guy wins back his family by blowing things up, this one has Kara magically shaking off her addiction and winning back her kids by whacking a spider to death. Imagine that. Even if this arc had been done better, and it isn’t, the payoff is insulting enough to render any good moments of relationship drama that may be present here.
As for the monster on the loose part, it’s pretty clichéd. One very obvious example of this is how the little girl loves her cat so, oh how shocking, the cat gets killed. I certainly never see that one coming the moment the cat is introduced! The jump scares occur at predictable points, the characters experience some emotional screaming at one another moment just like clockwork, and the spider itself never feels genuinely menacing. Don’t quote me on that last one, though, as I don’t have a fear of spiders. The spider here is large, but still within a size range that allows one to believe that a spider of this size can exist in real life, perhaps in their own home. Hence, I suspect people that don’t like spiders may want to give this one a miss.
At any rate, this movie is like half a woman’s sob story movie and half a monster spider on the loose one. The people behind this movie don’t exactly succeed in cohesively putting together both halves to make a cohesive film. Then again, it probably doesn’t matter if they had succeeded, as the pedestrian script is predictable and offers little that is new or interesting to folks that love this kind of movies.
