The Sci-Fi Network is known more for churning out monster movies in quantity rather than quality. Even by Sci-Fi standards, though, this is low-quality. Sci-Fi takes the top-secret animal experiment genre and rehashes it for the 674th time. Except that you really never get a good concept of what the top-secret experiment was, outside of "we were injecting spiders to make them larger; apparently the experiment was top-secret to the writers as well. The movie star Vanessa Williams -- not the "Soul Food" movie actress/singer/former Miss America/nude model Vanessa L. Williams, but the "Soul Food" TV show/bad movie actress Vanessa A. Williams. She's part of the experiment crew, as well as some guy Dr. Barnes, who looks like the lead singer from the '80s band "Devo," both physically and with his black outfit on; all he needed was the kooky red hat and I could see the whole gang breaking out in an impromptu karaoke of "Whip It" to try to keep the spiders at bay. The spider effects are pretty bad, and since the spiders are all colored a tropical green/black or orange, yet the movie takes place at a Utah ski resort, you'd think the spiders wouldn't have the ambush factor going for them. Yet somehow they still sneak up on hapless skiers throughout the movie. In its defense, "Ice Spiders" does have a laugh-ability quality to it that allows it to fall into the "good-bad" movie category, as opposed to other monster movies that are both bad and painful to watch, which is why I have enough sympathy to rate this movie a 3 instead of a 1 or 2.

Heading to a ski resort, a champion cross-country skiing team and the instructors on staff find the area overrun by gigantic spiders from a military experiment nearby and try to save their guests from the deadly, mutated creatures.

Frankly, this here was quite the fun creature feature. What really helps this one here is the high-quality amount of cheesy action featured which runs pretty consistently in here, from the film's central premise of bringing spiders into the freezing environment depicted. The scenes of the creatures out in the snow, as the opening attack on the hunters out in the snowy wilderness, is quite fun for seeing the sight of a spider hunting in the middle of the woods makes for a remarkably cheesy time while setting up the rest pf he action here. The fun times of them stalking the straggle skiers out on the slops or he searching out in the cobwebs covered woods where they come across the cocooned bodies and are then chased around by the creature for some really enjoyable times, as well as offering the set-up for the first of several big action scenes with the spiders in here. There's plenty of fun action with the soldiers in the facility trying to take out the spiders only to be completely wiped out by the surprise ambushes dragging them away while being imperious to gunfire and their other tactics which fail to stop them, and there's the really big fun of the attack on the resort here which is the definite highlight piece of the film. Starting with the early attacks on the skiers out on the lift and going through the rather fun swarming done on the guests leading to the race to get inside and barricade as well as the skiers attempt to get to safety inside the bus this one has plenty of highly enjoyable action in this sequence before the real fun of the creatures breaking through the resort for a fine scene overall. Even the finale offers plenty of fun with the race down the slopes into the trap where they finally defeat the creatures in rather unique methods. As ell as the fact that all of this action doles out some bloody kills, these here are the positive points to hold out over the negatives. The biggest factor here is the usually atrocious CGI featured throughout here, which is among the absolute worst done in the genre here with a never-ending assortment of spider-like blobs hurled across the screen that come off utterly laughable and never once features anything remotely spider-ish about the creatures as there's the new-found feature of a glossy-glass-like appearance which no real spider displays along with the other features here of special chances, interacting failures and unconvincing notions that run rampant throughout the film. As well, there's also the fact that there's no real purpose here why they're trying to capture it again for their studies as that continually puts them at risk because of the clichéd motives of creating them for creating them which is wholly ridiculous and doesn't make sense. These here are the film's flaws.

Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

And, if you don't mind my saying so, I've been around. I've seen the legendary "Plan 9 From Outer Space," as well as a whole host of network TV films ("Locusts," "Vampire Bats," "Category 6," "Category 7," "Fatal Contact," whatever the sequel to "10.5" was called) and I stand here before you today to say that cable proves that you don't have to be a venerable broadcast giant to really, really stink.

The plot of the movie is that some government scientists engineer giant spiders in order to harvest their silk for Department of Defense purposes. The only problem is that one of the scientists tampers with the experiment, the spiders get out, and it's up to a fleet of B-actors to stop them or flap on the ground in a spot where a giant spider will later be edited in killing them trying.

This movie enters a qualitative threshold that I did not know could exist. You see, once a film reaches a certain level of "awful," the people involved start to notice (as evidenced by the tongue-in-cheek extra-low budget Adult Swim shows "Saul of the Mole Men" and "Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job"). Somehow, the cast of Ice Spiders was unaware of the lousiness of the film they were making. The only kind of television I've ever seen in my life - which has probably been shortened substantially by the cumulative doses of TV movies I've had over the years - that could rival "Ice Spiders" for quality are commercials made by regional furniture dealerships. Speaking of commercials, kudos to Orkin for their advertising during the world premier of this "film." The computer effects appear to have been designed with software from the 1980s, the acting is beyond awful - and I mean that seriously; some of this comes off like the actors were cold-reading the script - and the overall premise defies description. Thank God I taped it, because somehow I just know that this film can only be enhanced by VHS static lines.