Lavalantula

Every year Syfy airs a new Sharknado, and following shortly after, and getting promoted like crazy durign Sharknado, is some other premiere of a Syfy monster flick. The first year had Ghost Shark, a promising yet middling movie about a shark that dies and comes back as a ghost that can attack anywhere there is water, and I mean anywhere. They literally pad the movie with every form of water you can imagine and someone being attacked by a shark from it. Some of it is so half-assed they don't even give any more context than "somewhere in town, there's water, and the shark killed somebody". Within minutes one guy gets killed while fixing pipes under his sink and a kid gets eaten in his slip and slide and the scenes are not revisited, so basically they died just to prove that the shark could do it. The second year we got Sharktopus vs Pteracuda, the sequel to Sharktopus in which someone combined a shark and an octopus to create an animal with the head of a shark so it can bite people, but just behind the gills it's an octopus so it can climb up on land and grab people to feed itself. the monster was killed in the first one, but it managed to produce offspring which was raised in the second one in an aquarium to be like a trained whale or dolphin. Meanwhile, te world of science fals to learn it's lesson and tries the hybrid game again by adding pteradactyl DNA to a barracuda in an attempt to create a living military weapon, and of course it goes out of control. Decidedly the trained sharktopus is the only thing that can stop the pteracuda. Of course that works out great...NOT! Conan O'Brien gets killed in a thankless cameo that says "sorry we didn't fit you in Sharknado."

This year the double feature was Lavalantula, which they actually started promoting the year before. It starred Steve Guttenberg and most of the cast of Police Academy, which I assume was Syfy's way of saying "See, even we don't take ourselves seriously anymore." Steve Guttenberg plays an action star and is in surprisingly good shape for his age, or he had an awesome body double for his shirtless scenes. The movie opens with him starrign in a movie which turns out to be about giant cockroaches and he storms out saying he doesn't want to do a bug movie, besides he wants to take his son to a baseball game. Within minutes the Santa Monica hills erupt into volcanoes and ginat fire breathing spiders start attacking. Yes, in case you couldn't guess from the title, this is the gst of Lavalantula, fire breathing spiders. Somehow Guttenberg's antics tie in the news with the cty being burned by man-sized arachnids as we see on the news feeds several times throughout the show. His son was bicycling with friends until the spiders bite his prospective girlfriend and they run for their lives. Guttenberg desperately rushes to rescue his family and discovers that the lavalantulas are nesting in underground lava tubes mapped out by a geologist he finds at the La Brea Tar Pit. This was probably the lowest point in the movie as even the scientist admits he doesn't know why he's still there, offering gems like "Like, it's a hive" and "the Mayans called them Lavalantulas"(no they didn't). The high point was Ian Ziering's cameo in which he says "love to help you but I have a shark problem". Meanwhile, the girl who got bitten by a lavalantula turns out to have been infected with eggs and a swarm of baby lavalntulas eat her from the inside, then pour out of her mouth and kill the other friend leaving Guttenberg's son as the last kid standing. Seriously, the plot armor in this movie is amazing as literally everybody else dies around this family and they manage to survive unscathed. The ending involves excessive use of liquid nitrogen to take down the queen lavalantula.

In a world without Sharknado, Lavalantula might have been the king with promises of a sequel, but sadly for this movie, this is a world with not one, but three Sharknados, so Lavalantula doesn't quite make it. But, it's good for a cheap laugh. Maybe, one day, Lavalntual vs Sharknado, but alas, not now.