Adam Sandler fans will find the animated movie 8 Crazy Nights to be another flowering of Sandler's absurdist goofiness; but people who find Sandler completely annoying will be triply annoyed by it, because Sandler does the voices for three different characters: Davey Stone, a boozing, belching, self-loathing loser who hates the holidays; Whitey, a tiny old man who tries to rehabilitate Davey; and Eleanor, Whitey's neurotic twin sister, who seems not to have left her house in years. Fans will find the slapdash musical numbers and scatological humour hilarious; foes will find them tiresome and banal. But even Sandler's advocates won't care about the by-the-numbers plot of holiday redemption; you see, Davey's parents died on the first night of Hanukkah, and he just needs to cry about it. Sandler's best when he's walking that line between stupid and smart-ass. When he gets sentimental, it's trouble. --Bret Fetzer

Davey is everything that you don't want to be. He is a clumsy teenager, and a total wastrel. And now, he is even on the wanted list. To avoid jail, he decides to start assisting Coach Whitey and slowly begins to understand the essence of life.

An epigrammatic love story between two teenage neighbours. The boy decides to camp out in the lawn of the girl till she accepts to go out with him!

Not funny enough to be called a spoof, not scary enough to be outright horror, Eight Legged Freaks is a curious effects-filled pastiche of those mutant B-movies of the 1950s and 60s. The plot is of the standard small-town-overrun-by-giant-spiders variety, after the little critters have been exposed to leaking radiation naturally. Local boy made good David Arquette has returned to the town to make amends with the woman he loves (feisty Sheriff Kari Wuhrer) and to stop the dastardly mayor from selling his father's mine. But before he can sort that out, there is a lot of bug squashing to be done as the CGI spiders cause all manner of havoc and mayhem.

Eight Legged Freaks is admittedly a lot of fun, and there are some great set-pieces to enjoy, including a gang of teenage dirt bikers escaping a horde of jumping spiders. It's also quite gory in places, though with only a couple of decent shocks it's hardly likely to induce large-scale arachnophobia. The spiders are impressive but the CGI is painfully obvious and it never feels real. However, if you can suspend your disbelief for an hour and a half you will enjoy this pacey, fun and action-filled popcorn flick. It doesn't ever take itself too seriously and is certainly a lot more fun than producer Dean Devlin's other genre entries, Godzilla and Independence Day.

On the DVD: Eight Legged Freaks offers some nice, B-movie poster-style menu screens but little in the way of extras. There's no making-of, no special effects breakdowns (astonishing given how heavily reliant it is on these to tell the story) and not even any spider-related factoids which seem almost a necessity. What we do get, though, is a fun and sprightly commentary, the theatrical trailer and director's Ellory Elkayem original short film Larger than Life, that formed the basis for its feature-length offspring. Compact, creepy and almost silent, it's a shudder-inducing little movie and far more creepy than the main feature. Technically, the picture is sharp and the bright, comic book colours and cinematography look gorgeous, and the squelching soundtrack is wonderfully crisp. --Jon Weir

A variety of horrible poisonous spiders get exposed to a noxious chemical which causes them to grow to monumental proportion.

A private investigator is hired to discover if a "snuff film" is authentic or not.