Itsy Bitsy is a fun, schlocky giant spider movie with some great practical puppet work. For about 20 minutes. The hour leading up to that follows Kara ( Elizabeth Roberts ) and her two kids, Jesse ( Arman Darbo ) and Cambria ( Chloe Perrin ), as they adjust to living with aging treasure hunter Walter ( Bruce Davison ), who has employed Kara to serve as his in-home nurse. While we do get nuggets of development in the giant spider story throughout the film as Walter fails to make the necessary blood sacrifice to a relic that is given to him by a former associate, Ahkeeba ( Treva Etienne ), and unleashes spidery hell on Earth, the bulk of this film is a drama about Kara’s inability to care for her kids in the wake of an accident that left her with an opiod addiction and one fewer child.
This storyline works pretty well, with Roberts and Darbo both pulling their weight, delivering emotionally-raw performances that can be hard to watch as Kara constantly clutches for any degree of self-respect, any way to convince herself that she isn’t failing her kids, but the facade is inevitably broken, either by her own revelation or Jesse throwing it in her face as he becomes increasingly unwilling to permit her delusion. As Jesse starts to see Walter as more of a mentor, Kara’s ability to keep her drug use a secret becomes more untenable as she starts facing scrutiny from all sides.
Then, at some point, this becomes the movie promised by the cover art and that works pretty well too. The puppet seems a bit limited in what it’s capable of but they get around that with editing and the end result is greatly preferable to what they would’ve likely been able to manage with CG. With this change in tone comes a more ostentatious aesthetic as we get the occasional gimmicky shot and are beaten over the head with thunderous percussion. Subtle it isn’t but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Itsy Bitsy feels like two perfectly fine films that have been mashed together with a flimsy bit of connective tissue. .I guess I would recommend it more for audiences attracted to the dramatic angle as even when it becomes a giant spider movie, that does have implications in Kara’s redemption arc but if you game for a fun B-movie and this shows up on Amazon Prime, skip to the last 20 minutes and you’ve got yourself a short film that doesn’t lose much of its impact from the lack of context.
