* AngstWhatAngst: Despite Mike guessing that his friend, Joshua, has been killed by the mutant spiders, the young boy is hardly upset or worried.
* ItsShortSoItSucks: Not the movie, but tie-in 3d fps pc game. [[SoOkayItsAverage While the gameplay is a fairly well put together]], if your any good at these types of games, it will only last about 20 minutes ''at max''. At that length, it's probably the game that most encapsulates the idea of being made as an advertisement for the movie it is based on first and an actual game second.
* NarmCharm: The whole point of the movie! Especially the ridiculous noises the spiders make! They roar, they hiss, and when they're hurt they act like cartoons! When set on fire they squeal, when squished they go "bleah", and you might even hear a "whee" or two!
* NightmareRetardant:
** Granted, it's by no means a straight horror flick to start with, but the goofy noises the spiders keep making can easily defuse the terror for non-arachnophobes.
** Also, the plainly, clearly CGI early aughts monsters makes them more palatable.
** The movie's first death is caused by a (regular sized) pinktoe tarantula, granted it's already supposed to be a giant mutant, but they used a regular ''Avicularia avicularia'' as the killer spider. Pinktoes are generally known by hobbyists as one of the gentlest, most docile, most timid of tarantula species. It's the equivalent of making a movie about killer wolves and have the first death caused by a basset hound. Possibly justified, if the toxic waste also made the spiders more aggressive, which there is evidence for - most spiders, even the ones that don't regularly spin webs, are ambush predators and don't really chase down prey.
* RetroactiveRecognition: [[Creator/ScarlettJohansson Black Widow]] is a BrattyTeenageDaughter in this movie.
* SpecialEffectsFailure: The CGI spiders have not aged well at all, but that just makes the movie SoBadItsGood.
* TearJerker: While it's still treated as a awesome moment, it's still rather sad for cat lovers to see Zeke the Cat fighting against a spider who's the same size as him and eventually dying alongside it due to electrocution. The painful yowls and meows he gives off as he's being slammed into the drywall don't help.
** There's also an earlier scene in the film's beginning of a small dog getting taken into the cave and ''eaten'' by one of the mutated spiders off-screen, said dog actually belonged to Gladys who is later captured and webbed up when she goes to the basement after hearing her dog's cries.
* {{Woolseyism}}: While the Latin American translation changes the title to the more generic "Attack of the Spiders" (still a serviceable Fifties-style BMovie title and sounds similar to the original title of the film) the term "eight-legged freaks", which would rather awkward to translate, is changed to "arañas patonas" (big-legged spiders) and dropped more often through the film.