In a story that probably works a lot better as a set of fun-sounding sentences than it will as a full-length movie, Deadline is reporting that Kelsey Grammer is going to star in a film where he has to fight some giant killer spiders. (The kind that live in “an ancient labyrinth,” in case we need to distinguish them from the suburban giant killer spiders you might be more familiar with.) Grammer—recently of the short-lived Partners, and last week’s “Treehouse Of Horror”—will be starring in the 3D action thriller The Nest, where he most likely won’t be playing an erudite Seattle psychologist wielding a rolled up newspaper, even though that’s exactly what we’ve decided to imagine that he’ll do.
Beefy Twilight star Kellan Lutz will play the Niles to Grammer’s Frasier, presumably engaging his co-star in a mix of farcical dialogue and barrel-chested arachnid murder. Grammer’s Transformers: Age Of Extinction co-star Li Bingbing, meanwhile, will be sassing it up in the coveted “Roz” position. (Or maybe she’s a Daphne, who can say?)
The Nest is being produced by Arclight Films, with direction from Kimble Rendall, whose credits include second unit directing gigs on I, Robot and the latter two Matrix films. IMDB says Rendall also wrote the script, which centers on a colony of “flesh-eating funnel web spiders,” driven from their lair by the heat of a flash fire, (or, in our version, the irresistible draw of an imprudently unleashed baritone.) And while we know that Nest is probably destined to end up on the DVD rack, right next to all those abandoned copies of Down Periscope and An American Carol, it doesn’t stop us from imagining, just for a moment, Dr. Frasier Crane beating a giant tarantula to death with his father’s old green rocking chair. These, after all, are the images that get us through our day.