Troll (1986)

Apartment for rent. Acquire within...

Well, I've done it. I've actually done it. I reviewed a Harry Potter movie.

With wizards and magic and everything.





Though it doesn't exactly take place at Hogwarts.

(Though the castle in the title card looks like some branch campus. Or maybe the Hogwarts university hospital.)

Yes, it's the 1986 cult classic Troll. Directed by John Carl Buechler, horror movie makeup man who also made Friday the 13th Part VII.

One of many creature puppet films to emerge from the popularity of Gremlins, in a list that includes Ghoulies, Critters and *cringe* Hobgoblins.

The alleged predecessor to Troll 2, regarded as one of the worst movies ever made and I'm told has about as much to do with this film as Halloween 3 has to do with the rest of the Michael Myers franchise. (You know, that one where that kid witnesses a girl being eaten unaware that a fly has landed on his forehead - OH MY GAWWWWWWWWWWD!)

"Pulls our finger, my precious..."

We begin with the Potter family, who have just moved to a small apartment building somewhere on the streets of San Francisco. Little Wendy Potter, played by Jenny Beck from V: The Final Battle, plays ball by herself when she wanders into the basement and is attacked by some kind of...well, troll who uses a ring on his finger to assume her corporeal form and then proceeds to run around the building annoying everyone inside, screaming and growling and biting and going into conniptions.

The only person who seems to notice something is amiss is the son of the family, a monster movie fanatic named Harry Potter, Jr., played by Noah Hathaway, best known for playing Atreyu in The Neverending Story.

Yes, that is his name. HARRY POTTER, JR. His father, played by Michael Moriarty who spent four seasons on Law & Order, is HARRY POTTER, SR.

Despite what this film's producers might think, I'm fairly certain these names are just a coincidence. There's also a "Harold Potter" in an early Monty Python sketch about blancmanges playing at Wimbledon, and THEY haven't mentioned anything about it, so I would imagine it's more common a name than people think.

Though as Atreyu, Noah Hathaway WAS probably the Daniel Radcliffe of his day.

Speaking of names, Noah isn't the only interesting casting call in this movie. Check out who else lives in this building:

June Lockhart from Lassie and Lost in Space plays Eunice St. Clair, an nice sarcastic old lady who knows more about these creatures than appearances would dictate. As if the living, talking mushroom casually disguised as a table lamp wasn't a tipoff.

Gary Sandy from WKRP in Cincinnati plays Barry Tabor (spelled as shown in the credits and yet with a Y on his doorknocker), an ex-Marine who's always going on about communists and doesn't read books because liberals publish them.

Phil Fondacaro, who played a dead Ewok in Return of the Jedi, plays an English professor who is dying of bone marrow cancer. He also pulls double duty as the troll wreaking havoc around the building.

Seinfeld's Julia Louis-Dreyfus makes her feature film debut as Jeanette, an...actress or something? I wasn't made clear on that.

And finally, future congressman Sonny Bono (yes, the one who was married to Cher) plays a desperate, lonely, perpetually horny gigolo who--

Euugh! Ohhh, he looks like Carl from Aqua Whatever They Call That Show Now! Ugggh, I hate those tyoes of characters!

Oh yeah, and his name is "Peter Dickinson." Cue Beavis-and-Butthead laughter.

It isn't long before every apartment in the building apart from Eunice's and the Potters' are overrun with little magical gardens, its residents transformed into giant turds that sprout mystical vines and grass everywhere (Julia Louis-Dreyfus also turns into a nymph, while the dying English professor wishes he could be reborn into a magical land of unicorns and things and the troll is all too happy to oblige) and are soon crawling with other mystical creatures.

Oh, and they sing too. Here, have a listen:

Are those lyrics Latin? I can't be sure.

Anyway, his younger sibling's erratic behavior coupled with some ideas some bad monster movies put in his head have convinced Harry Jr. that the psychotic little she-demon in her little sister's body is not his little sister. Luckily his new friend Eunice, who is the only one in the building to notice that people are disappearing like rabbits, knows why.

Okay, this is actually a little convoluted...

For those of you who don't like spoilers, here is a picture of a younger Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a nymph to distract you from reading the following paragraph.

Oh. You're above being tempted by sexy nymphs. Okay then...

Long ago, before countries existed, there was a human kingdom and a fairy kingdom, and both of them got along with each other quite well. Torok and some of his fairy friends wanted to overthrow the human kingdom and rule the world, but they ultimately failed and Torok was turned into a troll for his trouble. Eunice has been living in the building for centuries, keeping an eye on Torok. It was he who has been growing little ecosystems throughout the building, and once he's furnished each apartment in magical kudzu, the fairy world will burst forth into the human world and...war will probably be waged, scientists will freak out, Pat Robertson will say the state of California had it coming, and the florist industry will enter a future more prosperous than anyone could imagine. Wendy is still alive somewhere in this mess, soon to be christened by Torok as the "princess of the fairies".

Uhh...did anybody else know about the inter-dimensional gateway in the basement of this seemingly normal apartment building? Maybe Eunice would have WARNED them or something? There were at least four other people living in it. I think one of the first things I'd like to be sure of when moving into a new apartment is that it was rat-, vermin- or fairy-dimension-free, because if I got sucked into some mystical fairyland while I was washing my clothes, I think I'd want my deposit back. I certainly wouldn't let my kids wander down there to get abducted by vengeful goblins or anything.

Okay, who gave the kids sugar?

Eunice sends Harry Jr. deep into Middle Earth with a sword with which to stab the heart of Torok's universe and rescue his sister while she changes into June's daughter Anne Lockhart from Battlestar Galactica, goes off to face Torok, and ends up as a tree stump.

Harry Jr. fares slightly better. He DOES manage to find his sister in a Snow-White-esque glass box and releases her, but he doesn't exactly stab the heart of Torok's universe, which is actually the biggest friggin monster we've seen throughout this film. No, Torok inadvertently does it himself when the monster tries to attack his queen Wendy after tossing Harry Jr. to one side.

Uhh...whoops. Guess you shouldn't have made the heart of the universe something that could be easily killed.

Anyway, to wrap up, brother and sister escape as the magical world collapses, the house stops sprouting weeds everywhere, Eunice is okay, the family moves out of the apartment, the other tenants...I don't know, probably dead, and a policeman goes to investigate the basement exemplifies what I was saying about leaving an inter-dimensional gateway unchecked in an apartment building.

"All right, son. No more Syfy original movies for you."

Troll is a weird movie. Every bit of it. From its characters to its singing goblins to a younger sister who could serve as an inspiration for leash laws for children...even its young hero and his neurotic obsession with movie monsters, even though he's the character whom nobody is expected to believe. We see him in bed watching monster movies, and then he describes his sister's behavior almost word-for-word like the dialogue in the film he was watching. Are their parents completely oblivious to the fact that the other tenants are never seen again after their daughter pays them a visit? Or that she's a good mouth froth away from going completely rabid? Or, for that matter, that their son, even though he's right in this case, is perhaps suffering from quite an overactive imagination for a boy his age? I mean, there is a line spoken by the father--"Honey, did you do a lot of drugs before we met?"--but otherwise they literally suspect nothing.

Also, watch for Michael Moriarty's not very good impression of Tom Cruise from Risky Business. Parents are so unhip.

It's also weird in that it doesn't feel like a horror film, even though it is sometimes billed as one and there is a gruesome scene early in the film in Sonny Bono's on-camera transformation into a giant plant-spewing turd. (Thank you, by the way. I don't like Quagmire characters.) Everybody else's happens off-screen, and there isn't really any blood or anything. The film doesn't take the disappearance of its supporting cast very seriously, and truth be told, it's kinda hard to take ANYTHING seriously when all your monsters take a break from their quest to rule the universe by singing some silly gibberish song.

Even though this film has decent makeup and visual effects, a once- or soon-to-be-famous cast, and something of a cult following, it is not as fondly remembered as the infamous film that was marketed as its sequel. Apparently, nothing can beat out a film with a widely circulated YouTube clip in the popularity department. Still, if you like fantasy movies about singing trolls and don't mind seeing Sonny Bono in an undershirt, then by all means go forth and conquer.

All I know is I've got that song stuck in my head now. What ARE those lyrics?

Lemme try...
"We have heard of this! It's the myriad campaign, ah!
Herbert Herbert wing, Herbert Herbert Herbert wing, dream of us!"
...this movie is weird.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends--future events such as these will affect you in the future.

There are bad movies, and then there are bad movies.

Some movies are made with the sole intent to cause physical and mental pain to its audience. Some movies are made by directors and film crews with very dim outlooks on life and very low opinions of humanity. Some movies are torturous to sit through in ways that violate the Geneva Conventions. Some movies exist only to insult your intelligence, diminish your sanity, and suck your very will to live.

Then there is that special kind of bad movie, the "so bad it's good" type of turkey. It's the unnatural phenomenon where a film is just so inept, so terrible, so incompetent on every imaginable level that it somehow transcends all logic and criticism and actually becomes quite entertaining. They're been called guilty pleasures, unintentional comedies, and have sometimes been considered art films. People not only love them, but make them cult classics and recommend them to friends.

You know which ones I'm talking about. Snakes on a Plane. The Room. Reefer Madness. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Every movie Troma Films has ever made.

And this week, we're looking at the granddaddy of them all...

Who better to school us all in how not to make a movie than the grand cheese master himself, Edward D. Wood, Jr., writer, producer, director, known transvestite, lover of angora sweaters, and the self-proclaimed master of "suspension of disbelief"? A man who loved movies and loved making movies, even though he wasn't very good at it. An icon of overzealous half-assery who combined the acting talents (or lack thereof) of horror legends Vampira, Tor Johnson, even the great Bela Lugosi (sort of), put together shoddy reusable sets complete with identical shower curtains, banged out a script in no less than five minutes tops, dressed half the cast in shiny bathrobes, and then blindly chucked the footage in the editor's face with the words "go nuts", and STILL came up with a film that is less than the sum of its parts.

Crackpot psychic The Amazing Criswell opens the film by talking (or reading off cue cards) about the future, where you and I will spend the rest of our lives, and where future events such as these will affect us. He then goes on to talk about "what happened on that fateful day" and then confuses us further about punishing the guilty and rewarding the innocent before finally settling on "GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE!"

Up in the skies, two men pretending to be airline pilots while sitting in a mostly empty room on boxes are freaked out by a shot of a hubcap hanging from a string.

Meanwhile, following a funeral service for the wife of an elderly gentleman, two gravediggers are burying the coffin when they are suddenly attacked by the very woman they were just burying.

Grief-stricken and despondent, the widower sadly leaves the house they had shared for so many years and walks a lonely, lonely path...into oncoming traffic.

And at HIS funeral, little do his mourners know that as they walk out of the world's smallest mausoleum wondering why his wife isn't entombed in there with him, HER CORPSE IS WATCHING THEM.

And it just gets better from here.

"The incidents, the places, the future...where the hell am I going with this?"

That evening, one of the pilots, a man named Jeff Trent, tells his wife Paula about the flying saucer he saw, saying it looked like a giant cigar (a giant hubcap-shaped cigar, I'm sure) and after he radioed it in, the topmost army personnel were upon him as soon as they landed and made him and the co-pilot swear to secrecy. He can't even admit he saw the thing (even though he just did). Suddenly a bright flash and a huge gust of wind knocks them both backward as a spacecraft has just landed in a cemetery conveniently next to the house, and just as conveniently where those two gravediggers were killed.

As the wind knocks the police around flimsy grave markers, one Inspector Clay (Johnson), who had gone off on his own with a flashlight, encounters Lugosi (or was it the director's wife's chiropractor? I can't be sure) and Vampira and is promptly murdered. ("And somebody's responsible!")

Soon after, Hollywood and Washington, DC are visited by similar sightings of hubcaps wobbling about on strings ("Visits? That would indicate visitors!") and the army's only solution is to shoot off pop caps at them. (How hard is it to hit them? They're just dangling up there.) As the army men ponder just what it is they're shooting at and what it is they're covering up, the aliens return to their space station and set about implementing "Plan 9", which is the regeneration of the newly deceased through stimulation of the pineal and pituitary glands in hopes of gaining the people of Earth's attention.

Plan 8 involved the saucers flying low over major cities with the aliens leaning out the windows waving and yelling "Hey! Look over here!"

Well, as Trent leaves to play pretend airplane pilot again, Paula is left all alone to touch his pillows in her sleep (make of that what you will) when Lugosi/Chiropractor Vampire Guy comes into her bedroom for some reason and chases her out of the house and into the cemetery, where he, Vampira and now the newly resurrected Inspector Clay wander around aimlessly while the girl runs around screaming. Shots alternate between soundstage and outdoor film, actors run across the same part of the cemetery several times over and the time of day changes completely at random until Paula is finally carried off the movie by a passing motorist. The dead reconvene at a waiting space vessel which takes off just as the cops arrive.

Wait, the detective and the dead wife come back as zombies, but the old man comes back as a vampire? How does that work?

Yeah, if I had to wear that, I'd want to choke myself, too.

Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Colonel Thomas Edwards, Chief of Saucer Operations (as if there were such a position in in the Army, at least to my knowledge) is briefed by a chain-smoking general about the radio signals the aliens have been sending them all this time, and then plays him one which they have translated via their new "language computer." The speaker identifies himself as Eros, a soldier from some unnamed planet within the galaxy who describes his race as advanced eons beyond humans, calls they "stupid" for thinking they were alone in the universe, states that they have come to save their planet from their "ancient, juvenile minds" who keep devising new ways to blow themselves up, and states that the Earth's big guns scare them and that humankind will be destroyed if they refuse to acknowledge their existence.

Not one for diplomacy, are we?

When did Ann Coulter get a dye job? And when did Glenn Beck shave his head?

Edwards is sent to California to speak with the Trents when the aliens come back, send their vampire to attack them and then promptly vaporize him with their Decomposing Ray.

You know, I'm beginning to think these cries for attention are signs of a deeper psychological problem.

A trip back into the cemetery to see where this ray came from sees Monster Clay kidnap Trent's wife and Eros invite them inside their spaceship so they can show them that they're holding Trent's wife captive. He then goes on to reiterate that they are on a mission of peace by admonishing them for their primitive wars, calling them "idiots" with "stupid minds" who will just keep killing each other, and states that mankind must be obliterated before they stumble upon a new type of explosive--a "Solaranite" bomb which would harness molecules of sunlight or whatever as an explosive that would set off a chain reaction and destroy the universe.

Oh, nice use of tact, Eros. The aliens from Independence Day have better people skills.

"You're all big jerks who are stupid and your big ugly faces are as dumb as a butt!"

Anyway, police reinforcements arrive to incapacitate Clay with a stick to the back of his head and save Trent's wife, a fight breaks out on the spacecraft between Trent and Eros that destroys Eros' ham radio equipment and sets off a fire, Trent and the army guys escape just as the flaming ship takes off and explodes in midair, and the remaining zombie creatures instantly decompose where they stand.

Then Criswell comes back daring us to prove that what we just saw didn't happen (we can) and warns us that people whom we don't even know have passed us by in the street may be from outer space, and mentions something about laughing at vitamins and television and outer space before ending with "God help us in the future," not telling us what any of this even has to do with the future.

"YOUR mind's stupider!"
"Nuh-uh, YOUR mind's stupider!"
"YOUR mind's stupider times ten!"
"YOUR mind's stupider times a hundred!"
"YOURS time a thousand!"
"YOURS times INFINITY!!"

Plan 9 from Outer Space is a quandary among bad movies. Is it a bad movie? Undoubtedly. Did it look like they only had a special effects budget of twenty dollars (adjusted for inflation)? Absolutely. Does the plot make as much sense as a 27-dollar bill? Of course. Could a hyperactive six-year-old have written better dialogue? Again, the answer is yes.

Is it the worst movie ever made, however? Surprisingly no.

There ARE bad movies out there. Movies that make you cringe, movies that make you hurt, movies that make you want to find the nearest bridge and jump off it. I've done a few on this blog already--Supergirl, Volcano, The Giant Spider Invasion, and maybe some others I can't name off the top of my head. To list Plan 9 from Outer Space among those titles just seems...wrong.

Don't get me wrong; it is NOT a good movie. It tries hard to tell a suspenseful science fiction story and fails spectacularly in every category. But I'm certain there isn't a director alive who goes into any movie project with the sole intent of making an absolute stinkburger. Sometimes watching these cinematic failures are like staring at a train wreck. You can't look away. And over the years people continue to not look away at epic fails like these. And they keep telling other movie buffs to not look away. And eventually they gain legions of fans, attract new generations of film lovers and develop a cult following, and nobody ever looks away.

I guess my point is...the worst movie ever made is NOT the worst movie ever made.

"A MOVIE THAT IS SO GOOD I WAS HAPPY TO DIE FOR IT!" --Bela Lugosi

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Oldfather Studios, former home of the Centron Corporation.

In 1947, University of Kansas alumni Russell Mosser and Arthur Wolf founded the Centron Corporation, a small Midwestern movie studio which specialized in making hygiene films that they used to show in classrooms to get kids to brush their teeth, keep clean and neat and avoid the dangers of communism. Based in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, Centron shot their films at various locations around town, particularly Lawrence High School, and employed local scriptwriters, technical crews and over 3,000 residents, many of whom were children, as actors. Throughout its history, Centron produced these kitschy, conformist educational shorts as well as some industrial safety films for John Deere, Caterpillar and General Electric.

It's been more than twenty years since Centron closed its doors for good. Their old building, constructed in 1955 and pictured above, is now the main facility of the KU film and media department, while their legacy is forever preserved in the Prelinger Archives and old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

As well as one of the best-known public domain horror films of all time.

Herk Harvey, another KU graduate, was hired by Centron and directed over 400 of their instructional films. While coming home from a location shoot in California, he came across an abandoned amusement park near Salt Lake City, and the desolation and spooky atmosphere was so enchanting that it inspired him to make a movie about it. And so he brought in Centron scriptwriter John Clifford to come up with a movie script, hired an unknown actress named Candace Hilligoss, and used various locations in and around Lawrence (as well as a few in Salt Lake City) with Lawrence-based actors and a Lawrence-based crew, shooting it all in five weeks' time and on a $30,000 budget.

And so we have Carnival of Souls, a horror classic that barely made a whisper in theaters on its first release, but thanks to a successful run on the late-night TV circuit gained a tremendous cult following and inspired the likes of David Lynch and fellow public domain movie icon George A. Romero.

Nowadays the students throw the GOALPOSTS in Potter Lake after winning football games.
Of course, we've also stopped winning football games.

So the film starts out with something you usually see in movies from this era: a hot rod drag race. Two guys randomly pull up next to three women in a car and challenge them, and the women quickly accept. The two vehicles race out of town, through some country roads and finally to a bridge, where for some reason the car with the three women in it suddenly swerves over the side and falls into the river beneath.

That's the Kaw Bridge in north Lawrence they've driven off, incidentally. Though since then it's been replaced by one made of concrete.

As local law enforcement try and fish the car out of the river for three hours with no luck, a survivor named Mary Henry (Hilligoss) emerges out of the water with no memory of how she escaped or what happened to the other two women.

Some time later, Mary decides to move on with her life and take a job as a church organist in Utah, after stopping off at Lawrence's downtown pipe organ factory (since relocated to the northeast part of town) to try one out. She settles in at a boarding house run by a nice old lady and meets her lecherous next door neighbor, and then introduces herself to the minister of her new church (the Trinity Episcopal Church in Lawrence, in fact, at least in the exterior shot).

If he starts saying "giggity-giggity", I'm leaving.

Along the way, strange things starts happening. On her way out of town Mary starts picking up strange organ music on every station on the radio, and then starts seeing a ghostly white-faced man (producer/director Harvey in makeup and a suit) in her windows which causes her to run her car off the road. This man starts appearing in front of her in random places at various times of the day--in mirrors, in windows, at the foot of the stairs of her boarding house, you name it.

Meanwhile, she takes a peculiar interest in an abandoned pavilion out in the middle of nowhere. The minister explains that the building used to be a bathhouse, then a dance hall, and was finally used as carnival grounds before it closed down.

"HEY! YOUR RIGHT FRONT TIRE'S A LITTLE LOW!"

Then one morning during a shopping trip (probably at Weaver's, the department store in downtown Lawrence), a ripple effect in the dressing room renders her invisible to the rest of the world for a few minutes, coupled by an unbearable silence and yet another sighting of the mysterious ghost-faced man. By sheer coincidence she becomes visible again at just the right moment to run panicking into the arms of one Dr. Samuels, a professor of sorts who offers to help her with her strange condition.

Even though he mentions to her that he's not a psychiatrist.

Frankly I'd have gone to see someone who actually IS a psychiatrist. This guy could be any type of doctor.

"Well, I can't just call you 'Not-a-Psychiatrist' Samuels, or 'Dr. Samuels who is not a psychiatrist'!"

At this point you need to know something about Mary - in less polite conversation she would be thought of as a "wet blanket" or a "party pooper". She's very strong-willed, but doesn't always feel comfortable around other people, doesn't want a boyfriend, and isn't keen to join in on activities with others. She admits that she only took the organist job because it was just a job and has no interest in joining the church that is hiring her. She's also not interested in having a relationship with her lascivious neighbor, though that may be his fault more than hers.

The next day, while practicing the organ at the church, Mary goes into a trance and starts playing something particularly eerie while hallucinating about the old pavilion and the white-faced man standing in a dance hall surrounded by other white-faced people dancing. The minister overhears it, calls it "profane" and "sacrilegious", and asks her to resign, all the while worrying about her mortal soul and asking her to join his church.

Okay, THIS part was DEFINITELY filmed in Kansas. Maybe not Lawrence, but still...

Then she goes out with her neighbor to drink and dance...or NOT drink and NOT dance as she's just not into those kind of things. He eventually leaves, fed up with her when he tries to put the moves on her and she sees the white-faced man in the mirror and freaks out, despite her constant pleas for companionship.

On the plus side, there's no lines.

Driven to her wits' end and convinced she does not belong in this world, Mary finally decides to leave town, but not before stopping at a service station across the street from the masonic temple in downtown Lawrence (the masons have since moved and there's a contemporary-style church there now). When the white-faced man reappears as a shadow in a doorway she flees to a bus depot desperate to leave town, where another screen ripple makes her invisible again, and the only bus she gets on is full of eerie white-faced people who all get up out of their seats and move in her direction. Finally she returns to Dr. Samuels' office for help only to learn she's been speaking to the original white-faced man in the chair.

She turns out to have dreamed this.

No, the movie doesn't end there. Heaven forbid.

It ends when she drives out to the empty pavilion, where everything she saw during her freak-out at the church is waiting for her, including the white-face man dancing with a white-faced version of herself. Then they all start chasing her outside laughing and finally catch up to her when she inevitably trips and falls in that special way that movie heroines do...

The next day, the minister, doctor and the police observe her footprints outside the pavilion which end abruptly with no explanation.

Back in Lawrence, the police have finally pulled the car from the start of the film out of the water, with Mary's body inside.

"GRUUHUGHGHUGHH...EEEEEEVERYYYYYY MAAAAAAAN A WIIIIIIIILDCAAAAAAT..."

I'll agree with Herk Harvey on one thing - if there's anything that creeps me out more than Lawrence Welk reruns, it's wandering around in an empty amusement park. Nobody in the booths or running the registers at the gift shops, the roller-coasters and bumper cars totally motionless, no music, no babies crying, no guys earning minimum wage and college credit by walking around in hot, sweaty cartoon animal costumes...I could see why he chose one as the backdrop for a horror movie, particularly one as isolated and remote as Mary is from human society. I could easily tell there was a message in there about social withdrawal and lack of human interaction, though hopefully the creepy-looking monsters in the makeup will give her someone to finally talk to.

Atmosphere is one thing that Carnival of Souls does well, from the empty pavilion scenes to Mary's momentary lapses of existence. No special effects, no CGI, just an abandoned fairground, some makeup and a creepy organ soundtrack. If you enjoy a move that makes good use of atmosphere, you will most assuredly enjoy Carnival of Souls. It's one of those movies that proves that less is in fact more. My only gripe with it was that it drops us into the opening drag race too abruptly, and we don't get a lot of background on Mary apart from she doesn't always get on well with others.

It's a real shame this film is in the public domain, because had it done well in theaters, it might have put my town on the map. That is, if being a progressive college town in an infamously red state with a great arts and music scene and home to one of the best college basketball programs in the country wasn't enough. To be honest, I think the only other film that Lawrence is famous for is The Day After, which implies that there's actually a worthwhile reason to drop a nuclear bomb on Kansas.

Remember kids: brush your teeth, keep clean and neat, and communism is bad!

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

The diminutive spider is second to none
In producing a thread that is sticky as glue
Yet he never gets caught in the web that he's spun
Which is better than most of us people can do.
--some quote I got from one of my puzzle books

Horror movies seem to revolve around one of the following themes: Don't piss off the locals. Don't piss off the ghosts. Don't piss off the man in the mask. Don't piss off the psychotic killer with the chainsaw. Don't piss off the over-sized mutant which YOU created with YOUR atomic bomb. Don't piss off God. And most importantly, DO NOT piss off nature.

The last theme was especially prevalent in the 1970s. With the rise of mainstream environmentalism, many horror movies of the time carried ecological messages, usually by pitting man against ecological adversaries. Frogs dealt with killer frogs, Night of the Lepus dealt with killer rabbits (with vicious streaks a mile wide), and Empire of the Ants dealt with--what else?--a colony of very perturbed, and very big, ants. They are always angry because in some way or another, man and his never-ending pursuit of progress, industrialization and scientific endeavors, or his otherwise blatant disregard for Mother Earth, pose a grave threat to that creature's ecosystem.

Well, except for the shark in Jaws. I'm not really sure what its deal was.

Quick quiz: can anyone guess what mankind pissed off this time in John "Bud" Cardos' 1977 creature feature Kingdom of the Spiders?

In "peaceful" Verde Valley, Arizona, as the opening credits song describes, we see a cow on a farm. This cow belongs to a Mr. Walter Colby (played by Woody Strode) and it is his prize calf which he is planning to enter in the upcoming county fair in the small rural town of Camp Verde where this movie takes place. He and his wife Birch (Altovise Davis) admire it for a moment before some Evil Dead-style cinematography tells us that something bad is about to happen to it.

In the next scene, we have local veterinarian Dr. Robert "Rack" Hansen (played by William Shatner of Star Trek and Priceline commercial fame) hitting on his deceased brother's widow Terry (Marcy Lafferty) when he gets a call from Colby - his prized calf seems to have fallen ill all of a sudden, and there are bite marks all over its body. Dr. Hansen meets up with Colby to examine the animal, which dies shortly after he arrives. A bewildered Colby wonders if it wandered into a hornets' nest or came down with Black Plague, while Dr. Hansen takes a blood sample to send to the Department of Animal Pathology at Arizona State University.

"I hope you'll pick me to be the next Happy California Cow...err...soon would be good." *whimper*

The Department sends back blond be-jumpsuited entomologist Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) who settles in at the local lodge before tracking down Dr. Hansen. Ashley is very calm around spiders, as we see later when one sneaks into her cabin while she is getting ready for a romantic dinner date with Dr. Hansen and she peacefully lets it outside--as a matter of fact, that's what landed the role for Bolling in the first place; she was the only actress who auditioned for the part who didn't have a problem working with the eight-legged animals. She tells him that the cow died from a massive dose of spider venom, which he initially dismisses before they head out to the Colby farm, where Birch finds their dog lying dead behind the barn shortly after they arrive. Examining the body, Ashley concludes that it too died from a spider venom overdose, and Dr. Hansen still believes that no one spider can do that much damage...and then Colby shows them "the spider hill", a raised mound of dirt on his farm the size of a burial plot with tarantulas crawling all over it.

Come to Camp Verde and see the amazing Spider Hill!

While on their romantic dinner date, Ashley talks to Dr. Hansen about these newly organized spiders and comes up with a theory for their attacks: the heavy use of pesticides on local crops has had drastic effects on their natural food supply, forcing them to colonize and adapt their eating habits by attacking larger animals. Later that night, concerned that soon the spiders will begin targeting humans, they resolve to torch the spider hill before they do any more damage, and when they return to Colby's farm, it just so happens that he and his wife are about to do the very same thing, unwilling to lose their farmland to this army of arachnids. As if they need any more incentive, a bull stampedes out of its pen and collapses, tarantulas crawling all over its body. The foursome douse the hill with gasoline and set it ablaze, but the spiders escape through an underground tunnel, and the next day while Dr. Hansen and Ashley are out on a picnic with Terry's young daughter Linda (Natasha Ryan) during an obligatory "admiration of nature" scene, two tarantulas attack Colby while he is driving in his truck, sending him careening over a steep hill and killing him. Dr. Hansen stops by the crash site to find Colby's corpse cocooned in spider webs, while Ashley learns from her colleagues that the spiders' venom has become five times more toxic than normal. Not sure how, since they don't really explain it--maybe all those pesticides mutated them or something like that.

Typical. The black guy gets webbed first.

Several more spider hills are found on the Colby farm, and the mayor of Camp Verde (Roy Engel in his final film appearance) orders the sheriff (David McLean) to spray pesticide all over the surrounding countryside. Ashley objects, saying that pesticide is what started the whole thing in the first place and it would be safer to use natural predators like birds and rats, but not unlike the mayor of Amity Island in Jaws, this mayor is more concerned with the the upcoming county fair and is not about to have a whole bunch of birds and rats chase away the tourist trade. A crop duster is hired to spray the area, but while he is in mid-flight some spiders attack him, sending his plane out of control and crashing into a service station in a fiery explosion. Considering there are gas pumps close by, I'm surprised the vapors didn't cause the whole place to go up in a giant fireball.

The spiders then begin their attack on the human population, and despite the fact that no species of tarantula is venomous enough to actually kill a human, the people of Camp Verde go down fairly quickly. Colby's wife is the next to go in a scene complete with Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition chords, and then the spiders come after Terry and Linda. Dr. Hansen and Ashley arrive at their house in time to save Linda, but are too late to do anything for Terry. Soon all the surviving main characters, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Johnson (Joe Ross and Adele Malis), visitors from Colorado who had planned to stay for the county fair, are holed up in the lodge from the miniature horrors outside.

Speaking of horrors, check out Mrs. Johnson's choice of wardrobe--a multicolored striped shirt and blue denim overalls. Welcome to the seventies, folks.

"My fashion sense! My beautiful timeless fashion sense!"

The group makes plans to escape from the lodge and drive away in a nearby RV, but the spiders have them surrounded on all sides. They begin to barricade themselves inside, but soon the spiders start coming at them from all directions: under the door, through the air vents, through the fireplace, and some even attack Linda while she is in bed in another room. Some of them even manage to make their way into the fuse box in the basement and cut the power, and as Dr. Hansen finishes changing a blown fuse, he himself is besieged when they start coming in through the window, but manages to make it back upstairs for Ashley to treat him.

"Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not an exterminator!"

With the spiders having claimed the only telephone operator in Camp Verde, the entire town is now cut off from the outside world, and the small group of extras which constitute the townspeople are up in a panic. The sheriff is driving through this former-insectivore-induced pandemonium when a wayward car takes out a water tower which collapses on his vehicle, crushing him inside and leaving him to the spiders.

The group ends up spending the night in the boarded-up lodge, and the next morning some of them manage to get a radio receiver working. To their surprise, the big city radio morning country music show is on as normal, meaning that the outside world is oblivious to the events of the last few days. Dr. Hansen pries some boards off of a window to take a look outside and discovers that the whole building is covered from top to bottom in spider silk. The movie ends with a zoom out on a matte painting showing the entire town similarly cocooned as "Peaceful Verde Valley" ironically reprises over the end credits.

The anti-housefly rally turns violent.

You probably couldn't make a movie like Kingdom of the Spiders nowadays, at least without CG animators on your payroll. A large part of it would have to do with the increasing influence of animal rights organizations in motion pictures--ten percent of the movie's budget was spent on wrangling tarantulas, and while they did use fake rubber spiders in a few scenes, tragically some of them were squished during the making of this film, even when the script didn't call for it, and many more were killed because they couldn't take the hot Arizona climate. And let's not forget about PETA, who considers something as minor as swatting a fly to be the Eighth Deadly Sin.

Kind of a shame, really, because this movie makes for quite competent drive-in horror fare. Sure the environmental message it carries is eventually lost in the body count these newly carnivorous predators rack up, but that is usually the case with movies like this. It has sort of a low-budget charm to it, as well as one of the most unique and eyebrow-raising endings of any movie in its genre.

And at least the locals have better hygiene that those in The Giant Spider Invasion. You MST3K aficionados can take solace in that, should this film bring on horrid flashbacks.

Suddenly I have an appetite for organically-grown vegetables.