The Giant Spider Invasion (1975)

Sometimes the only way I know you're alive is when I hear you flush the toilet!
-Ev Kester
You're so dumb you wouldn't know rabbit turds from Rice Krispies!
-Dan Kester

You may recall that in my review of Texas Chain Saw Massacre we discussed the Deep South stereotype. That is, how according to Hollywood movies and TV shows everyone in the rural southeastern United States is a toothless hick, a neo-Confederate soldier, a wealthy cotton farmer, an incestuous slob, or a serial killer.

Well, this trope is not necessarily exclusive to the Deep South. Any rural location can be used as a backdrop for this dirtier part of Americana: an isolated farmland in Illinois, a cabin in the Rocky Mountains, even something cleaner like a backwards Midwestern suburban town can serve as the nesting grounds of these tropes. Pretty much anyplace as far away from modern urban civilization as possible works. As a matter of fact, Ed Gein, the real-life murderer that Leatherface from TCSM among others was based on, lived in Wisconsin.

Speaking of Wisconsin, this is where our movie, Bill Rebane's 1975 feature The Giant Spider Invasion, takes place, though looking at it you'd think it was in the Hazzard County ghetto. The film is at its heart a creature feature about an army of spiders from outer space that kill people and break things, but most of it sheds more interest on the disgusting exploits of its trailer trash cast. Think of it as Kingdom of the Spiders with a lower budget, lower standards, lower everything.

Many of you like me remember this movie from Mystery Science Theater 3000 during its years on the Sci Fi Channel (or PsyPhie or whatever they call themselves now), and this was the episode which made me desperately want to shower every time I watched it.

Well, either this one or Hobgoblins. I can't remember exactly.

The movie has multiple subplots, but none of them are very interesting and you'll be rooting for the spiders anyway, so let's just run down the cast of characters:

• Dutch (Bill Williams), a hick who runs the town's only restaurant where waitress/prostitute Helga (Christiane Schmidtmer) works at.
• Sherrif Jones (Alan Hale from Gilligan's Island), the law 'round these parts. He spends most of the movie answering the phone in his office, sitting in Dutch's eatery and thinking he is funnier than he actually is.
• Dan and Ev Kester (Robert Easton and so-called "special guest star" Leslie Parrish), a disgusting ma-and-pa couple who occupy the screen for a good portion of the movie. Dan is a dirt farmer and an estranged husband who goes out every night to Helga's trailer for some good old fashioned adultery while Ev lounges around the house all hours of the day drowning herself in legalized moonshine.
• Terry (Diane Lee Hart), Ev's young sister whom everyone wants to have wild untamed sex with.
• Dave (Kevin Brodie), the only person in this town with any practice or knowledge of hygiene and moral fiber. He's dating Terry, and Dan doesn't like it--partly because he doesn't seem to trust him, but mostly because he wants to have wild untamed sex with Terry himself.
• A hellfire-and-brimstone preacher who pops in and out of the movie for no real reason.

It's as if Britney Spears married Grizzly Adams' little brother.

Interspersed between scenes with these characters, a meteor hurls toward Earth and lands in the Kesters' backyard with some borderline psychedelic special effects and quite a lot of wind. Nearby, a motorcyclist falls off his bike (which inexplicably blows up) and wanders into the woods until something eats him.

The impact causes all sorts of electric disturbance, including bringing down an army plane, which arouses the suspicion (good lord, did I just use that word? *shiver*) of bepantsuited scientist Dr. Langer (Barbara Hale). NASA sends another scientist, the sexist Dr. Vance (Steve Brodie) to assist her in her study of this strange phenomena. These two are apparently the main couple of the film, which is odd since they both appear to be in their fifties. Through some elaborate scientific babble and lab equipment and adding machines and stuff, the scientists eventually conclude that the meteor fell through a black hole and opened up an interdimensional portal that all these spiders have been coming through. However that works.

The next morning, Dan and Ev finally inspect the impact site (Dan apparently was too tired from his...ahem...evening activities to take a look immediately after the meteor hit) and find a lot of dead cows lying around with their bodies horribly mutilated. As Dan schemes to chop up the meat and sell it to Dutch's cafe like he always does, they finally reach the crater and find several small rocks lying around which turn out to have sparkly diamonds inside them, which has the Kesters seeing dollar signs while unbeknown to them, a spider hatches out of one of them...

"Any news on that Gilligan's Island reunion special?"

Unaware that their whole house is slowly being infested with decidedly non-giant spiders, Dan freaks out when he finds human remains (the motorcyclist we saw earlier) while digging for more rocks, which scares the crap out of him knowing that local authorities will come looking for the body and might find his recent diamond crop. He decides to go to his cousin Billy (Paul Bentzen), who runs a rock shop in town, to have his diamonds appraised...AFTER his nightly conjugal visit. (Whatever happened to priorities?) During the night, Ev, who in Dan's words has been "hittin' the BOOZE again," is chased out of the house by a spider in her sock drawer and into a random cabin, where the titular giant spider eats her.

Uggggghh, Billy. Disgusting, unprincipled simpleton Billy. He looks even less clean than Dan, and I may be scratching the surface here. Fortunately he doesn't last long, because as soon after he tries to put the moves on Terry (ha ha, it's funny because they're related and rednecks like to inbreed and stuff!) he's driving off in his car where the giant spider runs him off the road into a gas station, which explodes before he can completely smash through the window and escape. Dan, after hearing that his so-called diamonds aren't worth the space rock they landed in, goes out digging for more when the giant spider eats him too. Then the spider army goes after Terry, nearly bringing the whole house down on top of her, until Dave arrives to take her to safety.

The last twenty minutes of the movie are a whirlwind of activity. The giant spider attacks a fair in Gleason. Dutch gathers his fellow rednecks and declares an unruly mob on the spider, which the sheriff is unable to quiet down. Dr. Langer and Dr. Vance run around the very dimly lit Wisconsin countryside and roll down a hill at first glance of the spider, Dr. Langer screaming like a banshee the whole while. Some guy loads something into a helicopter as part of the doctors' plan to seal off the portal. The giant spider heads back to town and dispatches Dutch and his mob before retreating to the Kester farmland. Alan Hale's stunt double is eaten trying to fend it off. Whatever was in that helicopter is dropped and explodes, which probably closes the gateway, I don't know, I suppose it does because then the giant spider starts bubbling over in a disgusting display and the superfluous preacher closes us out as the credits roll.

"A Buick with spider legs! Run!!"

Confusing movie, confusing visuals, confusing storyline. So the giant spider dies at the end, but what about all those little spiders still running around everywhere? Do they all melt into small puddles of ice cream and mashed potato soup? For that matter, what's with the title? The Giant Spider Invasion sort of implies that Earth is invaded by giant spiders, and yet there's only ONE giant spider, whereas the spiders that do any invading at all are normal-sized. That's not really a threat, as Terry demonstrates toward the end by taking one of them out with an iron. Maybe if they were brown recluses or black widows or one of those carnivorous arachnids from Kingdom of the Spiders, but still when you take size into consideration they would still be at a gross disadvantage. But the number one worst thing about this movie are the characters. Its redneck cast is the closest thing it has to comedy relief, and they're just not funny. They're just repulsive (or in Alan Hale's case, annoying as crap) to the point where you start counting down the minutes to when they get killed off, and the doctors are uninteresting characters as well. You don't care about anybody or anything in it.

In summation, The Giant Spider Invasion is...disgusting. Just flat-out, uncompromisingly disgusting. I've already used that word several times in this review, but I keep coming back to it, because the movie is, well, disgusting. The plot, the cinematography, and again, the characters...it's all a disgusting mess.

Maybe it was this MST3K episode that made me want to shower after watching it. But then again, the sex-starved kids from Hobgoblins were pretty distasteful to watch themselves...

I'm surprised they didn't all die from the noxious fumes in that house.

(Incidentally, would you believe that this movie has fans? Fans so devoted they've started up a website where you can buy it on DVD?)

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.