Hawkzino is back and he’s brought some eight-legged friends with him. This time, he’s also brought Captain James T. Kirk along for the ride. As you know, Hawk has been writing up his reviews of giant spider movies, this time, it’s the Kingdom of the Spiders.
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)
1977 was a great year. I was born. Star Wars was born. The Queen celebrated her silver jubilee (25 years, which turned out to be rookie numbers for Her Maj). Elvis died, which ruins my narrative somewhat, but I’ll press on anyway.
1977 was also the greatest year in history for spider movies. As well as Kingdom of the Spiders, we’ve still got Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo and Curse of the Black Widow to look forward to.
Like in my previous review, 1975’s Kiss of the Tarantula, the spiders in Kingdom of the Spiders are not giant. They are regular-sized tarantulas, which are still pretty big, but naturally so.
However, they compensate for their lack of size with abundance. 5000 live tarantulas were used for this movie, which is a lot. When you consider the sheer volume of spiders on display, I’d say it is equivalent to that of a single giant spider. If you disagree, then you must hate science.
Quick aside: I hope they didn’t claim that no animals were harmed during the making of the movie because trucks drive right over them.
After filming was complete, the surviving tarantulas were let loose in the Arizona desert and for years the local residents reported seeing large numbers of spiders in the area. It seems that they tried their hardest to recreate the plot of the movie in real life.
The differences between the tarantulas in this movie and real ones are not size-related but mostly behavioural, as these usually solitary, cannibalistic and placid creatures team up to snack on a small town, armed with venom that is five times more potent than normal somehow.
The Return of DDT
The characters speculate on the reasons behind the spiders’ change of behaviour. We don’t get any real answers, but if you’re expecting me to believe the theories they come up with, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
It revolves around the pesticide DDT. You may remember DDT from the 1958 classic Earth vs the Spider (and later on in Wrestlemania 2, courtesy of Jake ‘the Snake’ Roberts). In that movie, DDT was used as a weapon, but here it is a potential cause, albeit an indirect (and frankly dubious) one.
DDT hasn’t mutated the spiders, you see. That would be too easy and plausible. Instead, they blame DDT for wiping out the spiders’ natural prey. With no food available, the spiders apparently have no option but to unionise and rebrand themselves as maneaters.
I’m not buying it. Spiders are naturally cannibalistic, so why wouldn’t they just snack on each other if their food supply was low? And how do you explain the supercharged venom and their newfound taste for human flesh? And what about the fact that these previously solitary creatures are now hanging out in hordes?
Do you know who else hangs out in hordes? Zombies, that’s who. I think the DDT did its job in killing them off but they didn’t stay dead. Zombie spiders. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. If you disagree, then you might be a Nazi.
Captain Kirk: The Wilderness Years
The star of this movie is the legendary William Shatner, who plays veterinarian Dr Robert ‘Rack’ Hansen. His odd nickname doesn’t derive from him having a magnificent chest (although I’m sure he does) but has something to do with him playing pool with his brother when they were younger (he used to rack the balls. Not sure why that would stick).
Rack’s brother is dead now, killed in ‘Nam, and Rack has a confusing relationship with his widow, Terry, who is a woman. Terry is played by Marcy Lafferty, William Shatner’s wife at the time.
At the start of the movie, they ride horses together, lassoing steers and giving them inoculations. But then Rack lassos her, which is symbolic, I think. They roll around on the ground in a playful manner before she accidentally calls him John (his brother’s name) and he throws her off quite forcefully.
Later, Rack visits Terry and his niece, Julie. Terry points out that he won’t be “with her” but takes care of her as if he was. She likens it to buying a cow but giving the milk away, which doesn’t make sense at all.
Rack goes along with it and jokes that one day he’ll start milking the cow, which means her. I got the feeling that he wasn’t talking metaphorically. As if to confirm my suspicions, she replies ‘make sure your hands are warm.’
Awkward dialogue aside, Rack obviously wants her, but he feels guilty making a move on his dead brother’s wife. He’s trying to do the right thing but he’s also leading her on because he can’t quite quash his feelings. It feels very honest, and I liked this storyline. It’s a shame that he instantly forgets about her when a hot scientist from the state University blows into town and he starts sleazing all over her.
The Woes Of Walter
But before that, we meet farmer Walter Colby and his wife, Birch. He looks about sixty. She looks about twenty. They seem like a nice couple but don’t have the best run of luck. Walter takes pride in his prize calf, but it gets killed by spiders in the opening scene. Next, his dog is killed by spiders. Then his bull is killed (you guessed it – spiders). The bull crashes through a fence before keeling over. Walter leaps out of the way and breaks his arm.
Feeling down, he takes a trip in his truck but some of his friendly neighbourhood spiders hitch a ride with him. He doesn’t notice them crawling all over him until he pulls down his sun visor and one jumps onto his face. He drives the truck off a cliff, dies and gets cocooned in a spider web.
Later on, their farmhouse is invaded by spiders and Birch takes them on with a handgun. A spider lands on her hand and instead of shaking it off like a normal person, she tries to shoot it and blows her own hand off.
Birch also gets cocooned and killed. Don’t you just love a heart-warming tale with a happy ending?
Little Ditty, ‘bout Rack And Diane
But I’m jumping ahead. Following the calf’s death, Rack sends blood samples to the state University to analyse, which prompts a visit from Diane Ashley, a hot blonde scientist.
Rack happens to be at a gas station when Diane arrives and she mistakes him for the attendant. He plays along – you know how he is.
It reminded me of those Christmas movies where the high-flying city girl breaks down in a small town obsessed with Christmas and mistakes the owner of the cookie factory for a mechanic, but he fixes her car anyway. She’s there to close the factory but instead learns the true spirit of Christmas from a quirky cast of small-town folk and by winning the snowman building competition. She falls for the factory owner because not only is he stupidly handsome and good with his hands, he’s an awesome single dad to two kids (one girl and one boy). He’s not divorced though; his wife died tragically. The spiders got her.
And we’re back. It goes a little differently in this movie. Rack doesn’t play along with the case of mistaken identity to be chivalrous. He does it as a practical joke. He tells her the ladies’ room is out of order and that she’ll have to use the men’s room instead. It’s a real knee-slapper!
When they meet the second time, and his true identity is revealed, Rack asks her out to dinner. She says no, surprisingly. The next day he asks again and gets the same answer. His third attempt involves running her off the road in his truck, picking her up and throwing her in the passenger seat, stealing her car and driving them to dinner. I’m not even exaggerating that much.
Remember guys, when you can’t get a lady to say yes, try kidnapping. What could go wrong? At dinner, Rack raises a toast to women’s lib and Diane toasts Gary Cooper. I think they are both being sarcastic.
Diane And The Spider
Quick aside number 2: Diane is involved in one of the most pointless scenes that I can remember in any movie. She arrives at her cabin and turns on the shower. You might be imagining a scene where spiders swarm her in the shower when she is at her most vulnerable, but we don’t get that. Alternatively, you might be imagining a gratuitous nude scene, but we don’t get that either because the camera pans away.
While she is showering offscreen, a single spider appears on her dresser and crawls into the drawer. After her shower (still no nudity I’m afraid), she opens the drawer. You might be imagining that a jump scare is coming, but instead, she sees it, picks it up, pets it, calls it beautiful and carries it outside.
It doesn’t even try to bite her. And that’s the scene. Any sense of dread they are trying to convey is immediately undone when she starts treating the spider like a cat.
Anyway, having finally landed his gal, Rack takes Diane to meet his brother’s wife to rub her nose in it. He asks Terry whether it is okay to date her. She says yes (what else is she going to say?) but gets upset and runs off.
I don’t think he handles the situation very well, and to his credit he realises it. It seems that this love triangle storyline is far from over. Except it is, because the next time we see her, Terry is killed (by spiders. You probably guessed).
Enter The Mayor, We’re Saved!
The characters find a spider hill on Walter’s farm and burn it, but then they find another 30 hills, all full of spiders. Here’s where the mayor steps in. Mayors only exist in movies to provide an obstacle to our heroes. They never help. They are always incompetent, slimy bureaucrats who either deny that there’s a problem, which leads to disaster or bungle a response to the problem, which leads to disaster.
However, in this movie, I have a degree of sympathy for the mayor. He doesn’t deny the existence of the problem. He can’t really because he’s knee-deep in spiders. He implements a decisive response, which is indeed bungled, but not by him.
His plan is to spray the spiders with…wait for it…DDT! Diane calls him stupid but when he asks her how else they are going to kill them, she suggests their natural predators, birds and rats, which is REALLY stupid. If their natural predators could do the job, they wouldn’t have a spider problem, would they?
I’m starting to think Diane isn’t a real scientist at all. She’s the one that posited the DDT theory in the first place simply because the thought popped into her mind, and she didn’t bother to scrutinise whether or not it was a brain fart. With no viable alternative to the Sheriff’s plan, I think he makes the right call. And anyway, there’s a county fair coming up and he can’t have a bunch of spiders ruining it.
Narrator voice: ‘The spiders ruined it.’
Crop Duster Shenanigans
The DDT is deployed by a guy in a crop duster. We get a couple of minutes of excellent aerial shots as he flies about and loop-de-loops for no reason, probably dousing himself with DDT in the process. But guess who has stowed away in the cockpit? Okay you guessed, good for you.
Suddenly, there are spiders all over him. He emits an amazing blood-curdling scream but does very little to remove them. This is a feature of the second half of the movie. Characters should just be able to jiggle around a bit and shake the spiders off, but they don’t. Or is it that they can’t? Perhaps this is another one of the spiders’ new abilities: sticky legs. Or stickier legs. They’re probably already sticky to some degree. They crawl up walls.
I noticed another superpower too – the ability to appear out of nowhere in large numbers. There’s no way that many spiders could go unnoticed in the tiny cockpit of a biplane, unless they can teleport.
Zombie teleporting spiders with stickier legs than normal. No way DDT can do all that. There’s only one thing that can: aliens. Stay with me. Aliens injected the spiders with super serum and let them loose on the human population as phase one of their invasion. It’s all so obvious.
Dusty Crophopper crashes and burns, but not before dousing the whole town with poisonous spray. Rack and Diane warned the mayor that this could happen, but what can they do? They’re just two American kids doin’ the best that they can.
It’s okay though, because DDT is never mentioned again for the rest of the movie. It’s odd that they set up the poisoning of the town as a big plot point and then did nothing with it.
Worst County Fair Ever
Act 3 picks up the pace but I’m confused by the time frame. Before deploying the crop duster, the mayor says the County Fair is in a couple of weeks. Shortly after the crash – it is the same day because they are wearing the same clothes – the County Fair is in full swing, but with a few surprise guests. You’ll never guess who.
Okay, I’m going to stop asking these questions because the answer is always ‘spiders.’
It’s another of those teleporting moments. There’s no other way to explain how thousands of slow-moving tarantulas manage to take everyone by surprise and overrun the fair, unless they can fly or the aliens dropped them from their spaceship (sorry, I think my theories are getting out of hand. Forget I ever mentioned aliens, zombies, teleportation, or anything really).
People are sitting dead at picnic tables covered in web. Vehicles are overtured. The rest of the population is screaming and running around like lunatics with extra sticky spiders all over them. One lady has a live tarantula on her butt. I wonder how many takes that took to shoot.
The mayor is infested and gets run over by a car as well, just in case there is any doubt about his fate. The Sheriff drives through it all in his cop car until a water tower falls on him. It’s spectacular.
Back To Rack
Rack and Diane don’t attend the County Fair. For them, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. After rescuing Rack’s niece, Julie, and leaving Terry for the spiders (she deserved better), they hole up in the lodge where Diane is staying.
The last act is effective, with spiders infiltrating the lodge in different ways, including down the chimney. This is the first example of the ‘worst Christmas ever’ trope that pops up quite frequently in spider movies. For your shared Universe fans, spiders coming down the chimney will later feature in Ice spiders, Itsy Bitsy and Lavalantula.
There’s a spot of teleporting as well, such as when the spiders appear on Julie’s bed, but it mostly makes sense. Diane recommends using chemical extinguishers to kill the spiders, so using chemicals is okay with her now. Good to know.
These scenes are creepy because the spiders are very real, and very numerous. They even manage to cut the power to the lodge, which either speaks to great intelligence or blind luck (they are crawling all over the fuse box).
Rack enters the basement and bravely swaps out the fuse while batting away spiders. But then a window breaks and dozens of them land on him. Again, he doesn’t try too hard to shake them off (stickier legs than normal). He gets bitten on the cheek but Diane gives him something to neutralise the venom. She’s been keeping that one quiet.
Matte Painting Or Magic Eye Picture?
The end is the best part of the movie and is surprisingly bleak. The next day they wake up and tune into the radio. It appears to be a normal broadcast with no mention of the spider apocalypse. They remove the boards from one of the windows and look outside. The final shot pans out to reveal the entire town engulfed in spider web. Like…all of it.
The matte painting could have been better, but I like the idea. I always wondered how the world wide web was created (I’ll get my coat).
There is an IMDB entry for Kingdom of the Spiders II 3-D (Roman numerals, so you know it’s serious). A poster and slug line also exist: ‘This time they’re angry.’ Do you mean they weren’t the last time? Alas, it is categorized as ‘in development’ and doesn’t look like it will ever get made. Rack and Diane will have to wait it out in that lodge a while longer.
If they do decide to make it, I’ve got an idea for the plot. The title Kingdom of the Spiders suggests the existence of a monarch spider, most likely a queen rather than a king. I’m betting that the queen is bigger than the rest, perhaps even giant, and that’s what the sequel should be about.
Here’s my pitch: Arizona state officials realise they have lost contact with the town and send in marines to investigate. They discover a single survivor, a young girl called Julie. The marines enter the spiders’ nest to locate the rest of the town’s people, only to find them dead. The marines are ambushed by the spiders and most of them are killed.
They request evacuation via helicopter but it crashes when spiders get onboard. The survivors are attacked by the spiders and Julie is kidnapped. One of the marines, a woman who has developed a maternal bond with the girl (let’s just call her Helen Shipley), re-enters the nest and rescues her. Together they stumble upon the giant queen spider for a final battle, before the town is nuked from orbit and they escape but wait a minute, the queen has stowed away on their helicopter and Shipley has to fight it off with a forklift. Call me Hollywood, let’s do a deal.
Rating: 7 spider legs out of 8.