More from Hawkkzino and his epic Giant Spider Movie Marathon, the guy is a machine. This time is a new one for me, Kiss of the Tarantula (1975).
Kiss Of The Tarantula (1975)
Today we begin the holy trinity of mid-1970s regular-sized tarantula movies, which are Kiss of the Tarantula (1975), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) and Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (also 1977). So many Tarantula movies in a short space of time. It appears to be one of those inexplicable Hollywood fads, like when they made two Volcano movies in the same year (for the record, Dante’s Peak was better than Volcano).
Kiss of the Tarantula was called ‘Shudder’ when released in the UK, which sucks. Kiss of the Tarantula is my new favourite spider movie title because it’s creepy. I don’t want a tarantula to kiss me. Don’t put that thought in my head!
We start with a young girl called Susan playing with a spider in her garden as creepy music plays that sounds like someone opened a jewellery box with a rotating ballerina inside. Her mother, Martha, sees this and goes ABSOLUTELY APESHIT. She screams at her, beats the spider with a broom and shakes her daughter until something comes loose, it looks like (her facial expression goes all weird).
It’s a massive overreaction by Martha to natural childhood curiosity, and you wonder what effect it might have on poor Susan (stay tuned, you might find out).
Cut to several years later and eleven-year-old Susan is playing with spiders again. Her mother sees this and…well, let’s just say she hasn’t learned from her mistakes. Susan runs crying to her father, John, who is a mortician. They live in a big house that is also a funeral parlour and her father is working on a body (typical stable family environment).
John seems nice and comforts her, but then Martha enters and starts screaming that she hates him, hates her daughter and hates living in a mortuary. Reading between the lines, I get the sense that she’s not entirely happy with how her life’s going. I’m good at picking up on women’s subtle clues.
The Woes Of Martha
Martha is much happier in the next scene, where we find out she’s having an affair with John’s police chief brother, Walter, who is almost two feet shorter than his ‘brother’ and looks nothing like him. Superb casting, guys.
Susan overhears Martha plotting with Walter to kill John, so she fetches a tarantula from her basement, as you do, and places it on Martha as she sleeps. The smirk on her face makes it seem like she’s pranking her mother. After all, it’s only a tarantula. It may look scary but its bite is no worse than a bee sting. It can’t harm her.
Oh, I know what you’re going to say: tarantulas are more dangerous in the movies. In Kingdom of the Spiders and Tarantulas: the Deadly Cargo, they are one-hit-kill super predators (spoiler). They’ll just use the same trope here, right? WRONG!
Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. The tarantulas in this movie have not been rendered more venomous by pesticides or any other inexplicable plot devices. They’re normal tarantulas, but they do have a superpower of sorts: the power to scare people TO DEATH!
That’s right, Martha wakes up, notices the tarantula and dies of a heart attack.
I’m guessing it’s her extreme arachnophobia combined with being constantly stressed. I can buy it. Later, it transpires that Susan was trying to kill her, to stop her from killing John. It seems like a long shot to pin your hopes on a heart attack. What if she didn’t die? Oh wait, I forgot…plot.
If plot armour describes a situation where a character is protected by the writers despite them facing certain death, then this would be the opposite of that (plot poison?).
Quick aside: at Martha’s funeral, the jewellery box music gives way to a soundtrack that sounds like a cutscene from Super Mario Bros 3 (8-bit synthesizer heaven). It’s easy to forget that this was a new technology at the time. Who knew that a spider movie could be so cutting-edge?
Susan’s New Kink
We skip over a few years and Susan is now in her late teens. Without her mother around to hold her back, she’s established a tarantula petting zoo in the basement of her house. She keeps a dozen of them in cages but likes to take them out and stroke them.
She gives them human names like Jennifer, and this is the sort of thing that can happen when you brutalise your children for engaging in innocent behaviour: you end up damaging them so much that you turn their harmless fascination into some kind of kink.
If Martha had just let Susan play with that spider at the start, she would have gotten it out of her system in half an hour. Instead, we have to sit through a weird scene where Susan enters her bedroom, unbuttons her top, lies down on the bed, picks up a tarantula and HOLY CRAP where is this going?
The above shot wasn’t in the version of the movie I watched. She was still holding it in her hand when the phone rang. It was clear she was about to do something secret with it.
Susan’s date with her spider is interrupted by a group of drunk revellers who arrive at the mortuary in a VW Beetle (3 guys and 2 girls, so someone’s not getting any later). The guys break in to steal a coffin as a Halloween prank, but how are they going to transport it in a VW Beetle? I was impressed they fit five people inside it.
Anyway, Susan interrupts them and they terrorise her. Foregoing the coffin plan, they explore the basement and discover the tarantula farm. They open one of the cages and stamp on the spider when it falls to the floor. I think it was Jennifer (RIP).
The Legendary Drive-In Calamity
In the next scene, the VW Beetle crew arrives at a drive-in cinema, minus the gooseberry. The two couples engage in a heavy make-out session. They’re so engrossed that they fail to notice when Susan opens the door and lets the tarantulas in.
I’m assuming that Susan tailed them to the drive-in and planned the attack, but it could be luck. Perhaps she has a regular date night with her spiders (I wouldn’t put it past her) and simply took advantage of the opportunity when it arose. She transports them in what looks like a shortbread tin. You wouldn’t want to accidentally open that at Christmas.
Either way, the tarantulas are now in the car, crawling all over the couples as they kiss. It takes a while for them to notice (perhaps they thought the tickling was their partner getting handsy), but eventually, they catch on.
What follows is one of the most idiotic and unintentionally funny scenes I have ever witnessed; four idiots screaming their heads off while scrambling over each other to escape the car and accidentally killing themselves. I’m not kidding. Nobody gets bitten – remember these are regular tarantulas – but three of the car’s four occupants still manage to die before they can exit a CAR.
You may be wondering how this is possible, so let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up:
- The girl in the front, whose window is already half open, doesn’t wind it down further so she can dive out, and nor does she open the door from the inside. She tries to open it from the outside by stretching her arm out the half-open window but can’t reach the handle. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, who for some reason is laying horizontally across both front seats, kicking and screaming like a toddler having his nappy changed, boots her so hard he puts her head through the window. She bleeds out.
- The driver, now upright again somehow, has his neck squeezed against the steering wheel by the two idiots in the back trying to push past him and he suffocates to death. The car doesn’t have back doors, so the pushing makes sense. The rest of it doesn’t. How is it possible to suffocate that way?
- It gets better. The guy in the back cannot open the driver’s door the whole way because it is pushing up against the drive-in’s speakers. He squeezes part-way out before his neck gets caught between the door frame and the car. He also suffocates. He could have just turned his head to the left.
- The remaining girl survives, but she enters a catatonic stupor that lasts for the rest of the movie.
Susan watches this unfold with a horrified look that suggests she wasn’t trying to kill them, only scare them, which makes sense. I mean…who could have predicted that debacle? She retrieves her spiders. They crawl back into their tin voluntarily even though tarantulas cannot be trained in real life. Perhaps she has a psychic connection with them (yeah, that’ll be it).
Girls Need A Father Figure
You may be wondering where Susan’s father is during all this. Well, her daddy works in porno now that mommy’s not around. Not really, that’s a Guns N’ Roses lyric. He’s campaigning for his brother, who is running for Attorney General.
Attorney General of what? America? I don’t know how it works, but I thought you needed to be an attorney to run for Attorney General, not a police chief. Also, shouldn’t Walter be doing his own campaigning?
Walter is still working his day job, investigating the drive-in deaths. He’s also a total creep who keeps making suggestive remarks to Susan (‘you’re as lovely as your mother’ and ‘you’ll make a fine wife for someone’ are notable highlights). I see some spider-related karma in his future.
The Many Sides Of Susan
Even though Susan didn’t intend to kill the guy who killed Jennifer, she dunks on him by visiting his open coffin (which is only downstairs, so it’s quite convenient). She takes Jennifer’s spider corpse with her and places it in his coffin, so they can spend eternity together.
Susan then visits the catatonic girl and apologises to her. The girl had nothing to do with killing Jennifer, so it makes sense. I love that we see both sides of Susan’s character.
Unfortunately, another girl called Nancy overhears her and realises Susan had something to do with the three deaths. Nancy informs Bo, the other guy who broke into her house (the fifth wheel). Not having a girlfriend meant he wasn’t in the car on that fateful night, which saved him from getting his neck caught under the clutch pedal or some shit and suffocating to death.
Bo fakes an apology to Susan to get in her good books, invites her out and takes her to…the drive-in! Nice move. She’s not happy, but he calms her down by asking what movies she likes. She says she likes nice movies with happy endings, and she seems to be letting her guard down when he ambushes her about killing his friends.
I’ve got a feeling that all this trauma is going to send Susan over the edge at some point. We’re edging closer to ‘Carrie’ territory, which I feel is an appropriate comparison (pretty-but-weird girl gets bullied and gains revenge on her tormentors by misusing her superpowers/spiders).
I’m being slightly unfair on this movie because it pre-dates Carrie by a year, although the book version of Carrie came out a year earlier. The similarity isn’t necessarily intentional. It could be one of those inexplicable Hollywood fads, like when they made two asteroid movies in the same year (for the record, Armageddon was better than Deep Impact).
By the way, Susan escapes Bo by opening the car door and getting out. It’s that easy.
The Arachnid Dirty Dozen Strikes Again
The next day, Bo is at work, crawling through shiny air ducts like John McClane fleeing terrorists on Christmas Eve. He’s making repairs of some kind but we all know it’s just an excuse to place him in a confined space with spiders.
Sure enough, Susan arrives with her box of delights and into the air ducts they go, twelve of them in total (I counted). Told from the spiders’ point-of-view, this movie is The Dirty Dozen.
You know the drill by now: the spiders arrive, and the victim screams a lot, shouting ‘I’ve got to get out!’ while making zero attempts to get out. There are multiple shots of spiders crawling over him, and then he dies. Once again, not bitten, just scared to death.
Walter arrives to investigate and finds a detached spider’s leg on Bo’s body. It’s the first time I’ve seen a detached spider’s leg in a spider movie. It feels like it should happen more often than it does. It should have made the trope list ages ago.
Some good news: the catatonic girl is up and walking around again! Wait…no, sorry, she sees a small spider in her flowers and relapses. Never mind. The nurse informs Walter that she freaked out over a spider and he makes the connection with the detached leg. Now, who does he know with an unhealthy spider obsession and a motive to murder every victim so far?
If Walter is in any doubt, Nancy tells him directly that Susan killed Bo and the others (she’s the one who overheard Susan apologising earlier).
I wondered briefly if this lecherous, adulterous slimeball was meant to be the good guy. But it seems not though, because not only does he dismiss Nancy’s concerns. He attempts to blackmail Susan into fucking him in exchange for covering up her crimes.
But has Susan committed any crimes? I’m no lawyer, but all she did was release a few spiders. She can’t be held responsible for the town’s poor cardiovascular health or their penchant for auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Walter Goes All-In
Nancy overhears Walter’s blackmail attempt because she’s a professional eavesdropper, apparently. She’s staking out Susan’s home at night wearing a bright white jacket, presumably to uncover evidence of Susan’s guilt. But this new information, and the white jacket (mainly the jacket), puts her in a very dangerous situation when Walter spots her lurking in the bushes.
For all his faults, Walter isn’t stupid. Nancy has information on him. He’s running for Attorney General and can’t let his brother’s hard work on the campaign trail count for nothing. He decides to kill her.
What follows is a three-and-a-half-minute chase through the woods. By the end, it is broad dayligh,t and Walter and Nancy are still sprinting across uneven ground. You’ve got to admire that level of cardiovascular conditioning. Especially in a town with such a high rate of heart failure (insert vaccine joke here). Eventually, he catches and strangles her (another suffocation, yay).
For the finale, Walter returns to Susan’s house to take one last crack at her. He’s nothing if not persistent. He tries to convince Susan that he killed Nancy for her benefit. Susan knows Nancy is dead because she’s already seen her downstairs in a coffin, but she didn’t know Walter was the killer.
They struggle at the top of the stairs, and you know what that means: someone’s going for a tumble. Somehow Susan manages to shove Walter down the stairs despite him being twice her size.
Have you ever noticed how falling down the stairs in the movies is never a minor event? They don’t just pick themselves up and walk it off. It always results in death or paralysis. In this case, it’s the latter. Walter can’t move. What a perfect opportunity to bring out the spiders!
Spiderless Finale
But Susan doesn’t do that. The spiders are never seen again. The air duct scene was the Dirty Dozen’s final mission. It’s disappointing, but what we get instead is infinitely more horrifying. Susan drags good ol’ Uncle Walter to Nancy’s coffin and removes Nancy’s body using a hoist contraption with lifting straps. She uses the same hoist to lift Walter into the coffin and then puts Nancy on top. All the while Walter is begging for his life.
His voice is only cut off at the very end when she closes the airtight lid. The whole exercise takes seven-and-a-half-minutes of screentime. The length of the scene just increases the sense of horror. Susan appears impassive throughout and completes the job with calm diligence as Uncle Walter pleads in vain.
She’s finally snapped, guys. I knew it would happen. I don’t think she can be held responsible for the other deaths, but this one’s on her.
I love (but also hate) that the movie makes you sympathise with Walter at the end. Susan, who was a victim throughout, vanquishes her tormentor, so it should be a straightforward happy(ish) ending. But the specifics of that last scene threw me, so it still feels like the bad guy won.
Let’s settle this once and for all. There aren’t many good guys in this movie, other than John, but let’s see if I can work out with science who the real bad guy is, using the number of kills as a metric:
- Susan: 1 kill. The push down the stairs is self-defence, but burying her uncle with Nancy is pure murder, albeit with a huge dollop of poetic justice.
- Walter: 1 kill. Clear-cut murder of Nancy.
- Driver of VW Beetle: 1 kill. He stamps on Jennifer, the tarantula, but I doubt the charges would hold up in court.
- God: 2 kills. Martha and Bo, as far as we can tell, die from natural causes (heart failure), so we’ll blame God.
- VW Beetle: 3 kills. Those things are death traps.
So, there we have it. A car named after an insect is the villain in a spider movie. It even features on the poster (see above)!
In conclusion, this movie is an odd curiosity with wonderfully ridiculous spider scenes, random and interesting music and enough moral ambiguity to keep things interesting. The 1970s really was the golden age of spider movies.
Rating: 5 spider legs out of 8.