Back for more on his quest to watch every movie with a giant spider in it, Hawkzino has written up another review. This time, it’s the 70s classic, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo. You can read all of the other spider movies from Hawkzino, if you’re not afraid of spiders that is.
Tarantula’s: Deadly Cargo
Back to ’77 again – the year of the spider (I just made that up but I’m hoping to make it stick). This is the second spider movie of that year, plus it also ends the trilogy of unrelated 1970s Tarantula movies, after Kiss of the Tarantula and Kingdom of the Spiders.
Before I begin, I must mention the 70s porno/American game show mash-up music that plays over the opening credits. I seriously thought I had downloaded the wrong movie. It’s got saxophones and everything.
Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo begins in Ecuador, where two American smugglers and some locals are loading 9300lbs of coffee beans onto a plane. That’s quite a specific number which has no relevance. I’m not sure why I mentioned it.
Men are seen shovelling coffee into sacks from the back of a truck. Couldn’t they have done that at the farm instead of on the runway? Anyway, nobody seems to notice that another cargo is getting mixed up with the coffee. A deadly cargo. Tarantulas. Which aren’t deadly.
The Wandering Spider Controversy
This is explained later in the movie when a spider expert says they aren’t tarantulas, but Brazilian wandering spiders. So why call the movie TARANTULAS: The Deadly Cargo? Did ‘Brazilian Wandering Spiders: The Deadly Cargo’ not fit on the poster?
It is a bit of a mouthful, to be fair, but I think the real reason is celebrity. Tarantulas are well known and as any Hollywood Executive will tell you, you’ve got to have a star to help sell your movie. Wandering spiders are far deadlier than tarantulas in real life, but that doesn’t put bums on seats, does it?
The spiders’ venomousness (I’m amazed that’s an actual word) is still exaggerated, but that’s fine, it’s a movie. You’ve got to allow some creative licence. We can’t have an hour-and-a-half of people saying ‘ouch’ and then carrying on with their lives after being bitten (or being scared to death – that would be really stupid).
In a final twist, the actual spiders used in this movie are…tarantulas! Some of the characters even mistake them for tarantulas, which is understandable because they are, but only in real life, not the movie. In the movie they are wandering spiders who are mistaken for tarantulas, being portrayed by tarantulas.
It’s like that time in Ocean’s 12 when Julia Roberts’ character is mistaken for Julia Roberts.
Spiders on a Plane
Back to the plane. The smugglers don’t have enough money to pay the local federal export tax (more like extorsion tax, am I right?) so they engage in a spot of people smuggling to get the cash.
If I’ve got this right, we now have the regular cargo (coffee), the deadly cargo (tarantulas) and the human cargo (three smuggled guys). There may be some emotional baggage too, but the movie doesn’t have time for that.
On the plane ride to the USA, the human cargo meets the deadly cargo while lying on the regular cargo. One of them is sick but his friends don’t seem to know how it happened. Didn’t he say anything?
This seems to be a recurring theme in this film: someone getting bitten and then not shouting ‘Fucking hell, a spider just bit me!’ That would be the natural reaction to such an event, but instead we get a bit of thrashing about and sometimes a little unintelligible yelling.
Perhaps the venom paralyses the vocal cords. Yes, let’s go with that. I’m over here closing plot holes in decades-old made-for-television spider movies. Hey, it ain’t much, but it ain’t nothin’.
A second passenger is bitten. At least he notices it, but the pilots ignore him banging on the cockpit door because they’re busy navigating the plane through a storm. Once through the storm, an engine fails just outside a small town surrounded by an orange grove.
As they are about to land, those pesky spiders invade the cockpit, causing them to take off again for some reason (perhaps the spiders wrestled the controls away from the pilots). They fly around erratically before crashlanding in a field.
Enter the townsfolk
The main character is an aviator named Joe, who intercepts the mayday call at the local airport and then rallies the town to the crash site. This includes the doctor (reliable but old), the chief of police (an ineffective nonentity cuckold), the fire chief (the tough, responsible one) and the mayor/CEO of the orange grove (a giant douche, obviously).
It’s a nice sequence that introduces the main players in town. I was impressed, and it raised my expectations to unrealistic levels that the rest of the movie couldn’t live up to. Damn you, hope!
Joe arrives at the crash site with his girlfriend Cindy and her little brother Matthew. The rescue doesn’t go well. The fire department arrives in what looks like a 1930s fire truck. They can’t get into the plane so the fire chief starts whacking the fuselage with an axe.
They notice a fuel leak, so the townsfolk dig a trench to carry the fuel away from the plane. But then some random guy on a stunt bike rides in from nowhere at ludicrous speed hits the trench and causes the fuel to ignite and the plane to explode. But hey, it wouldn’t be a Tarantula movie without some kind of calamity.
The good news is they manage to extinguish the fire and inadvertently save the tarantulas (yay).
It’s a sin!
I like the sin factor that exists in this movie – karma dished out to folks who deserve it. Firstly, we have the guy who loots the plane for coffee and gets bitten by a spider and dies for his thieving ways. Because he doesn’t shout ‘fucking hell, a spider just bit me!’ the doctor doesn’t know what caused it. Given the similar condition of the smuggled men, he thinks it’s a contagious disease.
Next, Matthew (Cindy’s little brother) taunts a spider by hitting it with a stick and calling it ugly and stuff. Later, he gets bitten by a spider and dies for his bullying ways. Oh well, he probably would have grown up to be a serial killer anyway.
Next, the police chief’s wife, who is having an affair with her boss, gets bitten by a spider at a picnic and dies for her adulterous ways. Then her lover, Rich, also gets his comeuppance later in the movie, but it isn’t spider-related. I’ll come back to that.
A girl at a school finds a spider near the picnic site and her teacher puts it in a jar. When the doctor sees it, he realises that spiders might have caused all the deaths. He tells the mayor, who is very reasonable about it and organises a rapid and effective response.
Only kidding – have you seen mayors in movies? He threatens to throw the doctor in jail if he mentions spiders to anyone because it will scare his workers and jeopardise his orange harvest. Not to get political, but it’s a literal case of ‘orange man bad.’
The mayor uses a walking stick too, so you know he’s a wrong’un.
The fire chief shuts them down anyway when the bodies pile up and it becomes clear that the spiders are heading for the orange factory.
The wasp contingency
Wandering spiders are also known as banana spiders, but not because they like bananas, but they eat the insects that are attracted to the fruit. The orange farm is insecticide-free, a condition of their contract with the buyer. It must be an insect metropolis, but it’s about to become spider town.
There are hundreds of the little bastards running about at this point. Where the heck did they all come from? They haven’t had time to breed. I bet if you removed all the spiders from that 9300lbs of coffee, you would have just about enough for a double espresso.
The townsfolk have to find a way to round up the spiders without dousing them with poison because it will ruin their orange harvest. Their solution: wasps.
As I explained in my review of Tarantula (1955), wasps are the natural predators of tarantulas. Their buzzing sound reduces the spiders to a catatonic state.
The plan is to lure the tarantulas to a warehouse by cutting up loads of oranges, then play the sound of wasps over a loudspeaker to paralyse them. They test it on the tarantula they captured in a jar earlier, but it doesn’t work. Joe solves this by channelling his inner DJ (DJ Joey Joe Joe Waspy Boi) and uttering phrases such as ‘punch the bass up all the way’ and ‘drop the treble,’ presumably because he’s all about that bass. It works!
Just one problem with this: wasps are the enemies of TARANTULAS, not wandering spiders. The moviemakers seem to have forgotten which species of spider featured in their own damn movie. This could have been avoided if they just made them tarantulas. We would have forgiven them for exaggerating their venomousness (great word, I had to use it again). Talk about overcomplicating it.
We are then treated to SEVEN-AND-A-HALF MINUTES OF CONTINUOUS FUCKING WASP BUZZING. Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. It drones on and on while the heroes enter the factory warehouse and gather up the catatonic spiders. I might be part tarantula because I too ended up in a catatonic state.
Rich roll
But there’s a twist! Remember the chief’s wife’s lover, Rich? It turns out that he isn’t a very nice guy. He owns half the warehouse and tries to burn it down to collect the insurance money. He is punished for his adulterous, arsonist and fraudulent ways when he innocuously trips on a sloped roof, rolls down and lands on an electrical substation. It fries him and shorts out the power, but at least the wasp noise stops. Thanks, Rich. All is forgiven.
The funniest part is that he rolls down the roof at such a slow speed that you can see him forcing himself to keep going. He has practically no momentum and could easily have stopped.
There are parallels between Rich’s death and his lover’s death earlier in the movie. After being bitten, the police chief’s wife rolls down a hill, but has her arms crossed across her chest the whole time. It’s hilarious, but she commits to it. She builds real momentum and smacks her head against the trunk of a tree. For real.
The movie ends strangely. The spiders come back to life after the power shorts out, and our heroes flee the warehouse. Joe and Cindy walk away and everyone smiles at them. The fire chief says ‘I guess our little town will limp along for another year,’ as if they’ve achieved something, but they haven’t gotten rid of the spiders yet. Everyone acts like it’s over but it’s not.
Shortly after, the power comes back on (as does the wasp buzzing – yay). The townsfolk file back into the warehouse to finish the job of rounding up the spiders, but Joe and Cindy are off the clock apparently. They walk away arm-in-arm while the porno music starts up again. It raised my hopes for the following scene, but all we get is a montage of the orange factory back in operation. We’ll just assume the spiders are dead then.
Welfare check on the police chief
The montage at the end includes a random shot of the police chief sitting alone in his room with the curtains drawn, drinking, and it’s playing on my mind. Why would they include this? He wasn’t even a significant character.
I wonder whether he was victim of not only infidelity, but infidediting. I just made that word up, but it describes a character who has been betrayed by a movie’s editor by being largely cut out of the film (like Matthew Fox in World War Z).
The chief is seen at the crash site, and later when he confronts his wife’s lover, but we only see him once more after that. After Rich suggests to the fire chief that they should burn down the warehouse, we see the chief limping towards him menacingly.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with his leg – perhaps he hurt it when one of his deleted scenes hit the cutting room floor. Anyway, it seems like there’s going to be a confrontation but it cuts away. We don’t see him again until the montage at the end.
I’m not sure what to make of it but I hope he’s okay. Someone should tell him about Rich’s roof incident. That will cheer him up.
Rating: 4 spider legs out of 8.