Who doesn’t love spiders? Well, most people actually. They are hairy, they run fast and movies always paint them in a negative light. One of our Outposters has been reviewing some Giant Spider Movies and he’s sent in another one.
The Giant Spider Invasion
I have fast-forwarded 15 years from my last giant spider movie, Horrors of Spider Island (1960), to a true classic of the genre: The Giant Spider Invasion!
The time jump doesn’t mean I’ve skipped a bunch of giant spider movies that were made in between because there were none. My research uncovered at least a dozen movies made in the 1960s that featured giant spiders, but none in which they were the main plot/antagonist of the movie.
For that reason, they don’t count. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King features a giant spider, but that doesn’t make it a giant spider movie.
I’ve come up with acronyms to describe the difference:
- Original, real giant-ass spider movie (or ORGASM for short).
- Relatively accidental/incidental spider movie (or RACISM for short).
On second thoughts, let’s go with GASM and ISM to avoid confusion and controversy.
The good news is that giant-ass spider movies made their triumphant return in the 1970s. As we will see, it truly was the golden age of giant (and regular-sized) spider movies. I have some absolute belters to review, but we’ll start with The Giant Spider Invasion.
The Main Feature
This movie features a spider that makes Jaws look like a goldfish, according to the Sheriff. He managed to name-drop a movie that came out the same year, which I thought was impressive.
The spider he is referring to is no plus-sized spider or even a family-sized spider (please bear with me, I am still working on my sizeable spider sizing system). This is a gigantic thirty-foot bad boy.
None of that CGI garbage either. This thing’s a papier-mâché parade float mounted on a Volkswagen Beetle with puppeteers working the legs. Now THAT’S how you do it.
The opening titles play over a background of stars with 1970s psychedelic Star Trek music on the soundtrack, which is a clue to the spiders’ origins. We then see a comet heading towards Earth, which crashes in a farmer’s field in small-town America (hey, where else?). Spiders emerge from football-sized eggs. So far, so straightforward.
Black Holes Spiders
But later on, scientists start talking nonsense that even they don’t seem to understand. I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll try to sum it up: the comet is a miniature black hole from another universe and is spitting out monsters from another dimension. We only see spiders, but the franchise potential seems limitless.
The reason for this black hole complication appears to be plot convenience. A common problem with monster movies is that they often have hundreds of the little bastards running around, and you need to wrap the movie up somehow. A plot device is required so that the heroes don’t have to track down every single one to save the day.
Enter the black hole. The spiders feed off its energy, so the heroes can kill them all by doing one thing: sealing it off with a neutron initiator, obviously.
Science is the Answer
The two scientists are Dr Vance, from NASA, and Dr Langer, a female astronomer. Dr Vance has a lot of trouble figuring out the concept of female doctors. He finds Dr Langer in an observatory, wearing a long white scientist coat, working on a giant telescope and she announces herself as Jenny LANGER. So of course, Vance assumes that Dr Langer is her father.
When she says no, he asks if Dr Langer is her husband. When she says no again, he asks if Dr Langer is her brother. She finally puts him out of his misery but even then, he says ‘oh?’ as if he doesn’t quite believe it. I was disappointed because I wanted her to keep it going and see how many male relatives he could name.
In a weird way, I don’t think this scene is intended to be sexist. I see it as a clumsy 1970s attempt at being progressive. It highlights that female scientists exist and are knowledgeable (and also adept at handling casual sexism in the workplace, but that part was probably accidental).
Dr Vance doesn’t disapprove of her. She’s a novelty, that’s all and treats her as an equal for the rest of the movie. They get on well and she calls him ‘Vance,’ which seems like a subtle shade to me. I’m sure he didn’t spend six years in medical school to be called Vance.
Men!
Speaking of chauvinism, meet Dan Kester, the farmer whose field the comet/black hole/inter-dimensional portal thing lands in. He looks like a middle-aged Colonel Sanders but somehow has a hot wife with great hair (Ev) whom he compliments endlessly (“You wouldn’t know rabbit turds from rice krispies”).
Dan pretends to attend church but is really banging a local barmaid. Ev has a drinking problem but that might have something to do with a throwaway line about them having a baby that died. That’s some dark shit, but it’s never mentioned again. I had to rewind the movie to check that I heard it right.
Dan appears to have inherited the farm from Ev’s father but he tells her that he alone owns it. He also pervs over Ev’s younger sister, Terry, at every opportunity. When he finds out that she has a boyfriend, he threatens to pull down her pants and spank her and then chases her around the kitchen table in his underwear as banjo music plays on the soundtrack. No, really.
Later on, Dan says to Terry ‘Maybe I should have married you instead of her,’ and she reminds him that she was eleven at the time. He doesn’t even blink, he just looks her up and down and says ‘You’re not eleven now’ and tries to bribe her for sexual favours with a diamond (the interior of the spider’s eggs is made of them. I’ll get back to the spiders a minute, I’m talking about how awesomely awful Dan is).
Dan, Dan, what a man!
What else does he do? Oh yeah, he plans to sell the rotten meat from his mutilated cows to the local butcher (the spider killed them – spoiler). He also buries the body of a motorcyclist killed on his land (also spider) rather than tell the sheriff in case he finds his diamonds.
In fact, for the first hour, Dan seems to be the main character, imperfect as he is. He hyper-spaces from scene to scene (in the field, in his house, at his mistress’, at a diamond dealer) and is so busy trying to get into his sister-in-law’s pants that he doesn’t notice that his wife is missing (also spider).
Ev’s death scene – she runs into a barn and a sofa-sized spider flops on top of her like an old blanket falling out of an attic – seemed familiar to me. I suddenly realised that I had seen half of this movie as a young child (it was the 80s and my parents and no boundaries, what can I tell you?).
Who’s in charge?
I only remembered two things clearly: the spider in the barn and another death scene that followed it. The second featuring an old man in a field who sits down for a rest and a giant spider appears from behind a ridge and eats him.
I remember being confused because I thought he was the main character, but they killed him off halfway through. I also remember being concerned because who was going to kill the spider now? Plus, he was a kindly old man who didn’t deserve to go out like that.
That’s right, it turns out that the ‘old man’ I remembered was Dan! The sadistic pervert stuff just passed straight over my head as a child (thankfully, I guess).
There is no better lesson on the limitations of human memory than when you watch a movie that you haven’t seen since your childhood but think you remember. Even though the broad strokes are there, the look and feel are completely different, and in most cases better than the actual movie.
In my faulty memory banks, Dan’s death scene had a parched desert setting rather than a green field and the spider effects were creepy stop motion, rather than a fucking muppet. Maybe my brain is just great at post-production.
Didn’t see what spider?
I’m getting ahead of myself. Before Ev and Dan are killed, they drop one of the spider eggs on their kitchen floor. It breaks open and a tarantula crawls out but THEY DON’T NOTICE IT SOMEHOW.
The next time we see Ev, she is holding a fly swat and looks nervous. She tells Dan that there are spiders in the house. In fact, one of them is right behind them on the wall in the same shot and they miss that one as well, even when it crawls into a blender and gets whizzed up when she makes Bloody Marys. She does notice that the taste is a bit off though.
I found it strange that the first spider sighting takes place off-screen. I found it even stranger that Ev thinks a fly swat will be effective against a spider the size of her hand. But strangest of all is the fact that she was still sitting in her kitchen after seeing one. I would have emigrated to Antarctica.
Anyway, I quite like how the spider levels up in size during Ev and Dan’s death scenes, culminating in our first proper look at the parade float spider when it swallows Dan whole.
Big Daddy Spider
The movie picks up pace once Big Daddy turns up, after a slow first 50 minutes. The best death of the movie features Dan’s cousin, an equally perverted diamond dealer who turns up at Terry’s house just as she gets out of the shower. She rejects his advances and the camera unnecessarily zooms in on her arse as she walks away.
Jesus, even the camera guys are at it. At least make it look like you’re zooming in on something else. How hard is it to put a fake spider on her butt and act like that’s the reason for the close-up?
Dan 2 drives off but one of the tarantulas catches a lift and wants to ride up front with him. He screams and drives into a giant web. Big Daddy lands on the car and sticks his legs through the window.
Dan 2 drives away but then remembers his passenger, screams again, loses control of the car and crashes into a gas station, taking out the pumps before embedding the car in the building.
He exits the car and tries to break the gas station window to escape instead of walking through the hole he just created with the car, but the whole place blows up, killing him. That’s pretty careless if you ask me.
At this point, Vance and Langer arrive at the farm (remember them?), trying to trace the ‘black hole.’ It’s weird how their paths never cross with Dan or his family. The two storylines play out alongside each other, with only the sheriff crossing between the two.
After Big Daddy destroys Dan’s house with Terry still in it (and still in her underwear), their story is done.
To the rescue
Terry’s boyfriend rescues her and we never hear from them again. All we get is one disturbing shot of her on a hospital trolley, being slowly wheeled down a long corridor towards the camera by a nurse. I assume she’s alive but the whole scene is just creepy. I like it.
The last act involves Big Daddy turning up at the town’s summer fair, staging a pitch invasion at a baseball game and then taking a stroll down main street while being attacked by an angry mob. Those small-town folks sure hate outsiders. It’s a brief but cool scene, and the one that reminded me of Jaws somehow even before the Sheriff made the comparison.
After this, the spider heads back to the farm but the scientists seal off the black hole with the neutron initiator (duh, obviously) and Big Daddy melts into a pool of goo. I presume the smaller spiders die as well but we don’t see that part.
I’m glad I finally got to see the second half of this movie. It is a true Giant Spider classic, with enough strangeness and incompetence to keep it fun and interesting, as long as you know what you’re getting into.
Rating: 6 spider legs out of 8.
Hawkzino