The Giant Spider Invasion (1975) Group 1/Sci-Fi-Horror RT: 84 minutes Rated PG (violence, gore, brief nudity) Director: Bill Rebane Screenplay: Robert Easton and Richard L. Huff Music: Bill Rebane Cinematography: Jack Willoughby Release date: October 24, 1975 (US) Cast: Steve Brodie, Barbara Hale, Alan Hale Jr., Leslie Parrish, Robert Easton, Kevin Brodie, Dianne Lee Hart, Bill Williams, Tain Bodkin, Paul Bentzen, Christina Schmidtmer, J. Stewart Taylor, William W. Gillett Jr. Box Office: $15M (US)
Rating: ***
You know a movie’s bad when it’s targeted by both RiffTrax and MST3K. Such is the case with The Giant Spider Invasion, a supposed horror movie so inept and so goofy, it wouldn’t even scare the biggest arachnophobe. Hell, the scariest thing in this movie isn’t even the eight-legged freaks that overrun the small rural Wisconsin town, but the human freak with an unnatural attraction to his underage sister-in-law. Thankfully, he becomes spider chow along with a lot of other folks.
The spider disaster begins when a large meteorite crashes on the property of Dan Kester (Easton, Pet Sematary Two) and his alcoholic wife Ev (Parrish, Crash!). When they go to investigate, they find a bunch of his cattle slaughtered and several geodes containing diamond-like gems. They also contain spiders of varying sizes. They’re the spawn of one giant mother of a spider. They proceed to kill and devour townspeople until a pair of scientists, Drs. Vance and Langer played by Steve Brodie (Out of the Past) and Barbara Hale (Perry Mason), can find a way to close off the interdimensional gateway through which they came to our planet. Apparently, it’s the only way to kill the space spiders.
When we’re not being subjected to a lot of scientific talk from the only intelligent lifeforms in The Giant Spider Invasion, we’re witnessing the stupidity and ignorance displayed by the others. The town sheriff (played by Skipper himself, Alan Hale Jr.) is particularly dumb. When Vance shows him a Geiger counter, he says, “We don’t have any geigers around here.” The Kesters are a nightmare couple. She’s a lush; he’s a creep who tells her things like “You’re so dumb you wouldn’t know rat turds from Rice Krispies.” He cheats on her every night with a local woman. He tries to seduce teenage sister-in-law Terry (Hart, The Pom Pom Girls) on several occasions. I guess perversion runs in his family since his sleazy cousin Billy (Bentzen, Invasion from Inner Earth) also makes lewd remarks about the girl.
Terry is going out with Dave (Kevin Brodie, The Night of the Grizzly), a young reporter for the local paper. He doesn’t get to do much other than save Terry from a spider attack. There’s also this fire and brimstone preacher (Bodkin) holding revival meetings in which he warns of the hellfire that will rain down on sinners. While he says this, the meteorite approaches. There’s also a friendly local bartender named Dutch played by Bill Williams (Hell’s Horizon) who was married to Barbara Hale in real life. I think that about covers the human characters in The Giant Spider Invasion.
As implied in my opening statement, The Giant Spider Invasion is a laugh riot. It can’t be taken seriously, not even for a second. I think that’s partly what director Bill Rebane (Monster-a-Go Go) has in mind with certain scenes and lines of dialogue. Take the scene where we first meet the sheriff. When Dave walks into his office, he refers to him as “little buddy”. This is obviously a reference to the show that made him famous, Gilligan’s Island. It’s my understanding that the two writers came at The Giant Spider Invasion with different approaches. Huff wanted to make a serious film while Easton went for a more comical tone. We can see how that turned out. Calling it uneven would be inaccurate since it’s impossible to take any of it seriously. It’s about a giant spider from space, for crying out loud! It’s not exactly Bergman, is it now?
The special effects are the epitome of cheap and cheesy. The outer space shots are clearly a backdrop with poorly rendered light streaks representing the meteorite’s slow descent to Earth. The landing is nothing more than a bad light show seen from a distance. The scenes set at NASA (where Vance is sent from) are stock footage. They keep using the same shots of nerdy scientific types staring at consoles. The giant spider is really a Volkswagen Beetle covered in black fur and fake legs. This explains why it leaves tread marks rather than spider tracks. However, the makers did a good job with the scenes of people being devoured by the giant spider. They’re nice and bloody, especially for a PG movie. Speaking of which, I was surprised to see a boob shot albeit a quick one.
Do I even need to tell you the acting in The Giant Spider Invasion is uniformly terrible? I would guess not. What I’ve already told you pretty much speaks to that. I’ve also given you samples of the dopey dialogue so no need to go there either.
Let me end by saying that The Giant Spider Invasion is a movie of supreme awfulness. That’s what’s so great about it. It thinks it’s a horror movie, but it’s really an unintentional comedy about idiots, geodes and giant space spider. It’s a movie to be made fun of with its bad (oh, so BAD!) special effects, nonsensical plot and behavior befitting morons. This is why I LOVE plunging the depths of exploitation movie entertainment. There’s no shortage of trashy treasures like The Giant Spider Invasion to be discovered.
