{"id":6763,"date":"2024-10-25T10:49:02","date_gmt":"2024-10-25T14:49:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=6763"},"modified":"2024-10-25T10:49:02","modified_gmt":"2024-10-25T14:49:02","slug":"kingdom-of-the-spiders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/10\/25\/kingdom-of-the-spiders\/","title":{"rendered":"Kingdom of the Spiders"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Kingdom of the Spiders<\/strong> (1977)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dimension Pictures\/Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 97 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (violence, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: John \u201cBud\u201d Cardos\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Alan Caillou and Richard Robinson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Dorsey Burnette\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: John Arthur Morrill \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Release date: November 23, 1977 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: William Shatner, Tiffany Bolling, Woody Strode, Lieux Dressler, David McLean, Natasha Ryan, Altovise Davis, Joe Ross, Marcy Lafferty, Adele Malis, Roy Engel, Hoke Howell, Bill Foster, Whitey Hughes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $17M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ***<\/p>\n

\u00a0Kingdom of the Spiders<\/strong> is one of those movies that have to be taken on their own terms. Directed by John \u201cBud\u201d Cardos (The Dark), it\u2019s another \u201cnature on the rampage\u201d movie, a subgenre of horror movies popular in the 70s- e.g. Day of the Animals, Grizzly, Empire of the Ants, Nightwing, etc. It freely borrows elements of Jaws and The Birds to tell its story of a rural town under attack by deadly tarantulas.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Before you get too worried, know that William Shatner is here to lead the fight against the army of eight-legged foes. Yep, Captain Kirk himself; the same guy who would go on to save the President\u2019s life just three years later in 1980\u2019s The Kidnapping of the President. By his side is none other than 70s B-movie sex goddess Tiffany Bolling (Bonnie\u2019s Kids, The Centerfold Girls). How can an army of spiders possibly compete against a pair like that?<\/p>\n

\u00a0It all starts with a sick calf. Shatner plays Rack Hansen (LOVE that name!), a veterinarian in the small farming town of Verde Valley, AZ. It\u2019s he who examines the calf and cannot determine a cause for his sudden illness and subsequent death. He sends a blood sample to a university lab for analysis. They send arachnologist Diane Ashley (Bolling) who informs Rack that the calf died of a massive dose of spider venom. He doesn\u2019t believe it until the calf\u2019s owner, farmer Walter Colby (Strode, Once Upon a Time in the West), shows him and Diane a huge spider hill on his property. There must be hundreds of them in there. Colby makes the mistake of trying to burn the hill; it only sends most of them out a secret escape tunnel into the fields, homes and town streets. Naturally, chaos ensues.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So what\u2019s going on with the spiders? They don\u2019t usually work in groups. It\u2019s Diane\u2019s theory that the use of pesticides has depleted their natural food supply so in order to survive, they work their way up the food chain, going after larger animals and humans. Also, their venom is five times more toxic than usual. YIKES!<\/p>\n

\u00a0The spider siege couldn\u2019t have happened at a worse time. The town is just weeks away from the annual county fair. The mayor is more worried about the tourist trade than the safety of the townspeople. Did he learn his mayoral skills from Larry Vaughn (the mayor played by Murray Hamilton in Jaws 1 & 2)? It all comes down to the survival of a few characters. Besides Rack and Diane, there\u2019s Colby and his wife Birch (Davis, Can\u2019t Stop the Music), Rack\u2019s widowed sister-in-law Terry (Lafferty, The Day Time Ended) who has a thing for him, her cute as a button young daughter Linda (Ryan, The Amityville Horror), lodge owner Emma (Dressler, Truck Stop Women), town sheriff Gene Smith (McLean, Deathsport) and a tourist couple, Vern (Ross, C.H.O.M.P.S.) and Betty (Malis, Lucky Stiff). Some or all of them barricade themselves in the lodge as they become outnumbered by the spiders.<\/p>\n

\u00a0That\u2019s Kingdom of the Spiders<\/strong> in a nutshell or in this case, a cocoon made of spider webs. For what it is, it\u2019s pretty good. I remember watching it on network TV circa 1980. At the time, I only cared about seeing spiders attack and kill people while creating chaos. There\u2019s plenty of it in this flick. Verde Valley is literally crawling with them. They go after farm animals and citizens. They cause a crop duster to crash. Of course, no \u201cnature on the rampage\u201d would be complete without at least one scene of screaming townspeople running around covered in spiders. To this day, I still love scenes like this.<\/p>\n

\u00a0What\u2019s cool about Kingdom of the Spiders<\/strong> is that it predates the whole CGI movement which means that the makers used real tarantulas (along with a few rubber ones), not an easy task when you\u2019re dealing with creatures with cannibalistic tendencies. Each of the 5000 spiders used had to be kept in separate containers. The spider wrangler on this picture certainly had his work cut out for him.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It would be unfair to knock the acting in Kingdom of the Spiders<\/strong>, especially with the power duo of Shatner-Bolling in the lead. Shatner is the ideal movie hero. His character is handsome, sure of himself and not too bright. At one point, he\u2019s compared to Gary Cooper. Shatner, as always, overacts in scenes although never to extent of Star Trek II (\u201cKHAN!!!!!!!\u201d). Bolling is easy on the eyes which is a good thing because she\u2019s not entirely convincing as a scientist. The two actors have decent chemistry, I suppose. In the 70s, little Natasha Ryan was the go-to kid when filmmakers needed to put a cute little girl in peril. She\u2019s kind of annoying in Kingdom of the Spiders<\/strong>, but you can\u2019t help but like her especially if know how her real life played out after she quit acting in \u201983. It\u2019s always good to see Woody Strode; he has an air of coolness about him.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019m not going to sit here and try to convince you Kingdom of the Spiders<\/strong> is high art cinema. It\u2019s definitely NOT! It\u2019s trash, cinematic junk food. It\u2019s the kind of movie you catch on afternoon TV or late at night. I can see it playing at drive-ins on warm summer nights. It\u2019s a fun movie that asks nothing of the brain. It\u2019s as silly as any other \u201cWhen Animals Attack\u201d type film, but it\u2019s also very entertaining. Additionally, some great arachnid acting is on display here; you don\u2019t want to miss that, do you? Throw in the cool cast and you have a really fun movie.\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dimension Pictures\/Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 97 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (violence, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: John \u201cBud\u201d Cardos\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Alan Caillou and Richard Robinson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Dorsey Burnette\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: John Arthur Morrill \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Release date: November 23, 1977 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: William Shatner, Tiffany Bolling, Woody Strode, Lieux Dressler, David McLean, Natasha Ryan, Altovise Davis, Joe Ross, Marcy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7142,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-movies","category-horror"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Kingdom-of-the-Spiders-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6763"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7144,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6763\/revisions\/7144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}