BEFORE: Another birthday today - so I commemorate the day 9 years ago when I turned 40 and came up with the idea for this blog. Really, I just wanted to watch more movies, and now I can't seem to stop the damn thing. (Kill it with fire?) When you make a life-plan like that, it's hard to look into the future and envision a day when you'll feel really old and are forced to spend part of your birthday watching a film about a giant spider. But hey, Dunkin Donuts has new Halloween-themed donuts available, and they cleverly put a chocolate Munchkin on top of a glazed donut and gave it little frosting legs to look like a big spider. I had one of those this morning, so I've got that going for me, at least. I guess it's just a spider-themed day...
Three actors carry over from "Revenge of the Creature", Nestor Paiva makes his third appearance in a row, and John Agar is here again too. Plus there's another cameo from Clint Eastwood, though he wasn't really famous at the time, but "cameo" is still the best word for this. After playing the bumbling lab assistant in last night's film, tonight he's got an uncredited role as a jet pilot - this seems more "in the pocket" for Clint as a future action hero.
THE PLOT: A spider escapes from an isolated desert laboratory experimenting with giantism and grows to tremendous size as it wreaks havoc on the local inhabitants.
AFTER: Let me see if I've got this straight: a dead man is found in the desert, and he had suffering from a condition called acromegaly, which involved physical abnormalities caused by an excess of growth hormone. Only he looks like he's had the condition for years, but the man had been seen without these symptoms just a few days before. How the hell do we get from that to a giant spider?
Ah, it turns out he's been working at a lab that's been experimenting with making animals bigger in order to (somehow) solve the problem of world hunger. Huh? (Please note, overexposure to growth hormone makes your face all puffy and droopy - are you listening, GMO farmers?)
How is making animals bigger going to solve hunger? Aren't giant animals going to have bigger appetites? Shouldn't they be working on making the food bigger, not the things that eat the food? This just doesn't make any sense. I get that they've been working with various solutions of "nutrients", but here's another problem - more nutritious food doesn't make animals larger overall, it would just feed them more efficiently. OK, maybe they'd get fatter, but not LARGER in scale. This is junk science, no matter how you slice it.
(I'll allow that a better diet could create larger animals over a period of a few thousand years, like people today are generally taller than their prehistoric ancestors, and the theory is that this is due to a better diet, along with things like orthopedic footwear. But it takes centuries, man, it doesn't happen overnight - we've got more nutritious dog food on the market now, but it doesn't make dogs the size of horses, now, does it?)
Oh, wait, are we supposed to eat the giant rabbits? I didn't even think of that, because normal people these days don't eat rabbits, that must have been a thing back in the 1950's. I guess if you can make giant rabbits, then you can make giant chickens and giant cows and then maybe you can start feeding some starving people, at least the ones that don't get killed by all the giant man-eating rabbits. But even this doesn't explain the giant spider - who the hell would want to eat a giant tarantula?
At least this time the audience gets to SEE the giant spider long before the people on screen do - and they used real spider footage blown up to giant size and super-imposed into the desert scenery, not giant puppet ants like they used in "Them!". So it looks sort of realistic, even though it's extremely unlikely that a spider bigger than a house could walk around the desert, where there's absolutely nothing to hide behind, and somehow NOT BE SEEN.
Other campy nitpicky moments include a character finding a giant pool of deadly spider venom and confirming its nature by dipping in a finger and TASTING IT, then referring to it as some kind of "insect venom" when we all should know that a spider is NOT an insect, it's an arachnid. How do I know more about this stuff than the damn scientists in this film? Could the screenwriter maybe have spent 5 minutes to do a little genuine research?
Up until this point, I was only familiar with this film as a referenced point in the lyrics of the song "Science Fiction Double Feature" that opens "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" - which go as follows: "I knew Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel as Tarantula took to the hills". The song also references films like "Forbidden Planet", "King Kong", "The Invisible Man" and "It Came From Outer Space", and if you catch all the references, you're a bigger film geek than I am, since I still haven't seen "Doctor X", "When Worlds Collide" and "The Day of the Triffids".
And I realize now that the wording was probably done to fit the rhyme scheme, but it was still disappointing to learn that at no point during this film was that actor "over a barrel". There were no barrels at all in this film, come to think of it. What a shame.
Also starring Mara Corday (last seen in "Sudden Impact"), Leo G. Carroll (last seen in "The Swan"), Ross Elliott, Edwin Rand, Raymond Bailey (last seen in "Vertigo"), Eddie Parker, Hank Patterson, Bert Holland, Steve Darrell, Don Dillaway, Tom London, Bing Russell (last seen in "Sunset").
RATING: 4 out of 10 clipboards
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