Earth vs the Spider

Oh yeah, I definitely liked this more than "Attack of the Puppet People". Working with the spider is pretty good, not great, but good. It looks quite believable throughout. It's not action-packed, it's still very intimate, and it's not scary, but there's a beauty in those B movies from the 50s. There are better movies like "Them!", but this one will do. (10/07/2014)

Poster tagline: BULLETS WON’T KILL IT! FLAMES CAN’T HURT IT! NOTHING CAN STOP IT! IT WILL EAT YOU ALIVE!!! Starring a stalactite cave, a kids' rock 'n' roll band and a big spider. Unlike other Gordon films, this one doesn't address how the titular monster – a large black tarantula – reached the size of a circus tent. It just lives in a stalactite cave, not far from the town of River Falls, it is big, ugly and bored, and it wants to "play". With people. People driving their cars on a nearby road. Apparently the people have no sympathy for its antics because they take DDT and sprinkle it all over it. Thinking that it is as stiff as Lenin's sarcophagus, they take it to the town’s gym where journalists take pictures of it. But just when its seemingly dead presence is making the boys' rock 'n' roll group play their hit songs in the gym, to the enthusiastic shouting of their classmates, the spider wakes up (probably because it didn’t want to listen to it anymore) and goes to brighten its day with a human meal. But that is by no means all, there’s also a girl who forgets her father's necklace in the stalactite cave, a young biologist whose family has been targeted by the spider, and a demonstration of how to dig into the stalactite cave in a few minutes with a single shovel. And there’s much more, by which I mean that this is by far the most "sophisticated" screenplay Gordon concocted. What is not sophisticated, though, are the special effects. You will enjoy, for example, the "Edwood-esque" shot when the spider "walks through the city", i.e. it walks in front of a photograph of a street and drums its legs into it, making the paper street shake cutely. The sucked-out human mummies, which look like a 'Mattel Barbie' after polio, are also adorable, as well as the sound the tarantula makes: a sort of mixture of a siren, a woman's scream and a grunt in death agony. And some of the dialogues are also brilliant, for example when a girl is mourning her slain father, her mother tells her not to think about that, the she has homework for school. But the highlight of the whole film, and one of the most original monster neutralizations in its genre is when two guys about 30 metres apart send an electrical discharge using electrodes, in the path of which the unfortunate spider scuttles... :) (19/02/2008)