THE
GIANT SPIDER INVASION (1975)Director: Bill Rebane
Retromedia Entertainment
THE
GIANT SPIDER INVASION (1975)One of the first things that comes to mind when discussing this film is the presence of Alan Hale, Jr. who was never able to shed his typecasting as The Skipper on "Gilligan's Island." Here, he's still as jolly and fat as ever, and even talks to the camera at one point, but the icing on the cake is that his first lines are, "Hey little buddy." Hale plays the sheriff of a small Wisconsin town that has some kind of meteor come crashing down, forming a black hole in a farmer's field.
Farmer Dan Kester is played by Robert Easton, a character actor who mostly played hillbillies and rednecks (if you remember "Moose Mallory" from an episode of "The Munsters," you'll know what I'm talking about). Easton, who also co-wrote this film, was a Hollywood dialect coach(!). Anyway, Kester discovers his field is full of dead cattle that surround a large hole in the ground. Also found are some unusual rocks which when cracked open, appear to contain some kind of diamonds.
Meanwhile back at the farm, it's white trash heaven. Kester's wife Ev (Leslie Parrish) is a hopeless lush, so he lusts after her jailbait little sister (Dianne Lee Hart of BUMMER) and finds time to carry on a liaison with a local waitress (Christiana Schmidtmer, the warden in THE BIG DOLL HOUSE). When cracking open the rocks, dumb Kester doesn't realize that he also exposed some spider eggs, and the house is soon crawling with creepy, fist-sized buggers. In the films most disturbing scene, one of the spiders falls into the blender of Parrish's Bloody Mary mix, and she unknowingly tastes the concoction in disgust. Her fate is being attacked by a man-sized fuzzy spider puppet which she is forced to catch and make look real.
That puppet later grows enormous, and at that point this "queen" spider is an altered Volkswagen Beetle. Well, it actually doesn't look that bad, and I think people ridicule the effects only because it's well known that there's a car under that carpet and those tremendous pipe cleaners (hell, they only had about $10,000 to spend on effects). Seeing people get sucked upside down into one of these things, blood gushing and all, is a site to behold. Other veterans in the cast are Barbara Hale ("Perry Mason") as an astronomer and Steve Brodie as a NASA scientist. Neither look too embarrassed (Brodie did a couple of Jerry Warren pictures, so I guess it really doesn't get any worse than that).
An outrageous mix of 50s giant monster motifs and backwoods 70s sleaze, THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION has been presented on DVD transferred from the director's only existing video master (film elements have reportedly disappeared). The full frame image still looks fine (nice colors and all) and the source is free of any major blemishes. The last few minutes appear kind of dark, but then it always looked that way, even on recent "Mystery Science Theater 3000" airings. The mono sound is very loud and clear, with only a few crackles and pops here and there.
Extras include a brief video interview
with director Rebane who calls it "The Giant Spider Disaster," referring
to its clumsy special effects. Despite the negative introduction, Rebane's recollections
show fondness for his cast and crew and he relates how his special effects man
was inebriated most of the time. The DVD is introduced by Ohio TV horror host
Son of Ghoul, adding another welcomed bonus to these discs and really putting
the "retro" in Retromedia. There's also a long trailer that hypes
the film to great effect, and the disc's packaging contains a full-color reprint
of the original promotional comic book distributed during its original release.
What a sweet deal! (George
R. Reis)