Directed by John Cardos
Starring William Shatner, Tiffany Bolling, Woody Strode and Lieux Dressler
I've always been a big mark for "nature run amok" horror movies. So many directors past and present have tried to get cute and jokey with slasher villains, but if you make things like spiders and sharks threatening, you'll get me every single time. Well, ALMOST every single time. My intense dislike for the SyFy original pictures has been documented here on blog, and a large part of it is due to the over-jokification of the subject matter. Trust me, folks, almost nothing in the real world is scarier than big creatures that can make you their lunch. There's a reason why I rarely venture outside my own house.
When I was a kid, UPN (and I refuse to Google whatever it's called now - is it still MyTV?) used to show Kingdom of the Spiders fairly regularly, along with a bunch of other insect-centric horror films in regular Saturday afternoon blocks. As such, I've probably seen it well over a dozen times. I loved it as a kid, finding William Shatner's character to be coolness personified and Tiffany Bolling (his love interest) to be hotter than liquid magma. These days, I own the DVD, and while it's not the undisputed masterpiece that I heralded it to be back in the early '90s, it's still got a lot going for it and one of the better natural horror flicks out there.
Released in 1977, the flick had a pretty damn impressive box office showing, grossing a cool $17 million off of a $1 million investment, proving yet again that horror movies rule and modern blockbusters that need to spend $250 million just to be seen as moderately cool can suck it. Shatner plays Rack Hansen (not a typo - it's what everybody in the movie calls him), a slick veterinarian from rural Arizona who finds himself at the center of the spider apocalypse. It all starts innocently enough, with a bunch of locals complaining about various livestock dying from mysterious ailments. Cue the arrival of Diane Ashley (Bolling, who I remember from episodes of Night Gallery and The Sixth Sense, sexy arachnologist who pronounces the deaths to be from venomous spiders. Like, extremely venomous. So venomous that Eddie Brock would be damn proud. (/bad joke)
That introductory plot is well and good, but the real star of this movie are the tarantulas themselves. Yeah, we're dealing with tarantulas in Kingdom of the Spiders, a species of spider that is not particularly poisonous. They're just really big and scary looking. I forget the exact number (and I'm writing this review from memory without re-watching it; that's how many times I saw it as a kid), but I believe that these spiders are said to be 20 times as venomous as the average tarantula. So we're not just dealing with big spiders; we've got really dangerous ones. Live ones, mind you, that find themselves covering the actors in the film in scenes where the screaming stars CAN'T be stunt doubles. Now, I've done my fair share of complaining about actors in the past, but they earned every bit of their paycheck on this movie for this aspect alone.
It doesn't take long for this movie to effectively become spider-mania, with the damn things taking over half the flick's fictional Arizona town. The menace seems to stem from this giant "spider hill" out in the country that serves as the insect's hive. Every time we see this thing, there is admittedly a pretty substantial feeling of dread - I know, because it's accompanied by dreadful, dreary synthy music whenever it's seen on screen. A few of the anciliary characters (a fairly engaging farm couple, Shatner's sister-in-law, etc.) find their way in and out of the movie, usually biting it in fairly creepy and inventive ways. The final hour of the film is basically Tremors, with the remaining townspeople barricading themselves inside against the spider threat and trying to figure out a way to escape. Only in this case, as was the case with a LOT of '70s horror films, we're not blessed with anything resembling a sunny ending. And it feels totally appropriate.
Now, I'll fully admit that a lot of the acting in Kingdom of the Spiders is anything other than pedestrian. Shatner would eventually master the whole "I'm bad and I know it" style of endearing acting, but here he was still playing it dead serious - badly - and it shows. Bolling, while very nice to look at, isn't much of an actress either, while most of the townspeople come across as the cheesehead hicks from Giant Spider Invasion (Youtube that episode of MST3K if you haven't seen it - it's dynamite). No, folks, story and character isn't what this flick has going for it.
What we've got here is atmosphere, and we've got it in spades. The dreary, grainy print that I saw countless times as a kid stuck out in my mind immediately, giving this admittedly silly movie the feeling of a documentary about spiders run amok. That atmosphere carries this movie through some pretty suspect material, and if you've got some tolerance for hokiness, you'll find more than a few scenes that will genuinely creep you out and leave you holding your breath. At least if you're like me, a guy who has a natural aversion to insects and an Honest-to-Christ PHOBIA of grasshoppers. That atmosphere along with some good sustained bits of tension is enough to heartily recommend Kingdom of the Spiders for a DVD buy, particularly since you can find it dirt cheap these days.
*** out of ****. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it's a classic way to kill a Saturday afternoon.
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