Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

I continue reviewing somewhat obscure low budget movies from the past.

Here we have a Bill Rebane movie. One of the best of the Bill Rebane movies. Who is Rebane? He is a very independent Wisconsin based film-maker. One of his earliest movies is the infamous MONSTER A-GO-GO one of the worst movies ever made. He had the opportunity to work with a Guiness Book of World Records World's Tallest Man. SO he put him in a really cheap awful movie. It made an memorable MST3000 episode.

About ten years and several terrible movies after that, Rebane put this one out in 1975. It was a throwback to the giant bug movies of the 50s.

I remember seeing the ad for this in the newspaper back in 1975. The ad said it had won some kind of Science Fiction and Horror Movie Award and that Forest J. Ackerman of Famous Monsters thought it was a good movie.

So I saw it IN THE THEATERS !!!!

Yep I was a sucker for cheap thrills and giant bug movies. I was watching the normally parental forbidden Chiller Theater with my Nana when I was 6 or 7 years old and they often showed the 50s giant bug movies like Earth versus Spider (A tacky Bert I. Gordon schlock camp gem) or the quite good Tarantula or the classic gand daddy of the genre (one of the first giant bug movies) THEM! (giant ants) Black Scorpion or Beginning of the End (giant grasshoppers), Monster from Green Hell (giant wasp) etc. So a few years later, all I needed was some one to tell me it was worth seeing and I was there.

Oops.

Actually other than the pacing, script, low budget, tacky/bad special effects. And inconsistent acting it’s a pretty good movie.

Oh I kid the Giant Spider.

There is a black hole from space that crashes to earth outside a small Wisconsin Town.

And look who is in one of the first scenes of the movie? It's the skipper from Gilligan Island who is now the Sheriff (yep Alan Hale Jr. took time off from his restaurant duties to appear in this movie). And guess what his first line in the movie is?

"Hi, little buddy."

I kid you not. Anyway, the drunken wife of a rancher discovers a bunch of rocks on her property. They smoke, open up and tarantula's come a'creepin' out of them, but they might be valuable rocks, right? So they aren't going to tell anyone about the spiders.

There's the a young reporter who wants to get a hot story and he has a crush on a young lady. There's an annoying creepy perverted character, there are normal sized large spiders attacking people and they somehow get together and create this GIANT SPIDER. The spider is not very impressive and when I tell you it is a played by a volkswagon you will probably enjoy it even more. The spiders eye effects are caused I believe by the cars brake lights. You have a lot of papermache and legs covering a volkswagon. You don't actually see wheels at least or the muffler sticking out, but the spider does move in a rather odd manner. It could be worse.

Do you really need me to tell you anything else about this movie? It is cheap, it is stupid and if you are drunk and sitting around with your friends you might have a very good time with it. Okay I'll tell you a bit more.

So the farmer lady who thinks the rocks might be valuable does not notice when a spider gets into her blender when she mixes up a drink and slurps it down. Yum. The spiders are getting together to take over the town51they have some kind of intelligence abou them. The guy from NASA convinces the Sheriff that they should work together and eradicate the town of the nasty spiders from Mars.

Well, then again, maybe they aren't from Mars. The guy from Nasa also gets to have one of those long dull speeches in the film where he talks about black holes which were a fairly new thing to talk about in the mid 70s.

Eventually the Giant Spider appears and we have a big finish -- sorta.

As Bill Rebane movies go, it's better than most of the lower than low budget junk he made. Which only matters if you have sat through Demons of Ludlow or Monster A-Go-Go.

Even though it qualifies as an entertaining so bad it's good movie, there are better choices to be made and I wouldn't put it too high on your list of stuff to get around to seeing some day.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening