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Review by E.C.McMullen Jr. |
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THE SPIDERakaEarth Vs The Spider- 1958USA Release: Sep. 1958 Santa Rosa Productions, American International Pictures Rated: USA: N/A |
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It's another Bert I. Gordon movie and that means, more often than not, the Monster is normally a little thing that grew to gigantic proportions!
Burt wasn't the only guy doing this, but yeah: He did it a lot. So much so that Forrey Ackerman used his initials to affectionately dub him, "Mr. BIG."
So ... small things made huge and, in this case, a spider.
Well why not? It worked great for Jack Arnold's movie TARANTULA a mere three years before. Why fix something that ain't broke?
Away we go with another giant spider movie!
It all begins with a happy guy we will come to know as Jack Flynn (Merrit Stone: PORT SINISTER, WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, TORMENTED) driving his car at night. Boy what a shit eating grin! As he drives he takes his eyes off the road to gaze lovingly at a present he has for someone.
He looks back up and...
Merry, screaming, blood-splattering Mishaps occur.
The next day, Jack's daughter Carol (June Kenney: ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE, BLOODLUST!) walks to school. Her insensitive lout of a boyfriend, Mike Simpson (Gene Persson: BLOODLUST!) gives her a present. She puts on a brave face but Mike can see something's wrong. Carol's having a bad birthday because Pop didn't come home last night.
"Ahh, that don't mean a thing, you know how he is."
Carol takes exception to Mike's implication and he blithely doubles down.
"Well that doesn't mean a thing, Carol. I mean, it's not the first time."
TRIVIA 1 Ed Kemmer was a fighter pilot in WWII. He was shot down, captured by NAZIs, put in a POW camp, and successfully escaped. After the war he moved to California and got into acting, taking a low paying job on a radio show called SPACE PATROL. It's popularity moved it to TV and Ed did 182 episodes in 5 years. He appeared in Shoot 'em up Shitkickers and War TV shows, then wound up back in science fiction in the space opera, CLEAR HORIZON, doing 256 episodes in 2 years. More than half a century later, its only the Science Fiction and Horror movies he's remembered for. 2 This is such a great filmmaker scene I've watched it repeatedly. Two things are going on at once, thrown at the audience. One is the teacher talking and being clearly heard. He's speaking about something that will be important later. At the same time, we visually see this other communication between Carol and Mike that moves the story toward the inciting incident. Our ears hear one thing, our eyes see something completely different, and we immediately take in two different things in half the time that are important to the movie. Brilliant writing and direction by Bert I. Gordon! 3 A Professor who teaches at a Public School? Wow! The wonderful state of a U.S.A. public school education! At least, before President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education (DoED): a government bureaucracy created to permanently funnel tax dollars and Federal Government power to the National Education Association (NEA) union. In return they would First always support Carter and his party. Second, they would properly educate all American children to see things Their way. This is how a desperate Carter got their endorsement as he ran for his second term. |
Mike! Dude!
Ahem, we were all stupid, insensitive, cruel children once: Self-righteous about our own flaws (if we even saw them at all) and barbaric in our judgement of others. The world would be so much better if we were in charge!
In science class that day, Professor Art Kingman (Ed Kemmer1: SPACE PATROL [TV], GIANT FROM THE UNKNOWN), explains polarity with a demonstration of electricity jumping from one pole to the other, and details why. Mike passes an unapologetic note to Carol.
Still mad at me?
Kingman is still talking, as he goes on about how electricity flows from the negative pole to the positive one and why. Carol smiles, accepts Mike's gift to her, and writes a note back.
Kingman engages the class, asking them to identify the differences between the two poles and as one they reply, "Anode. Cathode."
Carol's note asks Mike to take her for a drive down the road her Pop would have taken the night before.
With all of the love silently blooming and note passing back and forth, and all of it in service to getting to that Giant Spider (you know, the one on the poster and in the movie trailer?). Professor Kingman, teaching the class, fully lays out how the electric presentation on his desk is relatively harmless, but - in a university in Wisconsin, they have one big enough to simulate real lightning.2
After school they drive out and, sure enough, there's something odd up ahead.
They find a thick long line of... something attached to a tree and looking like it was stretched across the road. Look at all of this broken glass!
And there! There's a jewelry box on the road. There's a bracelet inside and a sweet note her Pop wrote to her.
And look! There's Pop's wreck of a truck!
Carol correctly assumes, by the evidence, that something bad happened to her Pop.
But where is he?
All of this evidence and mystery excites Mike's curiosity. It was cold last night. If your father was injured, maybe he went into that dangerous old cave to stay warm!
They enter the cave, Carol calls out for her father, and they narrowly escape what I call, "A sticky situation!"
Soon Carol and Mike are at Professor Art Kingman's house along with Mike's Pop. Art doesn't know what to make of the sticky line they found on the road. Feels like silk. As to the kid's explanation?
"A giant spider is pretty hard to swallow," observes Art's no-nonsense wife, Helen (Sally Fraser: GIANT FROM THE UNKNOWN, WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST).
Mike's tall father - so tall he's always bending over or crouching down to be head level with everyone else - take umbrage at Helen's disbelief.
"My son isn't in the habit of lying," warns Mr. Simpson (Hal Torrey: WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, THE COSMIC MAN, INVISIBLE INVADERS)
Art: "Yeah but, come on! A spider the size of a house?"
"Well..."
Mike and Carol went to the police station first, but Sheriff Cagle (Gene Roth: STRANGE ILLUSION, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, CAPTAIN VIDEO: MASTER O THE STRATOSPHERE, THE LOST PLANET, SCIENCE FICTION THEATER [TV], ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU, SHE DEMONS, ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES, TORMENTED) laughed them out of the station. Ha! These kids and their wild stories!
Professor Kingman3 calls the Sheriff, asking him to at least check out their story. Cagle laughs at him too. Ha! You educated people!
Kingman reminds Cagle that, if nothing else, he should be looking into the disappearance of Jack Flynn. Cagle, surprised by Art's checkmate, gets right on it.
So Carol, Mike, their Professor, the Sheriff, some townsfolk he rounded up, and a couple of exterminators loaded up with DDT (just in case) go to the cave and,
Holy Shit there's a Giant spider in here!
They shoot and spray, one thing leads to another and the end result of all this Feudin' and fightin' is a giant spider that's had just about enough of these gosh darn shenanigans! So she goes off on a tear to show her buffet who's boss!
You know what else is boss?
!!!THE SCIENCE MOMENT!!!:
EUREKA!
Under normal 1950s SciFi circumstances, you would think that small critters that grew into giant varmints would be rife with unscientific brouhaha, and you'd be right!
But while the sheriff tries to get answers as to how a common spider could possibly grow to that size, the scientist of the story, Professor Art Kingman, doesn't ponder the effects of radiation: In fact, he has no idea.
That's always the reasonable, rational, and honest answer. When faced with evidence of the unknown, not having an answer and being willing to look for one, is scientific.
Glibly attributing it to Magic, or telling people that it is your god's punishment for putting croutons in a salad before asking if your customers WANT CROUTONS IN THEIR FREAKING SALADS!
That's the problem, you see. Such a thing Can Not exist - BUT - since it clearly does, don't blow up the entrance to the cave and bury it, but capture it somehow and study it!
Sheriff Cagle thinks Kingman is out of his damn mind until the Professor checkmates him with reason a second time.
"And what if this happens again?" Kingman asks. "For all we know, she could have a litter of eggs all about to hatch into hundreds of giant spiders. What if they got out? Humanity couldn't survive."
Kingman is right. Since the seemingly impossible exists, and is a threat to us, we have to find out why and quick!
THE SPIDER is no Academy Award winner. The characters are trite stereotypes and there's nothing deeper here than scaring people who are afraid of spiders or a giant killing anything.
No, no awards for Special Effects, either.
That said, through experience, Bert I. Gordon learned and excelled at entertaining audiences no matter how dumb the movie. The only stock "formula" he ever repeated was his use of Giant Somethings! THE SPIDER was his last "Giant" picture of the 1950s. Bert wouldn't do another until 1965's VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS.
THE SPIDER gets Three Shriek Girls!
This review copyright 2024 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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