Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 5:1	Budget Medium

Kingdom of the Spiders

Ohh, William Shatner and Tiffany Bolling in a movie about man-eating spiders! Life is good.

As the movie opens, we see Rack and Terry rope a steer so that they can give it a shot of medicine. Terry teases Rack and in the ensuing tickle fight accidentally calls him by his dead brother’s name. Having effectively killed the moment, she watches as Rack consults his beeper and rides off on an emergency call. When he arrives at his office, a local rancher shows him a dying heifer.  Blood and tissues samples show spider venom and soon Dr. Ashley appears to try to help sort things out.  Quickly they find the ranch is overrun with tarantulas that have apparently learned to eat cows and people. The tarantulas grow more numerous and devious eventually cocooning the whole town.

 I am not entirely sure why Shatner has so many movie credits. He really is not that good an actor. His recent stint on Boston Public was tailor made for him and played off his public image a bit, but still remains his best acting to date. In 1977 he was not at the peak of his thespian abilities. Kingdom of the Spiders tries to gives its characters some backstory and history, but it has a bolted-on feel. Many of the little bits that are supposed to expound on the characters seem to happen in a vacuum or are so disjointed that we are left confused as to the motivation. Early on we are shown that there is a history between Rack (William Shatner) and Terry (Marcia Lafferty Shatner (yes, his real life wife at the time)).  In a classic bit of dialog, Terry wonders why Rack is helping to support her without any fringe benefits. Actually she says that “it’s like paying for the cow and giving the milk away” to which Rack replies “maybe someday I’ll milk that cow”. (Now I will grant you that no one is going to have much luck with dialog like this, so it is probably unfair to blame all of Shatner’s hamminess on his delivery.)  Later in the film, Shatner brings a date out to meet Terry and asks if she is all right with it. She smiles warmly and says okay, then goes into the kitchen and cries.

So what does this series of exchanges tell us about our lead character? Umm, nothing? We don’t know if he really has the hots for her or if he is oblivious to the fact that she really, really wants to do him, or if he is purposefully tormenting her by flaunting girlfriends in front of her. Early on we are given to believe that there is something between them. Hell, it's a bad movie, I'd suspect that Terry might have chosen the brother (who was killed in 'Nam) over Rack originally. It is important to have some sense of background for the characters to make us feel concerned about them, but here I am mostly just feeling confused. Frequently the characters say things that don't make any sense which does help distract you from the main plot but it just does not do it in a believable way.

That being said, one thing that does work for the movie is that it keeps control of its monster. Rather than have a giant mutated spider, we have thousands of tarantulas both live and stunt doubles. Some of the early camera work where it seems like the spiders are interacting with the actors is great. The shot of the tarantula chasing the mechanic only to get slammed by the door was hugely funny. Instead of a slow build up before we see all of the monster, we slowly see a build up of the number of spiders. In the end it is a bit silly, but it is rather effective. The scientific mumbo jumbo is flawed but at least tries to stay grounded. The scientist mentions that the spiders should not be this far north, is surprised that they seem to be not only tolerating each other's company but working together, and a casual bit of dialog reveals that their bite is five times more toxic than normal. This works nicely as several characters are bit by spiders but don't die immediately. Anyone who dies from the spider's bite is usually pretty well covered with spiders when it happens. However, as usual logic escapes the movie's protagonists. When Rack opines that "DDT won't kill them" they immediately move on to a nasty poison that is toxic to humans. They have DDT and an abundance of spiders to test it on, why not try the DDT first? Later in the movie fire extinguishers would prove effective at killing the spiders. Fortunately, they don't attempt to explain this, it is just stated as a fact, comes in to play once and is never mentioned again.

Tiffany Bolling (Love Scenes) plays Dr. Ashley with her usual competent style. Tiffany is a true B list actress. Her voice is strong and recognizable, but just slightly nasal. She is an okay actress but tends to gnaw on the furniture a bit. Still here she is given the task of being Exposition Guy sort of. Normally this include such little things as keeping the audience up to date on the off screen story or providing background information on a character. In Spiders she is one who gets to provide all the info on the spiders; from their odd migration, to their new and improved toxicity, and even has the thankless job of trying to convince the mayor not to use pesticides but to rely on "natural predators" like rats and birds. Amusingly this last bit is said once and never brought up again. I'd have thought this would have been a good place for an anti-pesticide argument (there are no birds and rats because the pesticide killed them and now you want to spread more?).

Being a 70's eco-disaster movie, the cause of the change in the spiders is thought to be that the use of pesticides was so wide spread the spiders no longer had their natural food supply. In a neat bit of movie logic the spiders have become immune to the pesticide, but the birds and rats which feed on the spiders did not. So immediately they migrated 600 miles, learned to cooperate and started hunting humans. Oh, yes, their venom also increased in toxicity five times. The writers don't really dwell on this, it is put forth in a very quick fashion, taken as gospel and ignored from that point onward. By this point in the movie the spiders are attacking in earnest and everyone is pretty busy trying to stay alive, so it is not too surprising that they don't debate the fine points of why the spiders are attacking.

The movie was directed by John Cardos who did a lot of stunt work over the years, and this comes across in several of the action scenes in the movie. We are introduced to Rack originally as he is racing his horse across a pasture. When the town is in a panic because of the spider attacks you start to notice that none of the damage is done by the spiders. Tarantulas are big for spiders, but they are not going to tip over a water tower by themselves. Instead they have to sneak into a car, hide until exactly the right moment and then swarm over the driver who then panics and presses the gas pedal instead of the brake causing the car to crash into the water tower's supports. During the sheriff's drive through town we can see dozens of people crowding about his car. When the tower falls and crushes him and his car, you can see all the extras safely huddled a hundred yards away. Of course, the instant that the we cut back to the squished sheriff, there are lots of people running around panicking again. Safety first.

I've talked about cannon fodder before. The advantage of a big cast (or at least a lot of extras) is that you can kill off a large number of on-screen characters without impacting the story line. It looks like the film makers were able to convince most of the town to participate in the filming which in turn let the film makers have lots of bodies. So while we lose a lot of characters with speaking roles and names, there are plenty of nameless victims too. We even get to see children not only in jepordy but actually being attacked and dying. One memorable scene has a kid (probably named Jon-Jon) crashing through a glass door and then falling in front of the camera covered in spider bites. The film is rated PG-13 but I don't know if that scene would be approved by today's censors. Showing children in harm's way is frowned upon and visiting death upon them will get you an R rating in a heart beat (or lack thereof). I may be more sensitive to this because of my recent viewing of Gojira (the original version of Godzilla). While the elements of the tacky, somewhat silly man-in-a-rubber-suit monster movie are there, the core of the movie is about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and there are two scenes that are gut wrenching. One involves a mother with two small children in Gojira's path and another at a hospital with children dying of radiation poisoning. My expectations of light weight B movie fare were shattered and I was dumbfounded. When you wallow in the shallow end of the movie pool, you don't often come across such powerful films. Hell, truth to be told, even in the "Cinema" world you don't see if often. So does that mean that Kingdom of the Spiders approaches art by throwing in a couple dead kids? Umm, no. My guess is that when the film makers asked the extras "who wants to jump through a glass door with spiders taped to your body?" most of the grown ups passed.

Another reason that some kids got parts could just be that they were family. Shatner's wife has a major part and Bolling's mom plays the operator. By the early 70's most towns had moved past the old hand crank and phone operator systems, but what the heck it looks cool and gives Bolling's mom a chance to do a quick Lilly Tomlin imitation. And did you notice the time on the clock? Timex advertised heavily on TV during that era and every watch always showed "ten to two" (it framed their brand name), so I don't think it is a coincidence that clock shows just about that time.

There is a truism in movie making that you don't show your monster too early. You want to tease your audience a bit by showing a glimpse here and there as well as do a slow escalation in the violence done by the monster. Kingdom hints at their "monster" right away; we don't see the spiders but we see something attack the cow from several different angles. A little foreshadowing that there will be lots and lots of spiders. Early on we see Dr. Ashley calmly handling a spider, even putting it outside rather than squashing it. When she sees the spider hill with hundreds of spiders, she still is more fascinated that frightened, though I suspect that the audience starts to get a little leery at this point. It is not until the town is completely overrun by spiders and the townsfolk are panicking that the monster is fully revealed. As much as I loved some of the scenes with the spiders, some CG would have helped. We see spiders on the ground and then all over someone but we don't see them crawling up legs or moving once they are on a person. I don't think I'd like to see a full blown CG swarm of millions of spiders, but I would have liked to see more motion and interaction with the spiders. Of course, this is a moot point as computer graphics special effects were not available when this movie came out and I am not sure that even Hollywood would remake this epic.

DeForest Kelly (Shatner's costar from Star Trek) was in his own eco-disaster movie in 1972, the highly entertaining Night of the Lepus. In terms of Campy Goodness, Lepus beats the crap out of Spiders. Spiders may have the whole "milking the cow" thing going on, but that does not come close to the inanity of Lepus' scientist. "Hand me a clean rabbit". Despite Kingdom being a technically better movie, I still have got to give Lepus more points. While there is some cheese here, clearly everyone involved tried to make a good move and they succeeded within the limits of the script and budget. True there are some cheesy moments but nothing that compares to Lepus. I think it says something about me that I prefer a mind boggling stupid movie to one that made a real effort, I just wish it said something good about me.

Got a comment or different opinion? Send a message.