10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Skipper vs The Interdimensional Arachnid Horde, May 25, 2004
This review is from: Giant Spider Invasion (DVD)
I've always enjoyed a good enormous insect devouring the Earth film, with some of my favorites being Them! (1954), The Black Scorpion (1957), and even Empire of the Ants (1977), but The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), while having its' moments, barely rates as a blip on the silver screen, or any screen, comparatively speaking. Directed by Bill Rebane, whose other credits include Monster a-Go Go (1965) and The Capture of Bigfoot (1979), stars Steve Brodie as NASA scientist J.R. Vance. Now, Brodie looked familiar, but I couldn't recall what other films I've seen him in until I looked up his bio and saw such cinematic flotsam as The Wild World of Batwoman (1966) and Jerry Warren's Frankenstein Island (1981)...ugh...I'm still reeling from that last one. The film also stars Barbara Hale (from TV's Perry Mason) as Dr. Jenny Langer, character actor Robert Easton, and Alan Hale Jr. aka the skipper from Gilligan's Island...oh man, I feel a serious cinematic hurting coming on...
The film starts out with some kind of foreign object traveling to Earth, crashing spectacularly on Dan Kester's farm in Hicksville, Wisconsin (okay, the town wasn't named Hicksville, but it shoulda been, given the complete idiotic, backwoods nature of the residents we've met so far). Shortly after impact of the extraterrestrial object, residents begin reporting problems with radios and televisions, but that's the extent of incident. No one really seems to have noticed that a fairly large object from outer space has slammed into a Wisconsin pasture, and even the farmer puts off investigating until the next day. A scientist, Dr. Langer, working at the local observatory does report strange and unusual readings to NASA...to which they dispatch Dr. Vance to investigate. The following day Kester and his alcoholic wife decide to investigate the strange happening at their farm, and discover a number of cattle have been partially eaten. They also find the impact site, and a number of geodes around the area. After breaking one open, they find what appears to be diamonds inside, and dreams of wealth begin to swirl in their heads. What they missed was the spider that popped out of the geode, and scurried off to do whatever it is spiders do...soon the spiders begin to make frequent appearances, creeping and crawling all over the place. And not just wee, bitty spiders but great big uns, too...and they appear to be hungry. After several townspeople get all et up in a particularly gruesome fashion by the biggest spider (I tell you, he's fifty feet tall if he's a foot!), Dr. Langer and Dr. Vance postulate that the object that crashed to Earth opened up a portal to an alternate universe, one that is populated by spiders, and they are now coming through this portal to Earth. That seems like quite a presumption, but since Vance is a NASA scientist, who am I to argue? Anyway, various plans begin to formulate, with the scientists looking for a way to close the portal, and local yokels forming gun-toting mobs to hunt down the giant spider what et up their kin. After getting to know the various residents of this small farming community, I formulated my own plan...let the spiders gorge themselves on these knuckleheads, and then perform a tactical nuclear strike on the community. Do they manage to stop the invasion of voracious interstellar arachnids? Or are we all doomed to become space spider sweet meats?
Okay, first of all the effects are really shoddy, but I that doesn't automatically make a film bad. If the acting, script, dialog, direction and/or characters are decent, I can let poor effects slide, especially in the context of low budget filmmaking (the cost of the film was about $250,000 to $300,000). Well, guess what? Most of those elements were pretty shoddy as well...I will say that it did look like a lot of effort and heart were put into this rather doomed production, but it seemed the director was never able to muster anything near the overall impact he was looking for, as I think this was a definite case of over reaching ones' limitations, specifically in the budget department. Alan Hale Jr. makes a few appearances throughout the film as the sheriff, but he spends more time in his office than anything else, making some of the lamest jokes you've ever heard. You can tell the writer tried to inject a comic element into the script, but mostly these elicited a great deal of groaning from this viewer. The funniest elements were the ones not meant to be funny, like the giant spider (it's actually a VW bug with fake legs attached), the theories thrown about by the scientists, and just the general character development. In many scenes real, smaller, spiders were used, and certainly provided many creeps, but what I found even creepier was the casual notion of relations of a biblical nature between some of the characters who where related to each other...none of this was shown, but it was eluded to, and given the characters involved, it was certainly not great stretch of the imagination. (Things that make you go `ewwwww')
Fred Olen Ray's Retromedia Entertainment provides a decent full screen print (about as good as a VHS copy) here with some noticeable wear and tear at a couple of spots. A real plus is the inclusion of some pretty good special features like an introduction by Akron, Ohio's Son of Ghoul, a mini reproduction of a four page comic book put out at the time of the film's release, a theatrical trailer for the film, and an interview with director Bill Rebane in which he basically points out the weaknesses in his film, lack of money, too many producers (five, at one point), and lack of a decent script, to name a few. Despite my criticisms, I am happy to know that someone out there is releasing films like this on DVD.
Cookieman108
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Skipper vs. The Giant Spiders, July 1, 2002
This review is from: Giant Spider Invasion (DVD)
Back from the shadows of cheaply made monster movies incorporating a few scares (actually, this had one scare - and I was intoxicated so I'm not certain it was truly meritable of the term "frightening") and a lot of laughs (As the back of the movie's case implies, the "Spider effects" is actually a VW disguised as a Giant Spider from Outer Space, plus there are some laughable yokel mating rituals.) comes The Giant Spider Invasion. It basically adheres to the old monster movie principles, the cheaper the monster and the thinner the reasoning, the better.
Here we have the story of a small Wisconsin town that experiences an unknown object plummeting to Earth, landing close to the farmhouse of the unsavory Dan and Ev Kester. Upon closer inspection of the impact site, the Kesters find droves of their livestock mutilated and worry about what did it, too, until they discover geodes filled with what look to be diamonds - and a more sinister eight-legged cargo that is initially overlooked. Enter the NASA scientists and their loosely scientific hypothesis that states that the crash site is actually a "black hole" emanating energy feeding some soon to be gigantic spiders and you have a truly fun-filled, barely budgeted monster movie!
Be forewarned that the plot is thin, the actors (with the exception of Alan Hale AKA "The Skipper") are subpar, and the effects are almost nonexistent. Knowing this ahead of time, however, leaves you room to enjoy this flashback to an enjoyable time in "horror" cinema. Buy it and experience VW love once again!
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