Customer Reviews

Giant Spider Invasion

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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

Director Bill Rebane strikes again with this wonderful trashy film about rural rednecks and giant spiders. A meteor crashes on a ranch and bugs emerge from the crater. A giant spider eventually emerges and goes on the rampage thru Gleason Wisconsin. Alan Hale plays the sheriff. He even calls the hero "Little Buddy".
I enjoyed this film the first time I ever saw it and I still enjoy it. This dvd is hosted by Son Of Ghoul and comes with color comic book repro. A good little item here.

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!

The title's a bit ambiguous, isn't it? I mean, is this a giant invasion of spiders, or is it an invasion by a single giant spider? As it turns out, it's a little bit of both. It's also a pretty lousy B-movie ripe for heckling, as the boys at MST3K certainly proved - in retrospect, this one was almost too easy. When you start the dialogue with Alan "Skipper" Hale greeting a visitor to his sheriff's office with the words "little buddy," you know this isn't going to be an exercise in mental acuity. If you've never seen any of the Gilligan's Island gang in their post-Gilligan movie careers, consider yourself lucky because it isn't pretty (although nothing can approach the ignominy of Jim Backus in Angels' Revenge - a film that also featured Alan Hale).

This film takes place in the ultra-exciting surroundings of the Wisconsin countryside. Apparently, the big invasion either got off-course or the invaders were looking for easy pickings (or perhaps they just really, really like cheese). The invaders have a fairly explosive arrival, but no one seems to care very much - except the sheriff, who quickly gets annoyed with all the reports of cars and electrical gizmos suddenly not working that night. The next day, the biggest rube in Wisconsin finally meanders out into his field to find some mutilated cows and mysterious rocks. These rocks start turning up everywhere, and - amazingly - no one seems to notice the fact that really hairy spiders crawl out of the things when they finally burst. A local scientist does care about all of the unusual scientific readings she is suddenly getting in the area, and her reports encourage NASA to send out a greasy scientist to see what's what. The two of them come up with a cockamamie story about a black hole hitting the earth spewing out alien spiders. I guess that's one way to explain the sudden spider infestation and, eventually, the appearance of the mother of all spiders to terrorize the local yokels.

Nothing much really happens until the gigantic spider finally turns up. Sure, it's obviously just a VW bug in disguise, but I think it does look fairly impressive making its way just over yon hill toward town. In at least one respect, it does have a deadly aspect to it, as several crew members were almost killed during filming. Perhaps the scariest character in the film, however, is the fiery preacher who pops up from time to time, mainly as a vehicle for the sheriff's constantly bad jokes.

If you enjoy old B-movie monster movies, you might actually get a kick out of Giant Spider Invasion - well, probably not, but at least you'll pretty much know what to expect (which is not much). How can you resist a campy giant spider movie, though?

A handfull of my friends and I were fortunate to get a job through a acquaintance working on the Giant Spider Invasion in 1975. We worked on sets ,special effects,building spiders,ate people,destroyed buildings,and blew stuff up. I ate KFC with skipper and the other actors and crew.My memories of that summer are priceless and I have dreamed of that surreal lifestyle since.It's a slice of North Central Wisconsin from the mid 70s. Campy and Poorly Edited but I will always have fond memories of the excitement that found it's way to our usually quiet North woods.

if you like old school schlock cinema...you're gonna love this. a wonderful tail of adultery, greed, back stabbing, and giant arachnids from space. Gerry springer would have a field day with this crew. i sew this movie in the theater as a kid and it brought back lots of memories. thumbs up...very cool.

The Giant Spider Invasion (Bill Rebane, 1975)

I have to give props to any movie in which Alan Hale, Jr., plays a sheriff, and has "Well hi, little buddy!" as his first spoken line. That should tell you right there that this movie has no pretensions whatsoever at being serious. If you persist in thinking so, however, this movie will put paid to that many, many times during its dreadful hour and a half running time; it's just too stupid for words.

The labyrinthine, yet simple-minded, plot involves spiders emerging from geodes studded with diamonds. Yes, I'm serious. (And yet somehow only one person in the movie becomes aware that if you can get past the spiders, you can make a fortune.) There's a slightly worse problem in that when the spiders are left unchecked, they tend to grow. How big? Oh, to about the size of a VW Bug with eight mechanically-waving legs attached. (You can see the Bug in a scene or two.) To make it even better, the cast is a who's-who of bad television-- Barbara Hale, Steve Brodie, Robert Easton (whose character, an alcoholic pedophile, is the only really creepy thing about the movie), and Leslie Parrish, augmented with softcore star Diane Lee Hart (as the object of Easton's character's affection). With a stable of acting talent like that, the question is not how you can go wrong, but how you can go right. Top it off with a bottom-of-the-barrel script (co-written by Easton, which makes his character even creepier) and truly lame direction from schlockmeister Bill Rebane, best-remembered these days for Blood Harvest (starring Tiny Tim as an insane clown), and you've got perfect Mystery Science Theater 3000 material. Me? I saw it played straight. Pity me. *

When you go into a film knowing the terrifying creature of the title is a Volkswagon Bug tricked up like a small town pest control float, you really have no one but yourself to blame for suffering through the crushing anti-entertainment (I hestitate to use the phrase...) "production values" of this direct-to-the-dumpster trash class-sick. Marry a plot of cosmic, vaguely Lovecraftian proportions to 50s-style scientists and moist hillbilly sex, greed and booze domestic drama, fold in the afore-mentioned motorized monster Muppet and serve it all up on a budget that wouldn't get you an extra topping on a pizza - and you begin to comprehend the sleazy splendor that is Giant Spider Invasion. So where the heck do the 3 stars come from? For starters - from the very elements noted above. Viewers with a appreciation for the tart taste of trash know the film delivers a full course meal. This disc received an additional 2 stars by offering folks outside of North East Ohio an introduction to Son of Ghoul, a horror host for over 16 years in the Cleveland area, who kicks off the disc with a wild and wooley trip to the car wash. It seems his sidekick, Fidge, is bedeviled by dandruff, and an industrial strength shower is the only way to take care of the problem. Class stuff - and a great way to slide into a flick of this...er..."quality". Son of Ghoul also hosts discs for Brides Wore Blood and Garden of Death - and hopefully we'll see more in the future!

I am so very ashamed that I made my Dad drag me to see this crapfest in theaters in 1975 when I was about 6 years old. I remember seeing the ad in the Sunday paper and thinking "I have to see that!".
All I remember is there were about 10 people in the theater and some of them were smoking (what I don't recall).
I'm even more ashamed to admit I ran out of the theater during the secne where a woman runs to a barn and a giant spider (or stuffed pillow being pushed) attacks her. You see, I was and still am terrfied of spiders and coupled with the fact that I was 6 I ran like a fool. My dad failed to convince me to go back in so we left. He later thanked me for him not having to watch any more of the film.
I am proud that we got MST3000 to air this by request and they destroyed it which was awesome!
All these years later I finally have this abysmal disgrace on DVD and to say the least I'm not scared-only by the fact that this somehow played theaters! Still, what a glorious time when a pathetic film such as this could actually get into a theater. The best part-when Alan Hale says "Little buddy" when on the phone.

Like many, I enjoy a good bad movie, and this one is legendarily bad. This "director's cut" has some very subtle edits from the version most of us might have been used to from "MST3K", most notably the insertion of some stock military footage at the beginning of the movie (which adds nothing), the mysterious removal of Alan Hale's "Hi little buddy!", and a few other minor edits. There is also a very brief snippet of nudity, completely gratuitous and not especially interesting. The picture is a bit sharper than other versions I've seen, but the transfer is horrible, making the picture jumpy, almost like watching an old filmstrip. Some of the supplemental material is mildly interesting at first, but becomes tedious very quickly. In particular, home videos of efforts to find and retrieve the original giant spider out of the woods of northern Wisconsin were raw footage and nearly unwatchable. From here, the documentary-type footage became sad as friends of Bill Rebane and fans of the movie try to raise funds to restore the spider and nobody else shows any interest. The multiple interviews with Rebane, and his commentary during the film, add nothing of any real substance. In short, this version is probably of interest only to hard-core fans.