Kingdom Of The Spiders (DVD)

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KHAAAAAAAAAAAN&er&I mean, SPIIIIIIDEEEEERS!

"Kingdom of the Spiders" is pure 70´s cornball, drive-in cheese. This is a classic man vs. nature story that borrows liberally from "Jaws" and "The Birds." And William Shatner is in it. Oh, yeah.

The Shat plays Dr. Robert "Rack" Hansen, a veterinarian in the sleepy Arizona town of Camp Verde. Rack´s brother was killed in Vietnam so he looks after his wife, Terry (Shatner´s then-wife Marcy Laffterty), and daughter, Linda (Natasha Ryan). One day, Rack is called out to the farm of Walter Colby (the late, great-Woody Strode) whose prize calf was found dead. The good doctor can´t figure out what killed it so he sends a blood sample to the University of Arizona. Their top etymologist, Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling), arrives convinced that it was spider venom that killed the calf. Bolling, by the way, beat out other actresses because she was the only one who wasn´t squeamish about spiders crawling on her body.

Rack doesn´t believe an itty bitty spider could have caused the death of such a large animal. But, Colby shows them a massive spider hill housing hundreds of tarantulas. Ashley hypothesizes that man´s use of chemical pesticides, like DDT, have destroyed the spiders´ food supply. As a result, the tarantulas have turned more aggressive in order to prey on bigger targets. Much like the mayor of Amity Island, the Mayor Connors (Roy Engel) doesn´t want anything to ruin the county fair and orders for more pesticides to kill off the spiders.

Predictably, that plan doesn´t work and the spiders run amok. Rack, Ashley, and a few other survivors hole up at a lodge outside of town, trying desperately to keep the spiders out.

Don´t expect to see giant, mutant spiders as you would in a 50´s B-movie. These are regular tarantulas who´ve been riled up because of man´s environmental carelessness. The message is hammered home rather heavily, but it´s hard to take anything about this movie seriously. "Kingdom" is campy through and through which is part of its charm. Shatner isn´t the hambone he sometimes is. Heck, his performance here is downright minimalist compared to some of his other roles. You can´t say the same for some of the other actors. In particular, there´s a scene with Lafferty hysterically screaming at the top of her lungs with a broom in hand trying to sweep the spiders away from her daughter. Out of everyone involved, Woody Strode seems to be the most even handed. That is, until the spiders kill him. You can tell Woody has to slap the arachnid onto his face in order to make it look it attacked him.

Speaking of those poor spiders, most of the scenes in this film wouldn´t pass the muster nowadays because of the stringent. The production budget was half a million dollars with $50,000 spent on rounding up Mexican tarantulas. The poor creatures are sprayed with fire extinguishers and inadvertently stepped on by extras. Some of them are clearly crushed under the wheel of a cop car. The score is overly melodramatic full of screeching string instruments to signify tense moments. The score is stock music with some tracks previously used in "The Twilight Zone."