Directed by:Stuart Hagmann
A cargo plane carrying coffee beans, coming in from Ecuador and headed toward San Francisco, crashes in a small California town and unleashes a horde of everyone's favorite hairy spider unto the population. The spiders quickly scatter about after the crash and bite and kill a couple of people, so it's up to the town's fire chief (Claude Akins) and some others to come up with a solution to the problem that won't endanger either the citizens or the town's orange crop (which it financially depends on). And in this case, the solution involves stunning the tarantulas with amplified wasp sounds (!?) Charles Frank and Deborah Winters (BLUE SUNSHINE) star, along with Bert Remsen as the mayor, Howard Hesseman and Tom Atkins (NIGHT OF THE CREEPS) as the coffee importers who cause the problem and Pat Hingle as a doctor. Not a bad cast for a "movie of the week." It was nominated for two Daytime Emmy Awards (for sound editing and sound mixing) and was released the very same year as the much, much better KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS. Unlike Kingdom, Tarantulas is unexciting, too talky, completely unimaginative and almost entirely lacking in action. Even the scenes involving the spiders are weak. A theatrical release in Europe.
★1/2
Wow! A movie of the week! Don't see too many of them nowdays!
ReplyDeleteNope the only TV horrors they seem to make these days are Stephen King adaptations.
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