Earth vs. the Spider (1958)

... aka: Die Rache der schwarzen Spinne (Revenge of the Black Spider)

... aka: Earth vs. the Giant Spider

... aka: L'araignée vampire (The Vampire Spider)

... aka: Spider, The

... aka: Spindeln

Directed by:

Bert I. Gordon

When her father doesn't return home from a late night trip to Pasadena, high school student Carol Flynn (June Kenney) talks her boyfriend Mike (Eugene Persson) into borrowing a car and retracing her father's path. They soon stumble upon an accident site and some jewelry the dad had purchased for Carol lying on the side of the road. Locating the vehicle wreckage over an embankment, they venture on to a cave that's rumored by locals to be cursed. Those who've ignored the "No Trespassing" sign posted out front have a bad habit of never being seen again. Nonetheless, the teens figure the father may have been injured in the crash and wandered inside for shelter. They descend deep into the large cave, finding skeletal remains along the way, and then are almost impaled by a stalactite. After falling over an unexpected drop-off, they find themselves landing on something sticky and silky, which turns out to be a giant spiderweb. They then meet the beast of the title, which is mostly played by a regular sized "bird spider" (tarantula) made to appear giant through Gordon's (cheap and usually unconvincing) rear-projection fx.

Managing to escape from the spider's lair, Carol and Mike make it back to town to try to warn everybody. Their visit to Sheriff Cagle (Gene Roth) is a bust as he doesn't believe them, so they immediately go to their science teacher, Dr. Art Kingman (Edward Kemmer). Art convinces the Sheriff and his men to organize an expedition to search the cave. There, they find the remains of Carol's dad and then run across the spider. Though it kills the deputy, they manage to fill it with lead and hit it with a powerful concentrate of DDT. Now with the spider dead, the Sheriff proposes sealing up the cave entrance, while Art has another idea: Take it out of the cave and give it to the university so they can learn more about "genes that control organic growth." The teacher gets his way and the spider is temporarily transported into town and put on display in the high school auditorium.

A distraught Carol convinces Mike to go back to the spider's cave to help her find a bracelet she dropped (the last thing her father ever got her). Meanwhile, Joe (Troy Patterson) convinces janitor Hugo (Hank Patterson) to let him and his band mates into the auditorium so they can practice. The janitor agrees and then Joe instructs everyone to play so "loud enough to wake the dead." Some drama students wander in and start dancing and then the spider springs back to life... Revived by rock 'n' roll! It then breaks down a wall and then wreaks havoc on the isolated mountain community of River Falls.

After the spider adequately rampages about town, almost getting Art's wife Helen (Sally Fraser, from IT CONQUERED THE WORLD) and their baby in the process, it finally makes its way back to its cave home. Deciding that the Sheriff's initial idea to seal it inside was the correct one, they follow is back to the cave, place some dynamite and set off an explosion that causes a rock slide that closes off the entrance. Good, right? Well, not quite. Unfortunately, Carol and Mike are still inside and have had to make their way out onto a narrow ledge the spider can't access. The pest exterminators then have to turn into a rescue team and find a way back inside to retrieve the kids while also trying to find a way to put the spider out of commission for good.

Spider is part of size-obsessed director Gordon's cycle of schlocky giant whatever films that also includes the titular giant reptile of King Dinosaur (1954), the giant grasshoppers of Beginning of the End (1956), the giant rats, wasps, worms and chickens of THE FOOD OF THE GODS (1976) and the formidable Formicidae of EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977). He also made a bunch of movies featuring extra-large people, like the one-eyed giant of The Cyclops (1957), the radiation-enlarged scientist in THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) and WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST (1958), and the gigantic juvies of Village of the Giants (1965). For a slight change of pace he also made a miniature person movie called ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE (1958). Aside from Cyclops, Food and Empire (which they probably couldn't get the rights to), all of the other films listed above plus two other Gordon efforts were ridiculed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which gives Gordon the distinction of being the most covered director in that show's history.

In any case, Spider actually isn't that bad, at least as far as entertainment value is concerned. Sure, the film has some major problems, like stiff amateurish acting from some of the cast (though leads Kemmer, Kenney, Persson and Roth are decent), thirty-five-year-old's laughably being cast as high school students and a plot almost completely lacking in originality. The worst aspect is the completely unconvincing special effects for the spider... and not just because you can sometimes see through it! This film loses an entire half point just for breaking one of my biggest monster movie pet peeves: Inconsistent size. You'd figure a director as caught up with proportions as Gordon would be a little more OCD about such things but, seeing how the spider looks the size of a car in one scene and then towering over buildings the next, that doesn't appear to be the case. Still, I must point out that as bad as the fx are at times, they're still more convincing than the majority of modern B-movie fx in that they used a real spider instead of a computer-generated cartoon one.

Not that this doesn't have its good points. It's pretty fun and upbeat most of the time. It's also seldom given credit for being one of the better-paced 50s monster movies and generally avoids the feeling of being needlessly dragged out. There's even a pretty good sense of humor at times, as well as amusingly shameless self-promotion. Gordon is wily enough to make the Mike character the son of a theater owner and the father a big fan of the director's work. There are posters for The Amazing Colossal Man outside and Mike initially puts up some resistance to taking Carol to the caves cause "My dad just got in a new picture and I haven't even seen it yet. It's something about puppet people. Sounds pretty wild."

Gordon not only wrote the original story and produced, but he also did the special effects along with wife Flora Gordon and Paul Blaisdell, who's given a "special designer" credit. The cave scenes were filmed at both Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico and Bronson Canyon in Los Angeles and Universal Studios backlots were used for the exterior town sequences. This was "remade" (well, they at least reused the title) as a 2001 cable TV movie starring Dan Aykroyd, which was also executive produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff.

Spider played theaters as both a standalone feature and as part of a double bill that also included THE BRAIN EATERS (1958). There were DVD releases from both Lions Gate and MGM/UA as well as a DVD release of the film with MST3K commentary from Shout! Factory, followed by a Scream Factory Blu-ray release in 2020.

★★

From Hell It Came (1957)

... aka: La vuelta del monstruo (The Return of the Monster)
... aka: Veio do Inferno (It Came from Hell)

Directed by:
Dan Milner

After being accused of betraying his tribe and causing the death of the village chief / his father in the process, a young man named Kimo (Gregg Palmer) is sentenced to death by witch doctor Tano (Robert Swan). Kimo swears his innocence, accuses Tano and newly-appointed chief Maranka (Baynes Barron) of actually giving his father poison and claims Tano is just jealous of Americans because their medicine is stronger and more effective. None of that seems to make any difference to the rest of the tribe, especially after Kimo's own wife Korey (Suzanne Ridgway) betrays him and lies to back up Tano and Maranka. Kimo vows to return from hell to avenge both himself and his father and promises that "In death I will be stronger than you in life!" He then has a dagger driven into his heart, is placed in a wooden coffin and buried in a deep hole in the village graveyard.

The above execution spells trouble for a small group of scientists doing research on the same island as the former chief was friendly but the new chief and witch doctor are anything but. Yet they have pretty good reason to distrust and hate white man as a plague of death has been sweeping the island after nuclear fallout from an atom bomb test thousands of miles away was carried there by a typhoon and has decimated the population. That's what Dr. William Arnold (Tod Andews), Professor Clark (John McNamara) and Dr. Terry Mason (Tina Carver) have been stationed there to help with. After witnessing the execution from the brush, snoopy and opportunistic widow Mae Kilgore (Linda Watkins), who runs a trading post there and takes advantage of the natives trading cheap good for pearls and copper, rushes back to warn them and almost gets herself killed in the process.

While some of the natives, like Orchid (Grace Mathews), who hopes to earn enough money from the Americans to relocate, and Norgu (Lee Rhodes) and his successfully-treated, radiation-scarred wife Dori (Lenmana Guerin), are on the scientist's side, Tano and Maranka have turned virtually everyone else against them.

Some additional human drama has been added between both the scientists and villagers to buoy the entire first half of the film. On the scientist side, we have Bill trying to convince Terry to give up her career, marry him and have kids so she can be "just like other women." You know, because being a brilliant scientist who's saved countless lives instead of a married, stay-at-home mom means she must feel like a miserable, unfilled failure as a woman. Devaluing her accomplishments should be a big enough red flag, but there's an even simpler reason for her to tell Bill to stuff it: He's a total asshole.

On the villager side, we have Korey, who betrayed her husband in order to get with new village chief and is now herself being betrayed by Maranka as he's pushed her aside from another village woman named Naomi (Tani Marsh). Now Maranka is threatening to kill Korey if she tells anyone what they've done as he plots to kill all of the Americans with poison darts. No one feels sorry for Korey.

A small stump emerges from the ground on Kimo's grave and quickly begins to grow. Upon further investigation, the stump reveals to have a heart beat similar to that of a human. That fits in with a local legend about Tabanga, "the creature of revenge." Yes, Kimo's about to emerge from his grave as a walking, killing tree. Tano whips up a special "medicine" to spread at the base of the Tabanga in hopes that it will give him control over it but, before he even has a chance, Korey runs back to the scientists and rats them out. The scientist's then uproot the tree, bring it back to the lab and give it an overnight IV. When they return the following morning the tree has wrecked the place and is out in the jungle about to start a killing spree.

During the last 20 minutes, the Tabanga breaks up a lame cat fight between Korey and Naomi by picking Korey up and throwing her in a quicksand bog. It then smashes a guy against a tree, stabs another of the bad guys and rolls the body down a hill and manages to survive being burned in a hole. Eventually, it gets its limbs on Terry and threatens to toss her into the bog, which will likely be enough to scare her into spending the rest of her life as Suzy Homemaker and Bill's Baby Factory. She just better make sure his job provides good dental coverage as Bill told his colleague earlier in the film that she sometimes makes him so mad he "could kick her beautiful teeth in." Gee, how heartwarming.

My sympathies didn't really lie with any of the characters but with fx man Paul Blaisdell, who was given the impossible task of coming up with a big tree monster on a 1950s Z movie budget. But, honestly, he does a pretty commendable job under the circumstances. His Tabanga creation, while as cumbersome, ridiculous and non-threatening as you'd imagine a walking tree would be, probably looks about as good it possibly can. Yet poor Mr. Blaisdell usually ends up getting the brunt of the criticism in reviews for this title even though virtually everything else (the acting, the direction, the script...) is far worse than his contributions to the film.

This was the second (and last) monster movie from the short-lived Milner Brothers Productions, following THE PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES (1953). While Dan directed, his younger brother Jack Milner served as editor and producer, plus co-wrote the original story. Both men continued working in Hollywood for a number of years, but mostly on TV shows. While Dan was out of the business by 1962, Jack's career peaked in 1975 when he won an Emmy Award for his work in sound effects editing.

Released theatrically on an Allied Artists double bill with The Disembodied (1957), this was issued on DVD in 2009 by Warner Home Video as part of their "Archive Collection" and then was released on Blu-ray in 2017. It runs just 71 minutes.

★1/2