FILM REVIEWS

THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION

Film Reviewed by: Devon Ashby - Rue Morgue Magazine

I should first warn you that this movie has been MST3Ked, which obviously means that it sucks loads of dick. Released in the mid 1970s (admittedly a little past the prime of the giant bug subgenre), The Giant Spider Invasion features gloriously craptastic special effects, copious fiddle music, and Alan Hale Jr., who you may recognize as The Skipper from Gilligan's Island. The fun starts when a loud, mysterious, and psychedelically orange pulsating explosion is observed in a cow pasture in the middle of the night behind the dilapidated homestead of some perpetually drunk rednecks. This is followed by scientists blah-blahing about high radiation levels, which is in turn followed by everyone's favorite extraterrestrial-attributed science fiction phenomenon, mutilated cow carcasses. ?Along with their unceremoniously disemboweled livestock, the rednecks discover some brown baseball-sized spheres, which they intelligently decide to break open. In doing so, they unwittingly unleash a plague of intergalactic arachnids upon the citizens of Hicksville and its surrounding suburbs. Pretty soon giant webs are appearing everywhere, huge fuzzy spider puppets are lunging out of drawers, and people are turning up dead and partially eaten. Other highlights include naked boobies, gratuitous Jaws references ("That thing makes that shark look like a goldfish!") and a strange evangelical preacher who keeps appearing and being referred to throughout the film for no apparent reason whatsoever.

The film is rated PG and suffers mainly from being too long and not giving enough screen time to the ludicrously fake-looking giant spiders, which appear to be made out of pipe-cleaners, and are by far silly enough to have delivered the film from mediocrity had they been more effectively utilized by the filmmakers. As it stands, though, the film feels extremely padded, which is unfortunate since all the climactic scenes are so deliciously campy. Badly flawed but still worth seeing, although you might want to save yourself some time and just watch the trailer instead.