I’m not a fan of spiders, but there is something a bit endearing about some of the tarantulas in 1977’s Kingdom of the Spiders. One in particular is just trying to through a doorway and then the person who just exited slams the door shut. The spider is knocked back on its feet, only to jump back upright and assume a pose which is unmistakably an expression of umbrage. You can imagine it exclaiming, “Why I never!”. Another one is handled very gently by Tiffany Bolling and it calmly steps off her hand when she lowers it to the ground. Then it just kind of jauntily trots off. God forbid, but it’s cute. One seems to be in pursuit of a truck, and I admire its initiative.
She is university etymologist who comes to remote Arizona to investigate spiders that have been killing dogs and even cattle. Veterinarian William Shatner had sent blood samples to be analyzed, as he is baffled by the cause of death. Bolling will later come to the conclusion the bugs, which are normally cannibals and which don’t collaborate, have had to move on to bigger game after pesticides remove their primary food sources. They even line in giant mounds. Wouldn’t it be something it they learned how to make a honey-like substance?
That would be a step too far in this movie, one which is largely ridiculous, but which hews closer to this side of reality than any giants insect stuff from the 50’s. To the film’s credit, these are conventionally-sized tarantulas.
The challenge the picture faces, and which it fails to sufficiently meet, is there is only so much you can do with spiders. So, it also has a love triangle as Shatner pursues Bolling, while Marcy Lafferty is still after him. She is the widow of his brother, with whom had a daughter (Natasha Ryan). The first scene has Shatner and Lafferty pursuing a bull, which he lassos. She remarks, “That was adequate”, and I was wondering if she already told him that at least once earlier that same day and in a considerably different context. Then there’s some horseplay, during which she kills the mood by calling him by his brother’s name. There will later be an odd conversation between them where she asks if their relationship is like him having the cow and giving the milk away for free, something which didn’t make a great deal of sense to me. He says that, one day, he’s going to come over to her house and milk that cow…which is a weird and vaguely gross way to say he’s going to put a ring on it.
Alas, she is no match for Bolling, though this scientist is strictly business until she is inexplicably swayed by Shatner’s smarmy charm (shmarm?). I like this exchange between him and her: “How would you like some dinner tonight?” ‘I probably will. I’ll see you in the morning.” I wish she would have remained a no-nonsense professional through the course of the runtime but, alas, conventions of the genre require that she not just be a scientist, but a woman, too. I especially wish she would have stayed the course when she has such lines as “Would you be less skeptical if a man told you?”
I enjoyed the film more when it was these casual interactions between these admittedly thinly-defined characters. It almost feels like the animals getting killed by the tarantulas are parallel to that melodrama. Naturally, there will need to be a driver to ramp up the scale of the spider attacks, and that is the annual county fair which provides the bulk of the area’s tourist dollars for the year. It might as well be the Fourth of July weekend, complete with Shatner saying they’re going to need a bigger can of bug spray.
This picture is more competently made than I expected. I don’t recall noticing even a single frame out of focus, which is something I was inevitable for this type of picture in that era. The scenery is gorgeous, though the colors are a bit muted. The soundtrack is also about what I would expect, opening with a bad, county-ish song with a chorus I would have thought was “peaceful birdy valley”, except for the credit up at that exact moment informing me it is actually “Peaceful Verde Valley”. Regardless, it isn’t “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by The Eagles, so we can all be thankful for that.
I’d like to single out Ryan, a child actor whose performance isn’t amazing, but which is natural and enjoyable. One bit she does which greatly amused me is the offense she takes when Shatner asks her if she knows how to spread a picnic blanket on the ground. For whatever reason, I can imagine her as a stereotypical old Jewish woman from Brooklyn, saying stuff like, “Do I know how to spread the blanket he asks me. Gives me a pain in the tuckus he does.”
Kingdom of the Spiders is better than I thought it would be before starting the film, but it isn’t as good as the first half had me hoping it would be. A better movie would have tightened the action and allowed Bolling to remain a strong, independent woman. The movie is weakened by moments like the prankish Shatner, on first meeting her, directing her to men’s room of the gas station. The gas station owner panics: “Hey, what a minute! What is she doing in there?” Go figure—even back then people were a bit too concerned about which bathroom people were using.
Dir: John ‘Bud’ Carlos
Starring William Shatner, Tiffany Bolling
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray