Tom Atkins and Howard Hesseman pick up a quick paycheck in 1977 telefilm Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo. It looks like they’re going to be the stars of this, except they’re out of the picture in about 15 minutes or so.
These two had been flying a plane full of coffee out of Ecuador, after taking on some unexpected passengers. By that, I mean the three people sneaking out of the country for whatever reason. And, oh yeah, a whole bunch of deadly tarantulas. Hence why the movie isn’t called Illegal Immigrants: The Deadly Cargo.
Anywho, the plane crashes, killing every non-arachnid inside. Mind you, the budget doesn’t provide for us to be able to see the crash, though I was still impressed with the resulting wreckage staged in a field.
After the crash, things already start getting a bit wobbly with this affair. Not only have you killed off the two you thought were going to be their leads, but now you’re stuck with Claude Akins as the sheriff you’ve seen him play so many times, that it is almost like he is a recurring character across a great many films and shows. There’s also fellow screen veterans Pat Hingle as the town doctor and Bert Remsen as the owner of a produce warehouse. The last seems to be channeling the mayor from Jaws, with a similar focus on money over the welfare of the local populace. One indication you’re watching a made-for-TV is film when most of your leads have been card-carrying AARP members for a while.
And I am fan of such films, though the ones about attacking animals rarely fare well. This is no exception, and it seems to compensate for the relative lack of spider action by instead following other tangents.
Consider the crashed plane and how the film spends too much time on that plot point. Ideally, it would go straight from wreckage to spiders escaping to a ton of human-arachnid conflict. Instead, the plane leaks fuel, and the townfolk dig a ditch to redirect the flammable liquid, but a lone guy on a motorcycle who somehow didn’t notice there’s a huge crash site right there decides the jump that ditch. He fails in that attempt, and his motorcycle falls into that rather small ditch, igniting that directed fuel and starting a huge fire. I’m sure this wasn’t meant to be funny, but I laughed hard for quite a while. I’ll take my laughs where I can get them. Then again, I also laughed when a woman rolling unconsciously down a hill appears to whack her head on a passing tree, and I was immediately was embarrassed by my reaction.
But, if you’re in the right frame of mind, there is much to laugh at here, or at least find oneself bewildered by. There’s the plan to stun the spiders by using a large guitar amp to maximize the sound of angry wasps. There’s a wildly incongruous song over the opening credits I can only describe as “Do The Funky Tarantula”. There’s Hesseman’s preposterous Suh-thern accent. There’s Atkins and Hesseman treating the coffee like they’re smuggling drugs, speculating about the street value in San Francisco (I suspect it was narcotics in an early script and then revised for TV censors). Whatever is in the plane is clearly not coffee in the wider shots, and I swear they used gravel, instead. I love the idea that these two might be trying to smuggle gravel into the US. Lastly, is it really possible to suck poison out of a spider bite, like one can do with a snake bite? I don’t care to it up–I have just never seen this done in a film before.
What is most peculiar about Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is the weird behavior of almost everybody in the town most of the action takes place in, chiefly, nobody seems to be in a hurry to get to the site of that plane crash, with most people being irritated to have been woken up—in the middle of the day. Maybe there was to yet another subplot, one where half the town are vampires. Why couldn’t I have seen that movie instead?
Dir: Stuart Hagmann
Starring Claude Akins, Charles Frank, Deborah Winters
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray