Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

Jaws was one of the first big blockbusters and a number of studios spent the rest of the 1970s making cheap knockoffs of it.  However, there are only so many times that one can have an oversized predator (or swarm of them) attacking tourists and locals as a major event comes up before people get bored.  However, it seems they never got bored of seeing animals get their own against humans, whether those creatures be normal or supersized.  The "nature attacks" films pretty much were their own subgenre and, as in any, they were of varying quality, from amazing to amazingly bad.  Kingdom of the Spiders falls somewhere in the middle.

When Walter Colby's (Woody Strode) prize calf suddenly dies local veterinarian 'Rack' Hansen (William Shatner) sends samples of the animal's blood to a lab in Flagstaff to have it examined.  The results are sent to Arizona State University, where an expert in entomology named Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) travels to the town of Camp Verde.  It comes back that an illness didn't kill the calf, but rather a bite from a venomous spider.

It turns out that a group of tarantulas, who have suddenly become poisonous and highly aggressive due to dwindling food supplies, are passing through the town.  They have also begun hunting in packs.  At first it's the livestock and pets, but soon the townspeople start falling victim as more and more of the spiders invade.  With the town in chaos and Sheriff Gene Smith (David McLean) unable to keep control, Hansen, Ashley and a group of survivor's hole up in a hotel owned by Emma Washburn (Lieux Dressler) and attempt to survive the night.

There are a lot of problems that distract from what, ultimately, is a pretty good movie that in the last act becomes Night of the Living Dead, but with spiders.  It's not the whole part about venomous tarantulas, as these particular spiders get a bad rap just for being large.  It's made clear these are not normal tarantulas and that they have adapted due to the overuse of DDT and other pesticides that have killed off their natural food supply.  I appreciate that these are not giant spiders, but rather ordinary sized arachnids.  But, that is just it.  They are arachnids.  No entomologist would be calling arachnids insects, which Diane Ashley repeatedly does.  They are arthropods, which include insects, but that also includes such things as horseshoe crabs and shrimp.  This is like making a movie about Jane Goodall and having her call Chimpanzees monkeys.  It may be just a movie, but when other films about fantastically large spiders can get it right, it's hilarious that an environmentally conscious horror film cannot. 

The other problem is that, although some of this was filmed in Camp Verde and it was nice to see the town as I remember it from stopping there on trips to Flagstaff and Payson, the majority was filmed in Sedona.  I had not seen the film in quite a long time and seeing the rock formations that are specific to Sedona threw me off, as did Camp Verde, a town in Yavapai County, being part of "Verde County".  There was no reason to make up a fictional county for a real town that has quite a bit of history. 

Those problems aside, and the horrible exposition that Tiffany Bolling is given to spout, a good portion of Kingdom of the Spiders is a lot of fun.  It is PG, but 1970s PG, which means some of the violence exceeds PG-13 ratings of today.  I forgot about a number of scenes since I remember this playing regularly on Saturday afternoons in the 1980s, which means the film was edited for television.  Even then the images of corpses covered in webs as well as the final shot, despite being an obvious matte painting, remained with me all these years.

A major question, of course, is how does William Shatner do.  It's easy to forget he has done many roles other than Captain James T. Kirk and that, at this point in his career, the show was pretty much behind him.  He didn't want to do the movie but he was talked into it and it has become a highlight of his non-Star Trek career.  Truth is, the rough horse-riding cowboy seems much more him anyway.  Despite the way he is made fun of for his atypical line delivery and his obvious ego, Kingdom of the Spiders hints at a career he may have had if Roddenberry hadn't managed to get Star Trek: The Motion Picture produced.  

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

Time: 97 minutes

Starring: William Shatner, Tiffany Bolling, Woody Strode, David McLean, Lieux Dressler

Director: John 'Bud' Cardos