The Spider (1958)


Along with such directors as William Castle and Roger Corman there was Bert I. Gordon.  Castle loved his gimmicks, Corman loved making money and Gordon liked everything big.  Big bugs, big animals, big men.  Just not big budgets.  While some have dismissed Gordon as being along the lines of Ed Wood that is unfair.  Gordon's movies were not spectacular, definitely not classics, but they were at least passable entertainment, where only a handful of Wood's movies were watchable.  

Gordon not only directed his films but did most of the special effects for them as well.  That is where issues pop up, and it was an issue that followed American International Pictures into the 1970s.  Where Ray Harryhausen was a master of stop motion and Toho had guys in suits stomping around miniature cities, Gordon often used forced perspective or set a small creature loose among his models.  Sometimes this worked better than could be expected but often resulted in laughable results.  By the time The Spider, aka Earth vs. the Spider came out the giant mutated bug genre was on its last six or eight legs and he knew it.  However, this is the one where much of what he was trying to do came together.

Mike Simpson (Eugene Persson) and Carol Flynn (June Kenney) are a teenage couple in a small California town.  When Carol's father goes missing they go searching for him, following clues to a cave that has a reputation for people getting lost.  What they find inside is a giant spider waiting for them.  They barely escape and, while the authorities don't believe them at first, they are able to convince their science teacher Art Kingman (Ed Kemmer).

Kingman and the local sheriff find the arachnid and, with a load of DDT, seemingly kill it.  While being stored in the high school gymnasium it comes back to life after awakened by rock and roll music and attacks the town on its way back to the cave.  Not knowing that the spider has awakened Carol and Mike return to the cave to find a necklace her father had meant to give her for her birthday.  However, Kingman has a plan to seal the cave and starve the spider; they just aren't aware that the kids are in there with it. 

Gordon did the effects on this and, unlike Beginning of the End, they are somewhat passable.  The miniature work isn't bad and the major rampage on the town is done pretty well. The spider makes a bunch of noise that a spider wouldn't make just so there's a sound effect.  Although Tarantula is the superior film, and one in which a live spider was also used, the effects in The Spider are much better.  It blends a little bit better with its surroundings and doesn't rely on filming it in shadow to make it work.  I also like the fact that there is never an explanation for why the creature is as big as it is.  It just happened to get big in a tunnel, not from toxic waste or nuclear bombs, but just because.

There are still many of the usual problems I have with not just Gordon's films from this era, but most of the similar ones.  None of these were meant to be features, so they are short, and there wasn't a lot of effort to stretch them past the 70-minute mark.  Even so, there are large sections where people are walking from one place to another when the scene could have cut.  Also, the dialog, which is not that great to begin with, tends to get repetitive.  This does have much more spider action in it than one would expect but there is still a lot of time spent on goofy scenes or long periods of exposition, including talking about characters who never appear on screen.

Still, it's not the worst of the '50s "giant something attacks" films that I've seen, nor is it one of the worst Bert I. Gordon films.  It is far from a classic but would have served its purpose as a supporting feature in a Saturday matinee of the time.  It provides light, forgettable entertainment, just as Gordon intended. 

The Spider (1957)
Time: 73 minutes
Starring: Eugene Persson, June Kenney, Ed Kemmer
Director: Bert I. Gordon

 

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