Earth vs. the Spider
| release date | August 31 1958 |
| studio | American International Pictures (AIP) |
| director | Bert I. Gordon |
| writer | László Görög, George Worthing Yates |
| starring | Ed Kemmer, June Kenney, Eugene Persson, Gene Roth, Hal Torey |
| tagline | It Must Eat You to Live! |
1 Comments
A tacky and super-silly “Tarantula” rip-off from the master of shoddiness Bert I. Gordon, the man who’s also responsible for disasters like “Food Of The Gods” or “Empire Of The Ants”.
The story is quasi non-existent: a giant spider goes apehsit and attacks a small American town until it finally gets electrocuted – that’s it. We don’t get to know why the creature is so large, where it comes from and why it’s able to scream and growl. The special effects are horrendous: the spider’s web is obviously a rope net, the bodies and skeletons in the cave all look extremely cheap, and the spider constantly seems to change its size. The acting is mostly lame, the dialogue is simply dumb and I totally hate the fact that they repeatedly refer spiders to insects, which is absolutely wrong!
Still, there are at least a few really entertaining scenes: the spider attacks which are all fun, the surprising opening kill, the hilarious scene where the spider gets re-awakened by a rock’n'roll band and the outrageous scene where the sheriff kills a normal-sized spider in his office (made me ROFL).
50s trash at its best/worst.