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THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION – The Blu Review – We Are Movie Geeks

Blu-Ray Review

THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION – The Blu Review

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Wisconson-based regional filmmaker Bill Rebane’s no-budget wonder ($300k to be exact) THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION was a hilariously cheesy 1975 throwback to the giant-monster flicks of the 50s, a trend then enjoying a revival with films like EMPIRE OF THE ANTS and FOOD OF THE GODS. This outrageous mix of giant monster motifs and backwoods sleaze plays like a hybrid of TARANTULA and THE BLOB with its mixture of giant spiders and falling meteors. I saw THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION at the long-shuttered Ellisville Cinema in West St. Louis County (on a double bill with the David Niven vampire comedy OLD DRACULA). I recall the poster in the lobby which featured a gargantuan spider bearing down on a group of terrified people. In the air above the mega-arachnid was three helicopters and lying crumpled at the spider’s legs were burning cars as spotlights filled the sky. One of the terrorized was a busty young blonde wearing only a negligee. I was jazzed, convinced I was about to experience the greatest cinematic thrill ride of my young life. Upon purchasing my ticket, I was handed a cool 4-page full-color comic book adaption of the film (which I of course still have).

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The main character in THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION, Farmer Dan Kester, is played by Robert Easton who cowrote the screenplay and looks dashing in his red longjohns. Easton was a grizzled character actor known for playing hillbillies and rednecks but, as a master of accents and dialects, was considered one of a Hollywood top dialect coaches. Anyway, Kester discovers his field is full of dead cattle that surround a large hole in the ground. He also stumbles upon some baseball-sized rocks (constantly referred to as “geodes”) which, when busted open, contain what appears to be diamonds. Kester’s farmhouse is white trash enchantment. His boozy wife Ev (Leslie Parrish – LIL ABNER’s Daisy Mae) is an bitchy lush, so he lusts after her jailbait little sister (Dianne Lee Hart who performed in Drive-in gems as LINDA LOVELACE FOR PRESIDENT and THE POM POM GIRLS and, despite a PG rating, is topless in THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION) and still finds time to carry on an affair with a local waitress (Christiana Schmidtmer, the warden in THE BIG DOLL HOUSE). When busting open the geodes, Kester doesn’t realize that he also exposes some spider eggs, and his home is soon crawling with furry tarantulas. In the film’s best-remembered gross-out scene, one of the crawling critters tumbles into the blender of Parrish’s Bloody Mary mix, and she unknowingly slurps down the Tarantula Smoothie. Her disgust is short-lived as she’s soon being attacked by a dog-sized spider puppet that pops out of her sock drawer which she is forced to catch and make look real.

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That puppet later grows enormous, and at that point this “queen” spider is played by an altered Volkswagen Beetle dressed in a furry dark rug and eight giant hairy legs. That’s right, THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION is known as the film where the bug was played by a bug. Rebane had it made when the film’s distributor insisted that his film include creature special effects to rival the shark in JAWS, which was then in production. Rebane says in an archival interview on the new THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION Blu-ray that found a VW sitting at the studio and a a friend suggested it would make a good spider. Rebane’s friend Carl Pfantz figured it out. “Pfantz’s steel framework was covered with black Fun Fur to make the spiders both hairy and scary.” said Rebane, “The mechanical nature of the beast required seven teens to be stuffed within the cramped confines of the VW floorpan to work the spider’s legs.”

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What’s especially charming (and awful) about the queen spider is that it is so obviously built atop a Volkswagen Beetle frame. I was 13 when I saw it and remember thinking to myself “Hey, that spider is a built atop a Volkswagen Beetle frame!”. During its nighttime rampage down the streets of Merrill, Wisconsin (actually the day for night photography switches to night for day within the same scenes), its orb-like eyes pulse with an orange glow resembling taillights (were they driving it backwards?). Really, one does have to appreciate the low-budget ingenuity, but still, the end result is less of a menace and more of a loathsomely hairy parade float. Seeing people get sucked upside down into one of these things, blood gushing and all, is a site to behold. Other veterans in the cast are Barbara Hale (“Perry Mason”) and Steve Brodie as a NASA scientists who deduce the invasion (with various scientific-sounding language) to be the result of some sort of intergalactic gateway, a plan thwarted when they simply close it off, draining the spiders of their energy and causing them to melt into puddles of disgusting but colorful sludge. THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION is never for a moment dull and is the kind of movie worthy a large interactive audience (it’s a favorite of fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000, who memorably skewered it)

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Director Rebane had MONSTER A-GO GO (co-directed by Herschel Gordon Lewis), RANA THE LEGEND OF SHADOW LAKE under his belt, and went on to make THE CAPTURE OF BIGFOOT and BLOOD HARVEST (starring Tiny Tim!) but THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION remains his most watchable film. By today’s phony, technologically dependent, CGI-enhanced, multi-billion dollar standards it’s a piece of crap, but in terms of extras, the folks at VCI Entertainment have treated it, with their new 3-disc (!) Blu-ray release, as if it’s CITIZEN KANE.

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VCI’s 1.85:1 aspect ratio 1080 transfer is nothing to write home about but it’s likely the best the 81-minute long film has ever looked. It’s a soft image with some vertical scratches and other wear, but those who are used to seeing the MST3K version (which I’d bet is how most people initially saw the film) will see scenes that were previously too dark to discern. A couple of scenes cut from TV prints (Miss Hart’s breasts and a nauseating single-shot scene where a tarantula crawls into a blender which is then switched on, are restored. The Linear PCM 2.0 stereo track sounds about what you’d expect from a 40-year old movie made for $300k, which is to say that it won’t be something to test your sound system with but it’s acceptable.

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The extras that VCI dug up for THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION are beyond impressive:

  • 16-minute featurette “Size Does Matter! Making The Giant Spider Invasion” – Daniel Griffith, of Ballyhoo Motion Pictures, has produced several of these informative making-of docs for various cult films. This one is mostly based around interviews with director Rebane who discusses his early life in the industrial film biz and his first film TERROR AT HALFDAY (1961), which he regrets turning over to Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose re-editing resulted in MONSTER A GO-GO! (1965). Rebane talks at length about the making of his giant VW spider while rare photos are shown of the teens climbing in it. He discusses the film’s cast and mentions that Leslie Parrish had a ‘chip on her shoulder’ and wasn’t thrilled to be involved. He discusses the box-office success of the film, which was one of the 20 top-grossing films of 1975 (it was released the same month as the Charles Bronson classic HARD TIMES!). This doc does not run as long as some others that Griffith has done, but it’s his typical slick, involving, and well-researched effort.
  • The Super-8 Version of THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION “The Original Home Movie Format” – runs 28 minutes and is from my collection. I lent it to VCI to transfer digitally as an extra. They’ve done a terrible job with this transfer, frankly. I’ve watched this print a couple of times (and even showed it publicly at my Super-8 Giant Monster Movie Madness show in 2012), and it doesn’t look or sound nearly as bad as what ended up on this disc. The picture is unwatchably muddy and the sound is not only out-of-synch, but the voices are high; indicating that the projector speed was off. It’s a neat extra, and I’d like to see more Super-8 cuts on future discs (these pop up on some European DVDs and Blus, but Media Blaster’s DESTROY ALL MONSTERS is the only U.S. Blu release I can think of that has included one), but I could have done a better transfer in my basement than what they’ve done here. They should also have had someone introducing it, explaining what Super-8 films were to put it in context. They just play it so anyone unfamiliar with the format may wonder what the heck this hideous mini-film is.
  • A re-edited Super-8 HD Version – is an odd extra. They’ve taken the HD source and cut it to match my Super-8 cut. The vocals are the right speed this time, which explains why it runs 2 minutes longer than what they’re matching. A pointless extra considering the edit isn’t all that great, cutting much of the spider stuff and including too much Brodie/Hale exposition.
  • Kevin Murphy introduces Bill Rebane – runs 7 minutes and is just what it sounds like. The MST3K comic introduces director Rebane at a Bill Rebane Film Festival in Madison Wisconsin in 2005. Rebane then takes the mic and says a few words.
  • Archival Interview with Bill Rebane – This is a nice 17-minute piece that looks like was shot for a local TV news show. Rebane talks a lot on the set of his 1981 horror film RANA, THE LEGEND OF SHADOW LAKE and it’s an interesting look at regional, low-budget filmmaking
  • Interview with Robert Easton – As I mentioned, Easton, who played Farmer Kester in the film, was one of Hollywood best-known dialect coaches, known as the “Henry Higgins of Hollywood”, though he usually acted on film in TV as hillbillies and rednecks. The sound is poor and it could have used some editing (do we need to see his empty chair for 30 seconds?) but this is a good, 17-minute sit-down interview with Easton from 2005 (he died in 2011) who has great recollection of THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION and even does some voices.
  • Behind the Scenes Photo Gallery – extensive indeed – rare, behind-the-scenes photos and newspaper clippings are presented with comments – runs 15 minutes.
  • Comic Book – this is a partial reprint of the old 4-page full-color comic book adaption of the film that was handed out to theaters in 1975. The cover is different and it is shrunk down to fit in the Blu case (the original was 14 x 8 inches)
  • Liner notes – the reverse side of the Blu cover features liner notes credited to me. I sent a 1200-word retrospective of THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION to the folks at VCI, at their request, but what they ended up printing here bears almost no resemblance to what I sent them (though much of what I wrote has been reformatted and is in the first few paragraphs of the article you are currently reading). What they’ve printed is an interesting, trivia-filled read but it feels weird to have my name attached to something I do not write (and I wonder what the person who did write it thinks).
  • A bonus CD – containing 14 tracks from the upcoming stage adaption called The Giant Spider Invasion – The Musical, which I have not yet listened to.

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What the folks at VCI have done with their Blu of THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION is astounding and any fan of the film should hurry and purchase this immersive, final-word set. My beef with the end result is personal and I don’t want to discourage anyone from buying it. It’s available from VCI Entertainment site HERE 

And check out this vintage GIANT SPIDER INVASION trailer: