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4
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4 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Coming
near the end of the "When Animals Attack!" subgenre of the '70s,
Kingdom Of The Spiders is a competently
made, competently acted and thoroughly mediocre low budget horror
flick. The movie's only purpose is to serve as historical artifact
— this, folks, is how William Shatner paid the bills before
Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
In
a role John Agar would've played had the film been made 20 years
earlier, Shatner is Dr. Rack Hansen, cowboy veterinarian in
a small desert ranching community in Arizona. He's got a mystery
on his hands: livestock in the area are inexplicably dropping
dead. When the prize calf of farmer Walt Colby (Keoma's
Woody Strode) suddenly dies, the puzzled Hansen sends some bio
samples to the state university. The university sends back a
pretty female scientist, Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling), to
investigate. The dead calf, the veterinarian is told, was pumped
full of spider venom.
At first Hansen scoffs at the idea. Spiders
can't bring down cattle, he maintains. But the tests are conclusive,
and Ashley's hypothesis is confirmed when a huge spider hill
is located on Colby's farm. Ashley theorizes that the hill contains
thousands of tarantulas, each possessing venom five times stronger
than normal. Mutated by continuous exposure to chemical pesticides
and driven to seek new sources of food, the spiders have become
unnaturally aggressive. After Colby's dog is found dead the
embittered farmer sets the hill alight with flaming gasoline.
The spiders get their revenge, however; the next day Colby is
bitten in his truck while driving to town and killed. The situation
escalates when hundreds of other spider hills are discovered
in the area. Fearing that the news will disrupt the upcoming
county fair and negatively impact commerce, the town mayor orders
the hills doused with DDT while keeping things quiet. (Jaws,
anyone?) Ashley's scientific protests fall on deaf ears.
Things really start to get serious as a virtual
army of "millions" of super-tarantulas begins its march on the
town, attacking every living thing in their path. Panic sets
in as people start dying, setting off a riot on the town's main
drag. (Try stomping on them, you idiots!) Rescuing his
niece from the rampaging arachnids, Doc Hansen leads Ashley
and a small group of others to temporary safety within a resort
lodge outside of town, in which they barricade themselves. But
the spiders are everywhere now. The besieged humans can't seem
to stop them from getting in....
Kingdom is strictly an old-fashioned
horror yarn as opposed to an exploitation flick. It's PG-rated
fare devoid of any gore or nudity. Lots of real tarantulas are
used in the movie but there simply aren't enough of them (real
or fake) to make the story convincing. In the barricaded
lodge, when the idea of escape is floated, Ashley shoots it
down by saying there are simply too many of the spiders outside
to get away. ("We'd never make it!") The film then cuts to an
exterior shot showing about 20 or 30 of the critters in the
driveway — hardly an "army". It doesn't help that the film takes
its sweet time getting up to speed, spending an inordinate amount
of time on Hansen's personal life. (Are we really supposed to
care about the relationship between him and his brother's wife?)
I wanted more spider attacks, damn it, not scenes of Shatner
sucking in his gut to flirt with the hot blonde scientist! When
the film finally gets 'round to its semi-eerie, Twilight
Zone-style ending, the payoff is ruined by the use of a
cheap-looking matte painting. I suppose I should've taken the
horribly cornpone (i.e., shitkicker) country and western song
that opens the movie as a warning sign.
Basically, Kingdom
Of The Spiders isn't scary or creepy enough to be memorable,
nor is it cheesy/goofy enough to be unintentionally funny. It
just exists. (There is one quintessential Shatner scene,
however, when ol' Bill actually has some real tarantulas crawling
on him. The bit with the panicked townsfolk is good for a laugh,
too.) Granted, the attentive viewer can glean a couple
of valuable Life Lessons from the film... Number One: If you're
ever driving down the road and spiders start crawling on you
and biting you, immediately stop the vehicle and get out.
Screaming and driving over a cliff is not the best course of
action. Number Two: Never, ever shoot spiders off your
body with a pistol. Even big spiders.
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A
cheap bargain title from GoodTimes, this so-called "Special
25th Anniversary Edition" of Kingdom is
presented fullframe and in mono, without a single extra to be
found on the disc —
not even the trailer. Picture and sound quality are acceptable,
even though there's a bit of noticeable distortion during a
few passages of loud music. The DVD is really, really cheap
(less than $8 in some 'brick and mortar' stores) so I can't
complain too much. 12/05/02
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