Earth vs the Spider ** (1958, Ed Kemmer, June Kenney, Eugene Persson) – Classic Movie Review 2498

Producer-director Bert I Gordon’s 1958 black and white sci-fi chiller offers Fifties Z-grade creature feature entertainment that’s still quite a lot of fun viewing, at least on a friendly kitsch and camp level. Gordon also wrote the story on which László Görög and George Worthing Yates’s daft screenplay is based.

When Jack Flynn (Merritt Stone) doesn’t come home one night his teenage daughter Carol (June Kenney) and her boyfriend Mike (Eugene Persson) go searching for him but encounter a giant spider in a cave near the father’s wrecked car. It’s a Mexican redleg tarantula that appears from behind some rocks to attack them, but they manage to escape and get back to town.

Gene Roth plays Sheriff Cagle who brings the spider back to town and knocks it out with DDT spray, hopefully dead. Ed Kemmer stars as Professor Art Kingman, the biology teacher who has it hauled in for storage and study in the high school gym, where it is woken by a teenage rock ‘n’ roll band practising for the prom. Alas, this spider is no music lover (or people lover either) and the music sends it rampaging through the town, turning the local townsfolk into dried-up corpses.

With its preposterous plot, the movie is certainly good for a laugh or two or three, as there is no way it can be treated seriously thanks to its plethora of hammy acting and lousy special effects.  Kemmer, Kenney and Persson do their best with the material.

This was originally released by American International Pictures on a double bill with The Brain Eaters. When The Fly was a huge hit in 1958, AIP changed its name to The Spider on all the advertising but the screen title was never changed. It was remade in 2001 by director Scott Ziehl, starring Dan Aykroyd and Devon Gummersall. Producer-director Gordon was also responsible for Empire of the Ants (1977) with Joan Collins, the third and last released in AIP’s H G Wells film cycle.

Mike works at a cinema where a poster advertises one movie directed by Gordon, The Amazing Colossal Man, and the marquee shows they are screening another, Attack of the Puppet People, also starring June Kenney.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2498

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