Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

mark.waltz When dancing teenagers can stir a supposedly dead giant tarantula back to life, that gives evidence to the 50's square adult's belief that "Rock and roll has got to go!" Unlike the giant dancing duck in "Village of the Giants", this giant spider does not have rhythm, only an appetite for human body fluids, setting a trap with giant rope like sticky webbing to block the road near the deep and dank cave it lives in. Searching for her father out in the middle of this unexplored area, the rather naive June Kenney and her boyfriend (Eugene Persson) search for him inside the cave, already marked with a warning of "Do not enter!" Falling into the giant web, they are disturbed by the sounds of the approaching spider which seems to be speaking to them in anticipation of his lunch to be. Kenney and Persson manage to escape, but Kenney is frantic when she realizes that she has dropped the birthday present for her that she found near the wreckage of her father's pick-up truck. The discovery of shriveled up bodies with all the liquid sucked out (I guess spiders are only drinkers, not eaters) scares the bageebers out of Kenney, but that doesn't stop her from getting Persson to take her back to the cave after they believe that the spider has been killed and removed from the cave for research on how it got to be that size. Like other movies where they remove the supposed carcass of a giant creature, it is never explained as to how they do it, and even more importantly, the objections of those given that assignment who wouldn't touch a small bug let alone a large one!I guess you have to suspend disbelief that a spider can go into suspended animation when shot full of bullets and tied up in a school gymnasium. The school security guard gets trapped after a bunch of students decide to have an impromptu dance in the gym with the spider hanging in the background, and when his body is discovered, it is a hysterical variation of what a Dali painting might look at if it had once been human. I did find the special effects not bad, having seen much worse before when a giant creature is chasing townspeople, but the whole situation just becomes plain stupid when another teenager arranges for the spider (whom he has discovered trying to devour an entire house) to chase him back to the cave where Kenney and Persson have gone to look for that darn birthday present she dropped. Just then, the local law shows up to close up the cave and unknowingly lock Kenney and Persson inside, with them having gone into other areas of the cave with no way of escape. While Kenney overacts in her attempt to display grief for her spider lunch father, his widow (June Jocelyn) seems to show no grief over her husband's nasty death, only showing any emotion when her daughter is revealed to be trapped inside the cave with the spider. It's a fun bad movie that is easy to dissect for all of its absurdities, but can also be enjoyed on an extreme camp level, whether it be the ludicrous situations, the high school students played by bad 30 something year old actors or the fact that at the end Kenney and Persson are not even given a slap on the wrist for their stupidity.

MARIO GAUCI To begin with, I have to wonder whether Universal ever brought charges of plagiarism against this film in view of their own superior take on the 'giant spider' theme i.e. TARANTULA (1955); the title, then, ripped off Columbia's solid alien invasion movie EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956)! All of which suggests this was a pure exploitation flick aimed at teenagers (even incorporating a rock'n'roll number at one point) and, on that level, it is not too bad – being also thankfully brief at just 73 minutes – though clearly offering nothing we have not seen before! The Carlsbad caves used for a good part of the duration supply an ideal otherworldly backdrop, even if the special effects involving the spider itself are less successful (the spider often changes color from dark black to light grey!); the wizened make-up created for the blood-drained victims is rather creepy, however. One thing which can be said about Bert I. Gordon is that he was a shrewd promoter and, to be sure, two of his other horror/sci-fi efforts get namechecked here, namely THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) and ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE (1958) – both of which, as it happens, I have acquired in time to be viewed this Halloween (along with three more of the director's work within the genre)

qormi Really bad film. The acting is okay, but the plot is very thin.One of the teenagers looks to be forty. A giant tarantula lives in a cave. How did it get so big? No answer given. The special effects were very lame. The spider's web was just a rope net - crisscross square pattern - nothing like a spider's web. The spider kept making noises like a mountain lion. The spider kept changing sizes. One minute, it's larger than a two story house; then it's ten feet long. The corpses that had their juices sucked out by the spider resembled aliens - big white heads, huge almond-shaped eyes. Dumb. Spraying copious amounts of DDT into a cave, more than ten times the industrial strength, and nobody so much as rubs their nose. An unresolved scene where a crying,bloodied toddler walks past a car wreck in the wake of the spider's rampage. Unresolved, needlessly disturbing. The spider's shots were almost all live action shots of a real tarantula. The film never showed the spider killing anyone - all inferred. Cheap, unimaginitive production. The velveeta of cheesy films.

delibebek I really enjoy Bert Gordon films (although the apparently necessary middle initial continues to evoke images of Johnny Depp in "Ed Wood" continually insisting on the "D") and this is one is pretty typical. The photography is always good, and the effects are passable.It may be a difficult point to make, given that we never see the spider's method of consuming the precious bodily fluids it seems to crave, but I think the spider just wanted to be left alone. Perhaps the first victim merely happened along its path during a hunting foray.It is obvious however, later in the film, after the spider escapes the gym, destroying doorway-ignoring school janitors along the way, the spider simply wants to go home. As he re-enters the cave, you can clearly hear the spider saying, "Ho-ome. I'm ho-ome." If you thought that was an amplified spider's voice, it actually seems to be a human voice, distorted somewhat, so you may have to "undistort" the voice as you're listening.I feel sorry for the spider, and even until the final scene I was hoping that it would survive man's fury. But alas, it wasn't so. :( Not even glimpses of an egg sac that would have allowed a sequel.