Another Week in Schlock

Not a vintage week for schlock - a poor quality print of The Single Girls (1974), a rewatching of The Clones of Bruce Lee (1980) , (which contained more nudity than I remembered), another viewing of The Monster Club (1981) and now I find myself watching The Giant Spider Invasion (1975).  It's a sign of my age and life-long obsession with low-rent movies that I actually remember when the latter was released in the UK. Incredible as it may seem now, back in those pre home video days, what amounts to a cheap, direct-to-video style B-movie was actually released to cinemas.  As I recall, it was a pretty wide release, backed by a heavy campaign of TV ads.  It was certainly pushed pretty hard by the distributors, but still failed top become the sort of camp cult hit they clearly hoped that it would.  Although it might seem strange that, as late as 1975 such a low-budget fifties monster movie throwback would get such a release, it was, in reality, intended to be both a parody and a homage to such movies, deliberately cheesy n plot, dialogue and special effects - the giant spiders are incredibly ropy and completely non-frightening even to an arachnophobe like me. This aspect seemed to have been largely ignored on its initial UK release, with the film generally dismissed as simply a piece of cheap exploitation,  Watching it today, it seems clear that it isn't intended to be taken seriously - it opens, after all, with Alan Hale as a sheriff greeting another character as his 'little buddy', a reference to his best known role as 'The skipper' in Gilligan's Island.  (The fact that this series was unfamiliar to most UK viewers in the seventies probably didn't help the movie in this territory).

Taken at face value, most of the supporting cast give excruciatingly bad performances.  Taken as a parody, however, it is clear that this is intentional, as is the fact that most of the characters seem to be backwoods hill billy and stereotypical small town types.  The film seems to take forever to get anywhere, before stumbling through a flurry of late action to an abrupt ending.  As mentioned, the special effects, particularly the various giant spiders are pretty terrible but, once again, if one accepts the film as a parody of fifties monster B-movies, it is fitting that they should be on the same level as many of the low budget monsters seen in such movies.  (In point of fact, though, a number of fifties monster movies, despite their low budgets, featured excellent effects work and monsters, courtesy of the likes of Ray Harryhausen (Twenty Million Miles to Earth, It Came From Beneath the Sea, for instance) and Willis O'Brien, (Black Scorpion), not to mention the many wild and wonderful creature costumes produced by Paul Blaisdell for AIP).  That said, the biggest spider seen is quite impressive, if neither convincing nor scary, being, as I recall, built to fit over a VW Beetle for locomotion and featuring waving legs.  At a scant eighty minutes, it at least never really taxes the patience of the viewer and, it has to be said, is a lot more entertaining than The Monster Club...