The Spider [Blu-ray]

Director: Bert I. Gordon Bert I. Gordon

Overview

A man driving along a lonely back road at night is suddenly startled by what he sees, and is promptly killed by something that crashes through his windshield. The next day, in the nearby town of River Falls, teenagers Carol Flynn (June Kenney) and Mike Simpson (Gene Persson) decide to go looking for her father, who didn't get home last night. They find his wrecked truck and enter a nearby cave to begin searching for him. There they find his blood-covered hat and other signs of human remains and, as they go deeper inside, suddenly get trapped in a huge web -- then they spot its maker, a spider the size of a small house. They manage to escape and alert the county sheriff (Gene Roth), who doesn't take them seriously but does heed the warning of Mr. Kingman (Ed Kemmer), the science teacher at the local high school, to bring a pest-control crew along with his deputies, and a tanker loaded with DDT. They encounter the creature, and, after losing one of their men, dispatch it with the insecticide. Kingman persuades the sheriff to bring the carcass into town so that he can arrange to have it studied, leaving it in storage at the high school recreation room, for lack of anywhere bigger to keep it. As it turns out, the creature isn't dead, just stunned. As the local rock & roll band rehearses, the giant spider comes to bloodthirsty consciousness, breaking out of the building and ravaging the town. Bullets won't hurt it -- as Kingman says, you could punch holes in it all day without hitting a vital spot -- and the town is soon cut off when the telephone lines are knocked down.

Product Details

Release Date:	06/23/2020
UPC:	0826663207859
Original Release:	1958
Source:	Shout Factory
Language:	English
Sales rank:	17,327

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Ed Kemmer	Professor Art Kingman
June Kenney	Carol Flynn
Gene Persson	Mike Simpson
Gene Roth	Sheriff Cagle
Hal Torey	Mr. Simpson
June Jocelyn	Mrs. Flynn
Mickey Finn	Mr. Haskel
Sally Fraser	Helen Kingman
Troy Patterson	Joe,Hugo
Skip Young	Sam
Howard Wright	Jake
Bill Giorgio	Sheriff Sanders
Jack Kosslyn	Mr. Fraser
Bob Garnet	Pest Control Man
Shirley Falls	Switchboard Operator
Bob Tetrick	Dave
George Stanley, Jr.	Man in Cavern
Nancy Kilgas	Dancer
George Stanley	Man in Cavern
David Tomack	Line Foreman
Merritt Stone	Mr. Flynn

Technical Credits

Samuel Z. Arkoff	Executive Producer
Bert I. Gordon	Producer,Director
James H. Nicholson	Executive Producer

Editorial Reviews

Earth vs. the Spider is the most consistently entertaining, if not the best of Bert I. Gordon's various size-oriented fantasy-sci-fi films. Among his best-known movies, The Amazing Colossal Man has a more intelligent script and much better developed characters and Attack of the Puppet People is a more serious and better devised and designed movie (and both are referred to obliquely in this film), but Earth vs. the Spider is more fun than either of them. For starters, it has more comic relief than any of the other Gordon titles, mostly by virtue of the fact that much of the action in the first third of the movie involves teenagers. The vignette with the rock & roll band is, in fact, downright funny, though it also leads to the horror payoff for the picture. The film benefits from the presence of a surprisingly decent cast; June Kenney was an above-average player in low-budget films of this period (most memorably in Teenage Doll) and Gene Persson was a promising male lead (who later became a successful off-Broadway producer in New York). Among the actors representing authority figures, Gene Roth and Ed Kemmer hold that end of the picture together, with help from Hank Patterson in an all-too-brief vignette. The giant spider effects look primitive today, but in their time they were good enough to get picked up for use in other movies, including Have Rocket, Will Travel and Journey to the Seventh Planet.

All Movie Guide - Bruce Eder