Earth Vs. the Spider
Bert I. Gordon (1959)
Earth vs. the Spider is a wonky 1959-or-thereabouts monster flick with a bunch of good-looking, blindingly White Eisenhower-era cats and cattettes doing battle against a giant hairy real tarantula living in a cave.
I only note that it’s real because they didn’t use the giant puppet spider they could have—except at the end. Two giant Frankenstein electrodes (prefigured by a non-mad scientist at the beginning in a high school lecture) make an appearance, but let’s begin at the beginning, which, by the by, is always the best place to begin.
Jack Flynn (Merritt Stone) is driving down the highway as the film opens and suddenly his face goes all bloody and he dies. This gets things started off right. His daughter Carol (June Tenney), worried that he didn’t come home last night, goes with her high school boyfriend Mike (Gene Persson) to find him. They locate him in Spider Cavern, where a giant spider spiderizes them before they get away.
They go to the dumb-as-dirt B-movie sheriff (Gene Roth), who doesn’t believe them, but Mr. Kingman (Art Kemmer) the local high school teacher—who is manifestly NOT a scientific genius—convinces the sheriff to return with DDT. The cave is blasted with the stuff (what they used to use to kill bedbugs back in less itchy days), and the Spider, which really is a big mothertrucker, emerges and is captured and put in a museum, presumably dead. Just like Gorgo.
So a rockin’ band of hepcats and daddios and some swinging chicks all come down to the museum, where the nightwatchman and totally soused high school janitor (cum Dick Miller substitute) Hugo gets drunk (well, okay, we just assume he does, as he looks as if he smells like a combination of cheap booze, sweat, and tobacco spit). He gets on the phone to report that the Spider has come to life. And then HE gets spiderized.
(Hugo, BTW, is actor Hank Patterson, who had recurring roles on "Gunsmoke," "Petticoat Junction," and "Green Acres" in that bygone, august era of early Tube.)
Before that, the kids and the band are let in, and a smooth guy who went on to tour with Eddie Cochran jumps on the piano. Everyone shimmy-shammies and cuts a rug, whirling and twirling. Dad, and then the monstrous hairy Spider comes roaring (it really has a raspy roar, a sort of gore-choked cougar screeching that Carpenter later borrowed and amplified for The Thing). All those picture-perfect pretty blonde High School Confidential cuties straight out of a Silver Era comic book caper are enough to razzle my tazzle. Spidereeno can take a back seat!
Getting back to it.
The Spider emerges, and he’s whopping big mad and well-pissed, and he creepy-crawls the streets with all eight hairy cylinders running on full octane. The citizens emerge from their cars screaming, women clutching their faces as if the mad, bad Apocalypse is bearing down. It’s just like the Bomb, but only hairier and with lots of red, creepy eyes. (But we never C the I’s here.)
Did I mention the big, rope-like web? Guy gets caught in that sucker, he gets juiced by the fangs of Spidereeno, and then he gets sucked up and tossed aside like a little former husk of his self.
Carol and Mike make their way back to the cave where they find Jack’s body because they were looking for a bracelet he bought for Carol. That’s just the sort of thing you do when a giant hairy Spider mutant is terrorizing your town.
Bert I. Gordon (The Amazing Colossal Man) directed this fun, sticky mess, and captured the viewer for the rare sixty-odd minutes it unspools, thread by thread, for the paying customer.
At the end, it’s pretty predictable.
But I won’t let a peep.
EARTH VS THE SPIDER (1958) | 𝙁𝙪𝙡𝙡 𝙈𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙚 🎥 𝙃𝘿
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About the Creator
Tom Baker
Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
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