Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

The Giant Spider Invasion (1975)

Director: Bill Rebane

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Something of a hotch-potch as Rebane jumbles comic strip with genuinely unsettling horror. Real spiders are used to reasonably good effect, whereas the one giant specimen, despite a spirited first appearance, is patently mechanical and sadly undemonstrative. Still, the film starts with gusto: gamma rays crash into a Wisconsin farm, opening up a sort of grisly parallel universe, and scattering alien rocks that in addition to housing the spiders are lined with diamonds. Thereafter it becomes a tangle of technological mumbo-jumbo, an elderly courtship between Hale and Brodie, Old Testament fire and brimstone from a revivalist preacher, a painfully jolly sheriff, an asinine cub reporter, and a drunken wife who constantly berates her slobbish husband. Apart from the monumentally stilted script which provides many a chuckle, one of the highlights must be when Leslie Parrish (the drunken wife) sips a Bloody Mary which, unknown to her, contains a pulverised arachnid enemy.

Author: IB 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Bill Rebane

Producer: Bill Rebane, Richard L Huff

Cast: Barbara Hale, Steve Brodie, Leslie Parrish, Alan Hale, Robert Easton, Kevin Brodie, Bill Williams full cast

Genre(s): Horror

Duration: 76 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.