KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1997 Andrew Hicks
(1977) 1/2 (out of four)
From "Arachnid Productions" comes this classic of horrible horror, starring everyone's favorite bad actor, William Shatner. He plays Dr. Robert Hanson, nicknamed Rack because... well, look at his chest. He's ripped! Actually, the name Rack has something to do with pool games he used to play with his brother, who was "killed in Nam."
Old Rack still takes care of his brother's widow and her small daughter, as we find out at the beginning, when a horse-bound Shatner ropes the widow. "Stop it. Damn you, John!"
He stiffens. "I may be a lot of things to a lot of people, but I'm not my brother." Not an actor, either.
We cut away from that to witness the first spider attack, perpetrated on a 200-pound calf owned by farmer Woody Strode and his wife ("introducing" Lieux Dressler). Shatner takes a look at the calf the next day and says, sadly, "The calf's dead."
"Ain't that a crock!" Woody laments.
"There's only so much I can do," Shatner replies, and you almost want him to say, "Dammit, Woody, I'm a doctor, not a veterinarian!"
Down the road, a redneck gas station attendant is in a similar bind. He goes into his shed to look for a tire and finds a tarantula instead. "Damn spiders are having a field day in here!" he exclaims, as another jumps out at him. "God almighty!" he yells as he bats it to the ground, spits some tobacco juice on it and declares, "Take that, you ugly sh*t!"
Shatner asks for a reinforcement doctor and gets one in Tiffany Bolling, a sexy entomologist from "the university." Immediately, Shatner turns on the old Captain Kirk charm, asking her, "How would you like to have some dinner tonight?"
She replies coldly, "I probably will. See you tomorrow." Punked! Bolling heads back to her rented cabin, where she does what all hot horror chicks do sooner or later -- strip and take a shower. While she's soaping up, a tarantula roams her cabin and hides itself in her dresser drawer, setting up the nail-biting sequence where the PSYCHO score goes crazy while a towel-clad Bolling gets closer and closer to danger, finally reaching into the drawer and pulling out a spider. "You're not supposed to live in people's houses," she tells it, in an almost baby-talk tone of voice. "You're supposed to live in the ground." She sets it free, to go kill someone else.
First thing in the morning, Shatner and Bolling pay another visit to Woody's farm, where Bolling finds their dog dead, announcing, "It would appear this dog died from a massive dose of spider venom."
"That would explain the spider hill," Woody replies, leading them to a giant mass of dirt out back that swarms with tarantulas. Shatner muses over it for awhile before heading back to his sister-in- law's house to flirt with her for awhile. Then he gets the idea that maybe he should burn the spider hill, and heads back to the Strode farm for the third time. As Woody lights it up, yelling out, "Burn! Burn in hell, you bastards!" Spider hell.
What no one counts on is the fact that there are 30 or 40 other identical-sized spider hills nearby, all of them swarming with killer spiders. Their natural prey has been cut back by prevalent use of DDT insecticide, so now they're coming after humans. Not just any humans -- humans who can't act. So in one hilariously bad sequence after another, townfolk die off, from the crop duster to Woody to the sheriff. There are even the requisite scenes of people wrapped in giant spiderwebs and screaming masses running out of the city while spiders run rampant. There's only one question on my mind; why the hell doessn't anyone just stomp on those things?
KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS is awful, but laughably so. Shatner, complete with cowboy hat and oversize belt buckle, has never overacted more badly and the effects are so far less than special that this KINGDOM hearkens directly back to the unintentionally funny sci-fi flicks of the '50s. It's played out more as a slasher flick, though, and if you can track down a video copy of this rarity, you'll see previews for five or six horror films that seem even worse, with titles like THE TOOLBOX MURDERS, SCREAM BLOODY MURDER and THE DEMON.
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