In the “Kingdom of the Spiders” (1977), the man with one idea is king.
Too bad that one idea is transparently lifted from “Jaws.”
William Shatner stars as a Southwestern veterinarian who teams up with an arachnologist from Flagstaff to grapple with a natural threat, even as the mayor (predictably) is determined to keep the town open for the county fair.
The film also plays into the whole ‘70s environmental horror sub-genre (cf. “Frogs,” “Night of the Lepus,” “Orca,” “Prophecy,” etc.), by positing that it’s man’s rapaciousness and stupidity that’s at the true root of his own peril. This of course has its antecedents in the atomic horror movies of the 1950s. If only those idiots hadn’t been spraying DDT.
It takes a mighty suspension of disbelief to accept notoriously shy, solitary tarantulas working together to turn a county fair into a buffet. “Land of the Daddy Long-legs” would be about as threatening.
And poor Woody Strode. A longtime favorite of John Ford, who got to fight Kirk Douglas under Stanley Kubrick’s direction in “Spartacus,” and he’s reduced to this.
At any rate, Roy and I will be discussing it as a belated birthday tribute to Mr. Shatner, who turned 91 on Tuesday. So burn your offerings at the altar of Shat in the comments section. We’ll be dancing the tarantella to emolliate the effects of spider-bite, on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, when we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:00 EDT!