L'Invasion des araignées géantes

Meteor lands on Wisconsin farm, opening up a black hole that unleashes giant spiders into a hick community!!

Oh boy. Legendary horror cheese filmed in Wisconsin by B movie director Bill Rebane is the perfect example of a film that's so bad it's good! The Giant Spider Invasion is best remembered as the movie in which a VW Beetle was used for the monster spiders! The special FX consists of live tarantulas, unconvincing puppets, and of course those VW's complete with long furry legs. Between those amusing FX, a ridiculous premise, and some funny dialog this cheap horror film never has a dull moment.

Yet as poor as the quality of the film is the cast (which has a number of veteran actors) isn't that bad. In a way it's their serious, well semi-serious, performances that make the occurrences even more humorous.

The Giant Spider Invasion is one of the most unintentionally hilarious horror films ever made and whether you like it or not, you can't deny that it's entertaining! A definite must-see for fans of campy B horror.

** 1/2 out of ****

The Giant Spider Invasion is a superb piece of 1970's B-Horror. Of course, by today's synthetic, digitally enhanced, multi-billion dollar, pseudo-artistic, technologically dependent standards it is a poor film, but remember that 'Spider Invasion' only cost $250,000 to produce.

It is full of small, creepy spiders, developing into mega-bohemoth spiders and laying waste to anything that gets in their way!

Oh sure you can label it cheesy! You can label it hokey! Label it sub-par! B ut isn't that why people watch B-horror? And is not 70's B-horror the true pinnacle of the genre? And did not Mystery Science Theater think it a worthy piece to cover on their show? Me thinks in the affirmative on both questions!

This movie is a worthy effort...dealing with such diverse topics as Alien Invasion, to greed & evil in the social context...to even what Camus referred to as the Existential Dilemma (or something like that)...oh you can find almost anything in any piece of art, but my point is that this is a good movie! It's cheesy, but good; and when I saw it at the age of 6, I thought it was very horrifying!

I still...to this day...cannot drink tomato juice...Thank-you Giant Spider Invasion!

A very low-budget horror movie (it was shot in six weeks with a budget of $300,000), about a horde of radioactive mutant spiders with a craving for human flesh emerging from the depths of the earth to invade a rural Wisconsin town after a black hole opens up another dimension. Featuring awful special effects, just the one giant spider (which was constructed by covering a Volkswagen automobile with artificial black fur, with the fake legs operated from the inside by seven members of the crew), and a cast made up of a lot of "has-beens," and B movie veterans, it's tacky as hell but a lot of laughs as the spiders go on the rampage at the towns summer fair. The film received a considerable theatrical run and became one of the 50 top-grossing films of that year, even featuring in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Listed as one of 'The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made' by Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson in the book The Official Razzie Movie Guide.

You've got to hand it to a guy like Bill Rebane. I mean, you can laugh at his movies all you want (or be incredibly bored by them), but the man made a living as a filmmaker with virtually no money or talent in filmmaking. The guy was a brilliant salesman. This horrible movie was a huge box office hit, it was among the fifty most successful movies of 1975. Impressive for a director with no major studio backing who shot all his features in Wisconsin rather than Hollywood.

The movie itself is nearly unwatchable, but it's a great time document of how easy it used to be to find a cinema release for your movies. This is not worse than whatever you used to find at the bottom shelf at a video store, but paying good money to see this on a big screen? That's a whole different animal. Particularly because you have to wait a really long time to actually see the huge spider (which is clearly a Volkswagen with legs) the trailer promised you. Up until then you see a bunch of people that you never want to see again talk and talk and talk. By the time that thing actually shows up, you're already too numb from the tedium to even laugh at it.

Bill Rebane's movies can best be enjoyed when you know all the background to them. Rebane has a charming mom&pop style of filmmaking, mom (Barbara Rebane) is even credited as the assistant director. One of his daughters 'plays' one of the huge spider's legs. He sure writes great parts for women. It's made by a cast and crew that genuinely seems to be trying to their best, it's one of those movies that seemed way more thrilling to make than it is to watch. But you can't blame Rebane, he certainly did the best he could. He made a giant spider movie with 250.000 dollars, spent a lot of time with family and friends, actually sold the thing to theatres and somehow people still talk about it more than forty years later. That alone should earn him a place in film history.

Judging from what has been said from other commentators I was expecting one of the worst movies ever made. Make no mistake The Giant Spider Invasion is a bad movie- very bad in fact, the 2.7 rating is about right for it- but not atrocious and a long way from one of the worst movies ever made. Barbara Hale and Steve Brodie are decent, there is some unintentional entertainment value and a couple of the attacks are appropriately gruesome. To say that The Giant Spider Invasion is poorly made though is an understatement, often what is seen is close to incoherent. The spider is not a convincing threat at all, more goofy than menacing and the cheap puppet-like design is no help. The music sounds stock and inappropriate, when you can hear the dialogue you are kind of glad actually that the sound is poor and the story is thinly plotted, completely lacking in atmosphere and predictable. Apart from Barbara Hale and Steve Brodie, the acting is so terrible- especially from Alan Hale- that it's not worth any comments. All in all, not as atrocious as heard and expected but very bad. 3/10 Bethany Cox