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 first time I saw this movie was on an episode of MST3K. From the greasy hick to the doctor from Nassau (NASA) this film has it all (wrong, that is)! I couldn't stop laughing when they finally showed the 'giant spider' that looked like a high school homecoming float. I would recommend this movie to anyone with a lot of time and patience. I only wish they used microphones. It sounded like Thomas Edison was the sound man through part of it. Try and see the MST3K take on this movie. you will die laughing!

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.

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!

Giant Spider Invasion is a low budget monster movie reminiscent of the giant bug invasion pictures of the 50's but it was actually shot in the 70's. It's all very predictable, these giant spider eggs travel to earth on board some meteorites and land in a small Wisconsin town. People start disappearing, cattle are found mutilated and things just aren't quite right. Needless to say, it's up to the local Sheriff, astronomer and out of town NASA specialist to find out and ultimately confront the source of the strange things going on. Of course it's all being caused by these giant spiders that are running amok, devouring everyone in sight. The effects are pretty bad and the acting is very hammy but it's all part of the fun. Amazingly, they actually built full sized giant spiders for this film and although they look terrible, it's wonderful to see these massive creatures roaming the Wisconsin country side wreaking havoc where ever they go. Giant Spider Invasion is good mindless fun that's better than 90% of the horror/sci-fi films being made these days.