Le baiser de la tarentule

From the first scene, little Susan seems troubled and is fascinated with spiders. She considers them her pets. And why not? Mom has all of the warmth and maternal love of one of dad's corpses on a slab. Dad is a mortician and full of love for his daughter. The actress playing mom is pretty stiff in her role (no pun intended) and actually seems much too old for the part she is playing. She is having an affair with her husband's brother, a cop. Susan overhears mom talking on the phone, figures out who she is talking to, and overhears their plans to kill her beloved dad.

So Susan waits until mom is asleep and puts her pet tarantula on her. Mom awakens, doesn't jump out of bed, just lays there in terror, and then has a heart attack and dies. Mission accomplished. Dad is safe. Susan grows up. Her age is never specified, but it seems that she is in high school because she is walking to school with a backpack. Although, like mom, she seems about ten years too old for the part. By this time Susan has many tarantulas as pets in the basement and she is still the apple of her dad's eye.

Pretty soon Susan is solving all of her problems with bullies and the kids who broke into the mortuary and killed one of her pets spiders by planting spiders on them when and where they least expect it. In every case they don't run away, they just sit there screaming with the spiders crawling on them and die of a coronary. Never have I seen so many healthy young people die of heart attacks.

Now that Susan has matured, Dad's lecherous brother begins to have the hots for her, bothering her and getting just a little too affectionate. Blech! The girl is your niece! To make matters worse he's the local DA, and he and the cops are stumped at all of the deaths occurring around town. To make matters even worse he wants to run for state Attorney General. But for some strange reason he sends his brother out to campaign while he shadows Susan with his tongue dragging the floor. Usually voters want to hear from the candidate, not his brother.

This all comes to a head with the DA committing a terrible crime himself, and Susan wreaking a completely ironic justice upon the guy that for once did not involve her spiders.

The dialogue is wooden and the acting uninspired. And then there is the case of the high schoolers that look like they are in their 30s and the convenient way all of the victims die at the sight of a spider. However, this is a case of something you just don't see anymore - an independent low budget film with actors so anonymous you wonder why they bothered to give them names in the movie different from their actual names. For several of the players I think this was their only credited role.

For me, it is an artifact of the last days of drive ins, and for that reason I enjoyed it. It is so authentic, so not mass produced, so something that no movie studio would have any part of today that it is just a guilty pleasure of mine. Your mileage may vary.

I would guess that this uninspiring little film was probably inspired by Stephen King's book 'Carrie', and possibly even Brian De Palma's film adaptation, as while this film was released in the same year; I'm sure that there was more than enough time to write the script and make the film with what was left of it. Spiders are common throughout horror cinema, and big tarantulas are a fear of many people. Adding to this theme is the tried and tested formula of a young female outcast getting her revenge...so really, there's not many excuses for this film not being better. Kiss of the Tarantula hasn't gone on to achieve much acclaim and it's rather unknown, which doesn't surprise me at all. The film focuses on a young girl who likes spiders. Her mother doesn't share this arachnid appreciation, however, and after continually telling her daughter off for playing with spiders, the young girl decides that enough is enough and ends up putting a spider in her mother's bed, which leads to a heart attack. Some years later, the girl is still disturbed; and decides to use the spiders to get revenge on her current enemies.

The fact that this film was shot on a low budget is clearly shown through the use of the spiders; as it can't have cost much to round a few up for filming, and this is pretty much all the film has in terms of horror imagery. The spiders are about enough to pull it through, but the film is otherwise lacking; and I find it hard to believe that everyone except the central character is scared of them. The plots surrounding the spiders isn't too interesting either, with only the idea of the young girl being an outcast for her 'hobby' and a plot involving her uncle and her mother having an affair providing distraction from the central theme. The fact that the film is set in a funeral home is a positive element, as mortuaries often provide an interesting location for horror films, and that works well here. As you might expect given the type of film, the acting is largely diabolical, and I'm not surprised that this was the only film role for Suzanna Ling. Director Chris Munger never made another film after this one also, and overall; Kiss of the Tarantula is almost worth seeing, but you wouldn't be missing anything by not watching it.

If seeing a man play a creepy, unattractive, hair-hat-wearing corrupt cop who's an incestuous uncle a little too convincingly is your thing, your ship came in and has been at the docks for decades! Otherwise, the movie is just tedium and people hilariously spazzing out and killing themselves over spiders that pose them no real harm.

When you look at the poster or the VHS cover, you think this is going to be some kind of horrible boring B movie that flunked before it even hit theaters. Well, in some ways it's absolutely ridiculous. Other ways, it's frightfully disturbing and suspenseful. The Tarantulas used are actually a quite expensive and sought after species, the Mexican Red knee. Completely harmless, we make the venom of these spiders look like they can kill virtually in an instant. That's silly to me, but to others it might prove quite chilling. The crazy part is the family life of the poor young woman. Incest, murder, bullying, I'm amazed the poor girl wasn't in an asylum. I'll say this much, this film will leave you with your mouth agape in disgust and amazement. I really liked it.

I would say that this was inspired by the success of Willard which came out the previous year but the action is provided by spiders instead of rats. How about the scenes at the drive-in movie theatre? A volkswagen contains four victims who are screaming at the top of their lungs and no one comes to investigate. Were they and the spider woman the only ones at the drive-in? The spider woman spends time fending off the lecherous advances of her uncle, played by Eric Mason, whose acting style reminded me of William Shatner.