The Giant Spider Invasion

Something of a hotch-potch as Rebane jumbles comic strip with genuinely unsettling horror. Real spiders are used to reasonably good effect, whereas the one giant specimen, despite a spirited first appearance, is patently mechanical and sadly undemonstrative. Still, the film starts with gusto: gamma rays crash into a Wisconsin farm, opening up a sort of grisly parallel universe, and scattering alien rocks that in addition to housing the spiders are lined with diamonds. Thereafter it becomes a tangle of technological mumbo-jumbo, an elderly courtship between Hale and Brodie, Old Testament fire and brimstone from a revivalist preacher, a painfully jolly sheriff, an asinine cub reporter, and a drunken wife who constantly berates her slobbish husband. Apart from the monumentally stilted script which provides many a chuckle, one of the highlights must be when Leslie Parrish (the drunken wife) sips a Bloody Mary which, unknown to her, contains a pulverised arachnid enemy.