EARTH VS THE SPIDER (1958)

EARTH VS THE SPIDER (1958)

Tagline: IT MUST EAT YOU TO LIVE! 

(Horror, Sci-Fi, Giant Spiders Will Jack You Up) [PG]

Note – This movie was just given a “passed” by theaters when it came out. However, the home video release was given a PG rating in 1991. This movie is also known as simply “THE SPIDER”. 

Just put down "cause unknown" and let the coroner worry about the rest. That's the trouble with you eggheads - you jump to conclusions! I know what I see and I see a dead man, but, uh, I don't see any spider.

After her father goes missing one night, Carol (played by June Kenney) decides to talk her boyfriend into going to look for him. They end up finding a cave where the suspect Carol’s father may have sought refuge from the cold. Inside the cave, they encounter a giant spider which wastes no time in terrorizing the neighborhood after DDT is unsuccessfully used to try and kill it. 

This is another one of those movies where the teens appear to be smarter than the adults because none of the adults believe them at first. However, then the teens do something so stupid it kind of makes you feel like this whole town is just going to have to die from stupidity. 

For me, this movie is extremely effective effects-wise because the spider is a real tarantula. There are a few wonky scenes of course but overall it’s pretty great. In fact, this movie could have easily been a follow-up to 1955’s TARANTULA if the producers had decided to go in that direction. Having said that, I think in color this one might actually expose some of the weirdness in the cave scenes regarding depth. You can kind of see in the black and white version that they may have some cutouts here and there to help give the cave scenes more scale. One other issue I also noticed is that this is a giant kaiju size spider. The web it spins has a pattern that looks okay, but in the close-up shots, there are actually regular-sized spider webs on top of the larger web. I am not sure if this was just a mistake, or if the producers were trying to say the giant spider was like the king of the spiders and there were still other smaller spiders still around? 

When it comes to the cast we’ve got a lot of hits with Sally Fraser from IT CONQUERED THE WORLD in the role of the professor’s wife. June Kenney is good in this as Carol. She was also in the 50’s sci-fi classic ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE. Ed Kemmer is cast as the professor and he’s great in this as well. Kemmer is probably best known for GIANT FROM THE UNKNOWN. Eugene Persson also did a good job as Carol’s boyfriend. Where the casting got a LOT off the rails was when they cast Troy Patterson as a teenager, he was 35 at the time. Back in the 1950s, it wasn’t uncommon to cast full-blown adults as teens, but man, Troy looked like he was 40 in this role and he just looks way way out of place in this movie next to all the other actors and actresses playing teens. 

The pacing and score in this movie are pretty good. The make-up jobs on the victims of “the spider” are particularly gruesome for this type of film. One thing I didn’t like was that the noise the spider makes every time it’s shown, just seems like it’s a dude groaning and may be slowed down or sped up to make it sound slightly more mysterious. It’s all very odd. I do like the little touches in this thing where the movie theater is actually showing two other films from the same studio, ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE and THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN. 

Overall this is a 5 out of 7 for me. It’s one of the cooler big spider movies even to this day. We see the spider soon enough in the movie and there is plenty of scenes with the spider as the movie moves along. 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF SANTA ROSA PRODUCTIONS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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