The Spider

1958 "The Spider will eat you alive!"
4.6| 1h13m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 01 September 1958 Released
Producted By: Santa Rosa Productions
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

Teenagers from a small town and their high school science teacher join forces to battle a giant mutant spider, living in a cave nearby and getting hungry.

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Director

Bert I. Gordon

Production Companies

Santa Rosa Productions

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The Spider Audience Reviews

Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall
Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
SnoopyStyle Jack Flynn is attacked while driving home. His teenage daughter Carol and her boyfriend Mike go searching for him and find a giant spider in a cave. The Sheriff doesn't believe them. Their teacher Kingman is able to convince him to send a posse. Armed with DDT, they are able to kill the giant spider. They bring the spider back to town and store it in the high school gym. As the kids practice rock and roll, the spider revives and terrorizes the town. Meanwhile Carol and Mike go back to the cave to find her lost bracelet.It's a campy 50s creature feature. The giant spider is a fun visual. The acting is bad. The story is simplistic which actually helps. I certainly don't want too many explanations about giant spiders. That can't be any good. It's a B-movie with a few fun unintentional silliness.
bkoganbing Earth Vs. The Spider is drive-in material if I ever saw it. The kind of film that you can relax at the drive-in and not miss a lot as you get down to business with your significant other.This film gets confused a lot with Tarantula, they're about the same though I would give not want to split the difference either way.Two kids Eugene Persson and June Kenney are the protagonists, they find the cave where the giant arachnid hangs out and which has been rumored to be haunted for years. Later on they go back to the cave looking for a present that the girl dropped and have a second encounter with the big spider.These two kids are dumb, but they can't be held accountable because they've got a colossally dumb science teacher in Ed Kemmer. He goes along with the sheriff to rescue them the first time and they think the big guy's dead after all kinds of giant quantities of DDT are sprayed at him. All it does is put him in arachnid coma.The sheriff wants to blow up the cave and bury the body, but no Kemmer says he'd make a great exhibit for study. So they take the body and store it at the high school gym. In the meantime the local rock and roll band doing a little practice wakes him from his coma and everybody has to do it all over again.Some of those Fifties science fiction movies were better than others. Earth Vs. The Spider is not on the A list.
qormi Really bad film. The acting is okay, but the plot is very thin.One of the teenagers looks to be forty. A giant tarantula lives in a cave. How did it get so big? No answer given. The special effects were very lame. The spider's web was just a rope net - crisscross square pattern - nothing like a spider's web. The spider kept making noises like a mountain lion. The spider kept changing sizes. One minute, it's larger than a two story house; then it's ten feet long. The corpses that had their juices sucked out by the spider resembled aliens - big white heads, huge almond-shaped eyes. Dumb. Spraying copious amounts of DDT into a cave, more than ten times the industrial strength, and nobody so much as rubs their nose. An unresolved scene where a crying,bloodied toddler walks past a car wreck in the wake of the spider's rampage. Unresolved, needlessly disturbing. The spider's shots were almost all live action shots of a real tarantula. The film never showed the spider killing anyone - all inferred. Cheap, unimaginitive production. The velveeta of cheesy films.
MartianOctocretr5 Loved this one. It's strictly bush league in its execution, but it's fun. Anybody who gets a kick out of a good "giant bug" flick right out of the golden age of drive-in's will find this entertaining."Earth" locks horns in combat with a mutated spider. Apparently, everybody from Earth except for a little town was on vacation, because about a dozen folks represent Earth in this titanic struggle. The monster emerges from a stalactite/stalagmite cave (which looks suspiciously like a tour path in Carlsbad Caverns), after getting super-sized in a way that's never quite explained. It wants to invite some people for dinner, but doesn't tell them who's on the menu. Unintentionally silly scenes are numerous, but the two best are: 1) when the hero teen couple get caught in the giant "gluey" spider web. They play around on some ropes that look like one of those jungle-gym things at a fast food restaurant. Then they casually climb down from this deadly hazard. Real "sticky." 2) is utterly priceless: the captured lethal spider is kept for analysis, where else, but in a high school auditorium (no, I'm not kidding). It's a laugh riot when hip musicians rehearse for a sock hop, poodle-skirted groupies dance along, and nobody seems very concerned that a huge hairy tarantula is dozing about ten feet away. You'll never guess what happens next. By the way, look for Wally (Ozzie & Harriet) and Mr. Ziffle (Green Acres) in this scene.You have to give the actors credit; keeping a straight face had to be difficult. Most everybody genuinely shows enthusiasm in their roles, and makes the most of this wacky story. Special effects are so hokey you have to laugh. I love how the spider somehow changes size to neatly fit whatever situation it's in at the moment.A great giant-bug movie if you're in the mood for some nostalgic craziness.