Imagine a cheesy, low budget '70s remake of '50s giant spider flick TARANTULA and you'll get a good idea of what the enjoyably terrible GIANT SPIDER INVASION is like. Director Bill Rebane specialised in his own unique brand of 'backwoods' creature flicks during the 1970s, and this particular film is remembered as the one which dresses up Volkswagen Beetles to look like the titular critters! If there are elements which can be said to define the 'backwoods' or 'hicksploitation' horror film, I guess they'd include scenes set in small convenience stores, feature a lot of redneck characters, plenty of driving around the hills, woods and fields, and have people finding unpleasant things in bushes. Most of those sequences appear in this film, which features on a particularly unlikeable redneck (Robert Easton) who has a meteor land in his field one night. Cue a burst of quite awful back projection effects and a hilarious follow-up in which his character says he's too tired to check it out – he'll go to bed instead.
Soon, lots of mysterious nodules are turning up and depositing tarantulas around the place. They have a tendency to menace the sometimes-nude female cast members in a few effective scenes. There's also a lot of boring talk from a couple of scientists who turn up to investigate 'gamma rays'. Eventually, a huge spider shows up via laughably bad special effects, attacking a crowd at a baseball game and trashing a house in one scene.
This film's ain't a patch on similar B-movie KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS, with Bill Shatner. It's poorly-made and badly-acted, despite one or two professionals in the cast. Much of it is boring and none of it can be taken seriously. The brief nudity and cheap gore effects sit oddly with a film I would have marketed squarely at kids (at least on the strength of the special effects). But it does have a certain ambiance – call it so-bad-it's-good film-making if you will – that meant I didn't dislike it: instead I found it faintly enjoyable.
Soon, lots of mysterious nodules are turning up and depositing tarantulas around the place. They have a tendency to menace the sometimes-nude female cast members in a few effective scenes. There's also a lot of boring talk from a couple of scientists who turn up to investigate 'gamma rays'. Eventually, a huge spider shows up via laughably bad special effects, attacking a crowd at a baseball game and trashing a house in one scene.
This film's ain't a patch on similar B-movie KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS, with Bill Shatner. It's poorly-made and badly-acted, despite one or two professionals in the cast. Much of it is boring and none of it can be taken seriously. The brief nudity and cheap gore effects sit oddly with a film I would have marketed squarely at kids (at least on the strength of the special effects). But it does have a certain ambiance – call it so-bad-it's-good film-making if you will – that meant I didn't dislike it: instead I found it faintly enjoyable.