Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977) Review

WEEK 3: CREEPY CRAWLY CRITTERS

Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977) Review

I had to kick off the tarantula triple feature with a good movie; that’s why I kept Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo until today, because I’ve had a hunch, ever since first purchasing this movie on DVD many years ago, that it might turn out to be a web of worthlessness. Finally, after years of wondering, I popped in the disc and gave it a watch. I wish I had a happier report on what I saw.

Some shady dudes take a plane full of coffee beans out of South America back to the United States, and it’s shown in the opening that some tarantulas got shovelled into the coffee bags and stowed aboard, along with some illegal immigrants, who hide out in the cargo bay just as the plane takes off. The plane flies into a storm, and the spiders get out, attacking the stowaways, who fight back against them like little kids, screaming and hitting them with their shoes. Soon all the stowaways are sick, and the plane malfunctions, so the two shady dudes are forced to call for help and make an emergency landing. The people they contact phone up a local doctor, who says, and I quote, “I don’t practice medicine anymore.” What an asshole! Yeah, some people are in danger, and I have the knowledge and ability to save them, but I’m too lazy to get out of bed. It doesn’t really matter anyway, because the plane crashes (though the crash itself isn’t shown, which is disappointing) and soon the nearby town’s navel-orange-producing-factory (?) is overrun in the deadly spiders, which could spell the town’s doom.

Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is best summed up with one word: mediocre. Within fifteen minutes, I got the impression that it was a made-for-TV production, and it turned out I was right. As a result, the movie clearly has a micro budget, though I’m not sure a bigger budget would have helped to make it any better. Somehow, this movie has an even more 70’s vibe than Jaws, which came out two years earlier (I feel bad mentioning Jaws and this film in the same place, because they could not be further apart in terms of quality). At times, this movie moves so slow, it is coma inducing. I think the spider’s venom works faster than the speed at which this movie moves. It doesn’t help that the plot, characters, dialogue, music, and more, is all...blah. It’s not all horrible, but nothing is anywhere close to great. Oh, but how are the spiders, you ask, which is the central reason anyone would want to see this movie in the first place? They’re run-of-the-mill, slow-crawling, silent, tarantulas. Not giant, not mutant, nothing special like that. They’re normal and unremarkable, much like the whole film, and sometimes, being boring is worse than being so bad it intrudes into funny.

The filmmakers really played it safe, which isn’t too surprising given the restrictions likely put on them by the TV network. The expression “meh” is applicable here, indeed. But, as much as this movie was “meh”, it wasn’t completely devoid of what could be considered good elements. The fact that they kill off the main kid in the movie is fairly unexpected, especially for a TV movie, but Jaws killed off a kid, and that was done to a much greater effect. I was simply happy the terrible child actor succumbed to the tarantula’s toxic bite so I wouldn’t have to listen to him butcher any more of his lines. As someone who isn’t scared of spiders, none of the “scary” spider scenes did anything to creep me out, but I can imagine someone with serious arachnophobia being thoroughly disturbed throughout this movie.

While this isn’t the worst killer spider film I’ve seen, and far from the worst made-for-TV movie ever, an Arachnophobia or Lavalantula this is not. The whole time I was sitting through Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, I just wished I was watching one of those other films. While those ones are re-watchable and have fun with the material, I hope to never see this movie ever again, although I can’t say I totally hated watching it the one time.