Earth vs. the Spider (1958) Review

Earth vs. the Spider (1958) Review

 

This sounds like the most epic and terrifying killer animal film of the 1950’s with a title like that, doesn’t it? It’s not just a few people battling a giant spider, it’s the entire planet! And one poster sports these teasers: “Bullets…won’t kill it!” Flames…can’t burn it! Nothing…can stop it!” Well, okay, maybe the poster and title lied a bit. And after the success of The Fly earlier that same year, the title was shorted to just The Spider.

In the opening credits a name jumped out at me: Bert I. Gordon. Oh no, I thought, here we go with a shit show. Bert I. Gordon is known for specializing in cheap giant monster films that rely on crappy rear projection effects to make regular-sized animals appear as massive beasts. I observed the less-than-convincing method in The Food of the Gods and Empire of the Ants, and expected Earth vs. the Spider to be just as bad as those films. Luckily, it’s not. It has some merit, despite using the same technique as the aforementioned films, but with it being in black and white, it doesn’t look quite as bad. I only caught one moment where the spider’s body faded into the background.

The story begins with a guy driving home late at night with a birthday gift for his daughter Carol, and a length of web stretched across the road causes him to crash his car. Carol and her boyfriend Mike search for him later the next day and end up in a cave, where they find human skeletons and fall into the web of a giant tarantula. The web is very clearly just made of rope, and the spider announces its arrival with a shrill cry, which in reality is a warped woman’s scream, and it isn’t scary or funny, just bizarre and completely inappropriate.

The cops come to check out the cave after Carol and Mike tell them about what they found, and they find her father, who is nothing but a corpse drained of all his bodily fluids. Surprisingly, they kill the spider early on, and I expected it to come back to life right away, but they actually put it on display in the gymnasium of the small town’s school and it remains “dead” for so long I almost wondered if they were going to have a second giant spider occupy the rest of the film. I guess the spider was just taking a really long nap, because it eventually wakes up and smashes its way out of the gym.

The middle of the film features all the mayhem caused by the spider attacking, but unfortunately the final act is pretty boring. The focus is just on the teens stuck in the cave again with the spider and the townspeople trying to trap it in the cave, then when they do so they realize the teens are now trapped in there with it, too, and they have to get back in to get them out before the spider gets them. It sounds more dramatic than it actually is. In the final moments when they kill the spider it calls back to an early scene with the teens in science class learning about electric currents, so the climax doesn’t feel completely worthless.

Earth vs. the Spider is definitely the best killer animal film from Bert I. Gordon, but if I’m being honest, it’s a far cry from some of the best giant spider movies I’ve seen—and it’s not a big surprise to find that’s the case. Still, it’s a fun showcase for one of Hollywood’s earliest attempts to pit humans against the massive eight-legged monstrosities.