Earth Vs. the Spider

1958 B-movie

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Teenage lovebirds stumble into a cave despite signs that clearly warn them to stay out of the cave. Teenagers, those who can read, never listen. The cave happens to be the lair of a gigantic spider that has killed the girl's father. Help arrives and the spider is killed and taken downtown to be displayed and studied. But oh, snap! Some more teenagers revive the beast by playing rock 'n' roll music and the spider has to be stopped a second time. Damn those teens and their devil music!

This movie isn't really offensively or laughably terrible which unfortunately makes it a little boring. The acting's flat, the characters are boring, and the story is pedestrian. There's about 10-15 minutes where the giant spider is crawling around the small town (this is, by the way, more like A Small Generic Town Vs. the Spider rather than Earth Vs. the Spider) while people run around screaming. That part is mildly entertaining. The special effects, a superimposed spider, aren't awful, at least all the time. There's no interacting between the creature and the people. There are a few scenes where a spider leg extends from off-screen to slap a human around, but that's about it and it makes the violence and "horror" in this a bit hokey. I was impressed with the cave scenes. Lots of stalactites and stalagmites here even though it probably would have been much cheaper to just show the same stalactites and stalagmites over and over again. It wasn't enough though. This was a pretty boring movie.