Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo

That’s right – not the “friendly” cargo. Nor the “lovely” cargo. Any aeroplane pilot worth their salt knows that tarantulas are the deadly cargo!

Fred (Howard Hesseman) and his buddy Buddy (Tom Atkins) probably know this but, unfortunately, they don’t know that some tarantulas are on board their aircraft when they take off from Ecuador, bound for the US. They think they’ve simply got a load of coffee beans, plus three illegal stowaways brought onboard to offset the export tax costs on the coffee. But the spiders are hiding in the beans, you see. Remember that next time you pop open a jar of Nescafé. Coffee beans = a fun playground for giant spiders.

Anyway, the tarantulas do what tarantulas do, which is to say they start biting everyone, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Finleyville, California, home of a large orange-packing plant and not much else. Before you can say, “Oh my god, the fire brigade have accidentally set the crashed plane on fire!”, the fire brigade have accidentally set the crashed plane on fire, killing the remaining human passengers not yet dead from spider venom (sometimes life can be so cruel) and sending the tarantulas scurrying towards town. And that can only mean one thing... terror like you’ve never imagined! Terror like THIS:



Yes, a flying spider chewing off your ear! (Isn’t that advert fantastic, by the way? God, I wish I lived in the seventies when things like that turned up in the TV magazines.) There are basically two kinds of tarantula in Tarantulas:



Ja, on ze left ve have ze “fuzzy oranges”, the slightly more aggressive and unfortunately predominant strain, prone to crawling onto people’s legs and generally employing all kinds of spidery scare tactics. Then there’s the “scrawny blacks” shown on the right, which don’t seem to bite as often but, sheesh, are they creepy-looking...

Soon enough, the killer spiders start popping up all over town – in drain pipes, fruit crates and, most tastefully of all, a school for autistic children. But the one place the tarantulas really make a bee-line (or a spider-line) for is the orange warehouse. Because spiders love fruit. Yes, coffee and fruit. ’Cuz they’re just nutty about breakfast (and if that’s not a slogan for cereal, I don’t know why not)... OK, to be exact, what they actually like are the flies attracted by fruit – or, in this case, the crickets attracted by fruit, since that’s what the prop managers come up with.

Now comes the biggest dilemma of all: not only are townsfolk dropping like, well, flies, but the orange harvest can’t be shipped. And if the oranges are left to spoil, then there’ll be no money and no jobs left for the people not killed by the tarantulas. So what are the good citizens of Finleyville to do?



Well, this is a spoiler, really, so skip the rest if you don’t want to know what their solution is because, believe me, you’re not going to guess it yourself. The townsfolk decide to terrify the tarantulas using amplified killer-wasp noises, causing them to go into a catatonic (or spidertonic) state. The crisis meeting goes like this:

Man (cottoning on fast): If we can convince the spiders that there are wasps around...
Hero: That’s right! Then we can pick them up in an immobilized state.
Naysayer: Hold it... The spiders are in the oranges, and the oranges are in the boxes. You can’t get to ’em.
Hero: But they’re hungry... They’re hungry!

Yes, this really works! Next time you find a spider in your house, simply imitate the sound of a predatory wasp and you’ll see. It also leads to my absolutely favouritest bit of this already gob-smackingly entertaining film, in which the townsfolk experiment with different tones and pitches of wasp-hums in order to work out the exact frequency that stuns the spiders. One man holds a tarantula (in a jar) next to a crate of bees, leading to this priceless exchange:

Man (disappointed): That spider’s not immobile.
Girl: It looks scared, though!

Once the correct level of spider-paralysing terror has been achieved, the townsfolk scoop up the petrified tarantulas with spades and drop them into buckets of alcohol – which both poisons and drowns the creatures at the same time, while also making an attractive cocktail. For some reason, they do this really slowly, while loads of people just stand and watch the entertainment.

Unfortunately, the horror doesn’t end there. A sudden power cut brings a halt to the electro-wasp pop and the spiders start to wake up... Not only that, but the whole building has gone into lockdown... In total darkness! Yes, the orange warehouse has become a tarantula-infested scarehouse, with our heroic spider-scoopers trapped inside!



Phew! And you thought Aliens was scary... Although, I must admit, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo holds up quite well on the fear front, especially for a TV movie made in 1977. Director Stuart Hagmann (who hasn’t worked since, for some reason) extracts maximum suspense from every scenario – including a particularly nightmarish sequence where the three Ecuadorian stowaways are trapped in the hold of a storm-battered plane with hoards of spiders.

The ending strikes a strange note, however: I can’t decide whether it’s offbeat or just plain anticlimactic but, either way, it’s set to some really funky music so I’m not complaining. Tarantulas, you’re half creepy, half crawly, and all crazy fun!

Rating: 4/5

In the Spider’s Web

You show me a scary movie, and I’ll show you a movie that would be even scarier if it was full of spiders!

Jaws, you say? Okay then, how about when Chrissie goes swimming at the beginning... What if, instead of just getting deep-throated by a giant great white shark, she looks up in the middle of being munched in half and discovers that – aieeeee! – there’s a spider in her hair! Yes, not only is she being mangled beyond all recognition betwixt the powerful jaws of the ocean’s greatest predator, but there’s a massive spider all, like, tangled and stuff in her fringe... Eeeewww!

Or what about The Exorcist? So... Regan’s head is spinning round and round and suddenly she starts to spew – but instead of mushy peas, out comes... spiders! And spider eggs! And they’re all totally hatching as they fly out into the priest’s face! OMG, I’m giving myself a panic attack!

Well, anyway, I think I’ve made my point. And the makers of the new TV movie In the Spider’s Web must’ve agreed, because it looks like they saw the movie Paradise Lost and decided that what it really needed was less credible actors and more CGI tarantulas. (If any of my many American readers are wondering what Paradise Lost is, it’s what we Brits renamed last year’s Josh Duhamel-starring slasher movie, Turistas, because we don’t go in for those foreigny-foreign titles here.)

In Paradise Lost, a group of good-looking kids get lost in the jungle and end up having their organs harvested for sale on the black market. In the Spider’s Web is not dissimilar: A slightly less good-looking group of kids and their guide are trudging through the jungle when one, Geraldine, is bitten by a spider and falls ill. Her fellow travellers quickly fashion a stretcher from bamboo stalks tied together with vines (at least I think they do because they suddenly have one in the next scene) and decide that, since town is too far to trek, they’ll have to carry her to a mysterious nearby village, reputedly lorded over by an American doctor, in the hope that he can help.

The American doctor turns out to be a grizzled-looking Lance Henriksen decked out in crusty yellow nail extensions (at least, I hope they were). And help he does, mixing up a spider juice potion inside his hut... His hut shaped like a giant spider! Dr Henriksen explains that Geraldine has been bitten by a Bolivian Baja spider “unlike any other spider on earth”. Cue various shots of him pretending to handle a tarantula, while a few hastily inserted close-ups show a spider in someone else’s hands. Poor Lance must be a little arachnophobic – not that I blame him – and TV movie paycheques obviously only go so far. Don’t expect to see him in the next series of I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! with his lips around a witchetty grub.

Anyway, Geraldine’s condition is now stable thanks to an injection of pure spider blood, so the others decide to leave her there while they head off to town to bring back some doctors who don’t have claws. Two of them discover a spooky-looking cave – a cave shaped like a giant spider! – and head inside. Bad idea... Haven’t they noticed that the spider motif obviously spells trouble? Soon, the entire group find themselves caught up in nefarious plot involving organ-harvesting, swarms of tarantulas, and a villain whose face is hidden behind a mask of spider silk!

In the Spider’s Web is a Sci-Fi Channel premiere that, like last year’s Abominable and Mammoth, is quite a lot of fun. It’s no Arachnophobia, which as far as I’m concerned still rules the web when it comes to killer-spider thrills, but gets more done in its running time than Spiders and Spiders II put together – probably because it manages to mix in elements of slasher movies, Indiana Jones, the aforementioned Paradise Lost, and most any monster movie you can think of. That’s as well as having characters reference Apocalypse Now and Gorillas in the Mist without actually mentioning the titles of either.

I’m not crazy about the use of CGI when actual spiders are scary enough, but the film has its fair share of real tarantulas and gives the computerized ones some amusing things to do. Even more amusing is the “mix two real tarantulas with five plastic ones” technique, pioneered by Lucio Fulci in The Beyond... although the “mix two real actors with five plastic ones” technique is less successful.

I’m still giving In the Spider’s Web my recommendation, though. It’s not scary in the way that finding an actual spider in your bedroom is scary, but finding the DVD in your player wouldn’t be a nasty surprise either.

Rating: 3/5