Tarantula

9/6/2014

Can all mankind escape the terror of its dread embrace... Professor Gerald Deemer has been working on a special nutrient that will help offset a predicted food shortage, the serum he has created escalates growth in his lab animals at an alarmingly quick rate. Deemer quickly loses control of the experiment and during a fight at his lab a fire breaks out and a Tarantula that is already 50 sizes bigger than it should be, escapes, and soon all species are on the menu! Tarantula is a big personal fave of mine from this particular genre, so I make no apologies for my uncontrolled bias! The film opens with a facially malformed man running through the desert until he collapses, and from then on in we are treated to a story involving acromegaly (a disease that causes gigantism), and a giganti

1/6/2022

Boy, does this show its age!* But, you know what, I really enjoyed it. <em>'<a href="https://letterboxd.com/film/eight-legged-freaks/">Eight Legged Freaks</a>'</em>, eat your heart out! I seem to have found a new go-to Spider Rampage Flick™. To be serious, <em>'Tarantula'</em> achieves what it intends to - it is relatively creepy in parts. The special effects, as alluded to, have aged averagely, but there are still some excellent shots in there. When the spider is in a wide shot it looks very neat, the issues tend to arise when the creature is at the forefront of the shot - which turns into a sharp black-and-white shadow clash. Speaking of the b/w, it is a very dark film visually; especially for the night scenes. The make-up effects look great, either way though. Leo G. Carroll, J

11/14/2022

Allowing for the fact that the special effects are getting on for 65 years old, this is a cracking little sci-fi/horror feature. John Agar is the scientist on the trail of an industrial-sized spider that is wreaking havoc on a local Arizona community. Leo G. Carroll (in increasingly "Elephant Man" style make up) and Mara Corday help keep this Jack Arnold film moving along well. Herman Stein's music is a little derivative but it also helps to create some tension as they all race to stop the arachnid terror from desiccating everything it meets.

3/12/2026

**_A big axx spider threatens a desert town in the Southwest_** This debuted almost three years before the similar “Earth vs the Spider.” It’s adult-oriented and scientifically based compared to the later flick, which involves teens and 50s’ rock ‘n’ roll waking the (supposedly) dead spider. It’s worth watching just to go back in time to the mid-50s and observe how life was back then, including the styles and décor, not to mention the manner of speaking. John Agar makes for a quality masculine protagonist while brunette Mara Corday is appealing on the feminine front at the age of 25 during shooting. Although hampered by B&W photography, the desert locations are haunting. Plus, it’s interesting to see a big-bug flick from the 50s in which the mutations are not caused by nuclear was