There is nothing quite like the old “nature on a rampage” genre of creature features. Movies like Jaws, The Birds, and Alligator are all pretty good examples of this slice of horror movies, but today we are looking at flick that is an arachnophobes worst nightmare… Kingdom of the Spiders.

In the film, Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, plays Dr. Robert “Rack” Hansen, a veterinarian in a small Arizona town. Hansen receives a call about a calf that had died suddenly and without any apparent reason. Hansen sends a blood sample to a lab in Flagstaff and later meets with Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling), an arachnologist, who reveals that the calf was killed by spider venom.

Things go from bad to worse as animals and people alike are killed by swarms of spiders which are hunting together and looking for other food sources due to strong pesticides killing off their main prey items, and disrupting their natural food supply.

In typical Jaws fashion, the mayor makes terrible decisions because of a county fair coming up, which results in the entire town being overrun by the spiders.

Speaking of the spiders, the movie used 5,000 tarantulas for the shoot, funny in that tarantulas are extremely shy, more likely to avoid humans, and possess very little venom (not more than a bee sting). In fact, they had to use blasts of air from fans to get the tarantulas to move toward their “victims” in the movie, and you can see the tarantulas moving away from the actors at every chance they get. Additionally, the most harm to any actor was from the tarantulas’ bristles which mostly just cause itching (urticating bristles are actually used to make itching powder sold in novelty stores).

The tarantulas were purchased for $10 a piece from a Mexican spider wrangler (now that’s a job title to put on a resume), which meant that $50,000 of the movies $500,000 budget went to the spiders. All of them had to kept in separate containers as they are known to be cannibalistic.

Unfortunately, some tarantulas did die in the making of the movie, particularly the scene where the town is overrun.

This movie is a lot of cheesy fun and is unintentionally hilarious in a lot of areas. Particularly a scene with a crop duster that is attacked by the spiders. That said, this one has a surprisingly dark “twist” ending.

Definitely not a film for arachnophobes, but if you like creature on the loose movies like me, or want to see the kinds of movies that something like Tremors was playing off of, I highly recommend tracking this one down.

Next week, we’ll take a look across the Pacific for some classic kaiju action.