Kiss of the Tarantula (1975)

Reviewed on Mar 21, 2007 under Horror |

Directed by Chris Munger
Written by Warren Hamilton Jr.
Starring
- Suzanne Ling
- Eric Mason
- Herman Wallner
- Beverly Eddins
- Patricia Landon

“You say we have a big secluded rundown house that looks like a mortuary, a crapload of tarantulas, and a bunch of unknown actors willing to handle or otherwise interact with the tarantulas? Load the camera — we’re making a movie!”

That appears to be the genesis of this slight independent horror flick. When it opened, I’m sure that the audience’s gasps of dismay came from watching, the ugly, shaggy spiders meander around the screen in closeups. Nowadays, those gasps come from watching the ugly, shaggy fashions worn by the cast. Between the two, I’m sure there’s something here to give everyone nightmares.

And, as seems to be a peculiar conceit of ’70s movies (or maybe I just notice it more in them, because really, how could you not?), those fashions were imagined to be eternal. Witness the opening scenes, in which juvenile Susan (Susan Eddins) wanders around her home, playing happily with the garden spiders she finds until her uber-harridan mother (Beverly Eddins — her real-life mom, one supposes) smacks it out of her hand. Fast-forward a couple of years, to when pre-pubescent Susan (Rebecca Eddins — holy cow!) again is playing with spiders, and again Mom bursts in to stomp on it and harangue Susan. Susan’s father (Herman Wallner) is far more accomodating of Susan’s affection for arachnids, but then, Dad is also a mortician, so he’ll be passing on his own set of issues to his daughter. Spider policy isn’t the only problem between Mom and Dad, though; no, the biggest problem is Mom. She’s a screechy shrew who always complains about Dad taking her side and how she hates living in a mortuary. She shows all the traits of the stereotypical evil stepmother, though no indication of that is ever stated; in fact, when someone later mentions that Susan is as pretty as her mother, the implication is that there’s a good biological reason for it. So let’s just say that Mom has some severe attachment issues. Or that she’s just congenitally bitchy.

“Now behave, or I’ll make you focus on my dress again!”

Oh, and Mom’s also running around with her husband’s brother Walter (Eric Mason), a policeman in their small town. Susan discovers this when she overhears her mother on the phone with her “lover-in-law”¹, and not only that, but Mom and Walter are also planning to kill Dad in the near future! So Susan plays to her strengths: She goes into the basement, finds a tarantula, and slips it into her mother’s bedroom. (Confucius say, People conspiring to commit murder should not sleep with night masks on.) I should point out that neither here nor in any other death in this movie do the tarantulas ever bite or otherwise directly kill anyone (which is as it should be; rare is the tarantula whose venom can take out a grown human). Instead, it looks like Mom just panics herself into heart failure.

After the funeral, we fast-forward an indeterminate length of time, with Susan now a young woman (played for the rest of the movie by Suzanne Ling, i.e., not a member of the Eddins family). I’m not sure exactly how old she’s supposed to be — high school age? older? — and the question is made even more unanswerable by the fact that one member of her peer group has to be at least in his late twenties. But here’s the point I was trying to get to: it’s still the ’70s, with fashions frozen at the height of aggressive ugliness. Uncle Walter, especially, suffers at the hand of fashion. It should come as a surprise to nobody that he’s a slimy lech, even without knowledge of his earlier murder plot against his own brother, because it was nigh impossible for any man over 30 to dress in the popular styles and NOT look like a slimy lech.

That’s right: Spiders big enough to grope you.

Susan still lives at home in the mortuary with Dad, and without Mom’s interferences, has been able to turn the basement into her “pet room,” with rows upon rows of caged tarantulas all waiting for her affectionate stroking. It leaves her a little disconnected from the kids her age, but she doesn’t mind. And sleazy Uncle Walter is ready to step in, bestowing upon almost-adult Susan his pushy, unwanted attentions (not realizing that Susan has known all these years about the abortive murder plot). It’s kind of peculiar behavior for the local police chief who’s gunning for election to the D.A.’s office, but that’s just the kind of slimeball Walter is.

With the situation thus (at length) set up, let’s have some inciting action: While Dad is out at night helping his brother’s campaign, three local teenagerish (or whatever demographic Susan herself is supposed to be in) pull up to the mortuary, thinking no one’s home, so the three guys can steal a casket for a prank. (Where they’re going to put it in their Volkwagen Bug which already has six occupants, I don’t know.) When Susan interrupts them, they go out of their way to frighten her with their boorishness… and then one of them REALLY crosses the line by killing one of her spiders.

Uh oh.

So when two of the couples head to the drive-in later that night, Susan shows up in the stall next to them, and once the couples stop watching the movie and paying more attention to each other (Aaagh! Ugly people in bad fashions sucking face! Make it stop!), she creeps over and lets a boxful of tarantulas into the car.

Signage is always the key to any successful marketing plan.

Now, here’s the thing about tarantulas: They’re slow. Deliberate and slow. Often, that creeping pace can be used to add an almost unbearable tension to a scene, but to do that requires either a cinematographer or an editor who’s at the top of his game. (Both would be even better, but I’m not greedy.) With only competence in both departments, though, we get a spider crawling on someone’s ankle… a spider crawling on someone’s knee… a spider crawling on someone else’s ankle… a spider on the the dashboard… a spider on someone’s thigh… It’s a good thing these kids were taking their time, because they could easily have been all finished up and smoking a cigarette by the time the tarantulas entered their field of vision.

When the spiders are finally discovered, however, mass panic (”mass” among four people, anyway) ensues. Remember what I said about the spiders actually killing nobody? It holds true here. The driver kicks out the passenger window, and his date promptly cuts her throat on the glass. Then the guy from the backseat pushes his way over into the front, crushing the driver’s windpipe against the steering wheel. And said backseat guy (I mean, it’s kind of late to worry about character names now) almost makes it out the driver’s door, but the parking brake slips, the car rolls forward, and the metal pole holding the speaker box forces the door shut again, breaking the neck of the poor guy who’s halfway out. All that’s left is the backseat girl, who’s now in a perfectly understandable catatonic state. And then the tarantulas march in an orderly fashion back into Susan’s box, with no casualties among them and no clues which a smalltown police department can find, even when the police chief is sleazy Uncle Walter.

“Come on, Susan. Twice as old means twice as good!”

The couple that didn’t go to the drive-in were Bo (Jay Scott Neal) and Nancy (Patricia Landon), and they start to suspect that Susan had something to do with their friends’ deaths when Nancy catches Susan in the catatonic girl’s hospital room saying something that sounds a lot like an apology. Meanwhile, Uncle Walter is dividing his time between explaining the deaths (”Maybe they freaked out”) and putting his moves on Susan. And… Um…

This is one of those movies with a meandering plot, as the story doesn’t really spring from a single cause of action. That leaves me with the options of either recounting the entire narrative to you in detail, or skipping over most of the movie. (We’re still only half an hour in.) So let’s just get some bullet points out of the way:

- Susan has a love interest — who shows up in a couple of early scenes, then disappears completely.

- Bo’s investigation of Susan takes a wrong turn when he shouts his accusations at her. That, apparently, is enough to give her the psychic powers necessary to know when Bo would be working at his construction job alone on a Saturday morning, repairing some ductwork from the inside. The perfect place, you know, to be caught by spiders. (But not, i repeat, harmed by them; instead, Bo jams himself into a corner of the ducts trying to get away, and suffocates.)

**“What do you mean, I don’t get my SAG card for this??”**

- Uncle Walter does a little bit of police work: He discovers a tarantula leg on Bo’s corpse, and starts putting two and two together when he finds out that the catatonic girl, just coming around, freaked out again when she saw a garden spider in the flowers in her hospital room. And when Nancy comes to his office, babbling unfounded accusations about Susan being behind it all, well, he sees a chance to cover up a crime and instead leverage his way into his niece’s pants. Again, odd behavior for a man seeking public office.

Thanks to both Nancy and Uncle Walter trying to work their own angles, Susan really has little to do except react to their courses of action for the rest of the movie. It’s indicative of some shaky plotting when you realize that the entire last thirty minutes of a movie entitled Kiss of the Tarantula is entirely devoid of spiders. And the last scene takes so long, you’d swear the tarantulas were now behind the camera. Which still puts it in the upper half of all big-ass spider movies ever made.