Kingdom of the Spiders Movie Review

Trailer here.

Kingdom of the Spiders is a 1977 horror movie directed by John Cardos and starring William Shatner and Tiffany Bolling.

Something attacks a calf in Verde Valley, Arizona. The local vet, Rack Hansen(Shatner) is called by a farmer, Walter Colby(Woody Strode) to look at his calf who has taken ill suddenly. It is a mystery and Dr. Hansen sends a blood sample off to have it analysed. The calf dies. A woman called Diane Ashley(Bolling) arrives in town to talk to the locals about what has happened. She informs Rack that the calf died from a poisonous spider bite. This is most unusual and Rack doesn't think that it is possible. Diane studies spiders and is considered an expert. She wants to look at the calf's carcass and see what happened. Diane and Rack go to Walter's farm and discover that his dog is dead. Walter tells them that he has spotted a spider hill on his property. Diane thinks that maybe they are becoming aggressive because their food source has been eradicated by insecticides. The spiders are looking for a new source of food.

Diane and Rack decide to burn the spider hill. It is covered in tarantulas. They burn it, but some of the spiders escape. They are heading into town. Walter is driving in his truck when he gets attacked by the deadly eight-legged horrors. He crashes and dies. Rack and Diane happen to find him. The local Sheriff looks into it. Rack sees that Walter is wrapped in a spider cocoon. They visit the farm and discover lots more spider hills. At this point, I think I would just nuke the whole place. The mayor wants to spray the area with insecticide to kill them. A local man is going to spray the area in his plane. Unfortunately for him, he gets attacked by the spider posse. His plane crashes and burns. Walter's wife gets surrounded by the eight legged terrors and she perishes. Rack's sister in law gets attacked also. She dies. Rack and Diane rescue Linda, Rack's niece. They go to the Washburn Lodge and barricade themselves in. They are in contact with the Sheriff.  They try to seal up any holes to keep the spiders out.

The spiders launch an attack on the town. They start biting at will. There is total panic. Everything goes crazy. The spiders get to the Sheriff and he ends up dead. They head for the lodge next and they try and break in to get Rack and the others. They manage to turn off the power and the lodge is left in darkness. Rack goes to the basement to find the fuse box. It is surrounded by spiders. He manages to fix it, but gets covered in spiders. He is okay. The next morning, they all wake up and they take a look out of the window. They see that the whole area is covered in spider silk cocoons. The whole town is covered....

I liked this film. It was a lot of fun really. The cast were fine and the story was interesting, if not nightmarish! The idea of spiders taking over a town is horrible and this film would scare any arachnophobe. It scared the hell out of me because I can imagine nothing worse than loads of horrible spiders crawling around, killing people. Somehow, I like these spider movies though. They are always fun. I recommend this one. It is definitely worth a look, It has William Shatner and killer spiders!!! I will give this one a 5/10.