Kingdom of the Spiders

1977 "A Living, Crawling, Hell on Earth!"
5.7| 1h37m| PG| en
Details

Investigating the mysterious deaths of a number of farm animals, vet Rack Hansen discovers that his town lies in the path of hordes of migrating tarantulas. Before he can take action, the streets are overrun by killer spiders, trapping a small group of townsfolk in a remote hotel.

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Reviews

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.
Mjeteconer Just perfect...
Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.
Leofwine_draca This above-average "nature's rampage" horror flick beats Spielberg's ARACHNOPHOBIA in terms of hands-down scares - because here, the majority of the spiders are REAL ones instead of unconvincing fakes and special effects. Yep, somebody "borrowed" about 5000 tarantulas to make this movie and the effect is one of the most realistic man vs. beast movies out there. KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS is all you could hope for in a B-movie starring everyone's favourite thesp, William Shatner, and a cast of B-movie hopefuls.The plot concerns spiders which have to turn to larger food suppliers after farmers using DDT destroy most of their natural insect food. It has NOTHING to do with alien spiders, as the UK box cover bizarrely suggests. Although the film's structure adheres to the old strict template (minor deaths and mysteries followed up by a full-scale invasion), cult director John "Bud" Cardos (who also gave us THE DARK and MUTANT) takes time out for us to get to know - and care for - the principal characters involved in the antics. William Shatner takes the leading hero's role of a cowboy veterinarian (!) and his acting is pretty subdued here - at least, until the finale in which he is attacked by spiders and goes into a fit of over-acting or a scene where he skips down a road covered with the creepy-crawlies! Tiffany Bolling is the hard-headed female scientist who comes to investigate the mysterious deaths of cows (shown at the beginning in good, eerie scenes) and whose heart is soon melted by Shatner's charms. The only other actor of note is Woody Strode, who here puts in a touching show as a farmer who fears that his farm is going to get quarantined. The rest is your typical B-movie bunch, and fans will be glad to hear that there's a high death toll with literally dozens of folk falling victim to the invading arachnids.Although, as with most "nature's rampage" horror flicks from the past twenty years, there's a certain suspension of disbelief required to enjoy the on screen action, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS offers us some truly great shocks and scares to rouse us from the inaction of the first half. There's a great shot of a spider-covered bull jumping suddenly at the camera, which is guaranteed to put anybody on the edge of the seat, and a frightening moment in which a pilot is attacked by spiders and crashes his plane into a building which explodes. However, the best part of the film is the last twenty minutes, the full-scale invasion which owes more than a nod to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD as the survivors board themselves up inside a roadside café and sit it out.There are many scenes of people being surrounded by/covered in spiders which work because these are real, moving spiders, not lousy special effects. The film briefly moves to the town where there's some large-scale chaos with cocooned bodies all over and people crashing their cars into water-towers which then collapses and kills yet more folk. Shatner himself has a suspenseful scene in the basement where he goes to fix a fuse and finds himself covered in the creepy crawlies and struggles for survival. This is classic stuff and a cut above the usual less-than-impressive invasion sequences in similar movies. The film ends with an ambiguous (sadly unconvincing) matte shot showing the entire town has been cocooned in a spider's web, and manages to be sufficiently eerie. KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS is a treat of a B-movie for genre fans and one of the more effective man-against-nature flicks out there.
ofpsmith After the monumental success of Jaws, everybody tried to copy it. And it went beyond Shark movies. There were land based terrors as well. Such a film is Kingdom of the Spiders. Although it's pretty ridiculous the suspense of the film actually works all right, and it's actually decent. It's no masterpiece but for what it's worth, it's really not that bad. It actually plays out a lot more like The Birds than Jaws, in that there's a large swarm of the killer animals. The buildup is kind of similar too. The attacks begin early on, and every now and then. Then by the end it escalates into a large scale frenzy. Then again it's not perfect and if you're looking for a really good "nature attacks" film, go see The Birds or Jaws, because they're both much better than this. For what it's worth, Kingdom of the Spiders is an enjoyable William Shatner spider fest.
kai ringler at first when i started watching this , i thought to myself oh no not another cheesy horror flick with no point,, well after about 20-30 mins i realized that this thankfully was not one of those. William Shatner plays the character "Rack" a veternarian dr. he discovers that something is killing of animals on a local farm in the small community. Once he makes that determination he gets the help of a professional who just happens to be female and cute. together the two of them try to figure out a way to stop the impending doom that faces the town. it is discovered that the use of DDT,, a common agent used in the 70's to kill numerous insects rodents and what not has wiped out the spider's local food supply,, so now the spiders must adapt to it's ever changing habitat, no more food, who do they turn to.. well you guessed it humans,, we are the main dish,, and now we have to fight to survive,, who better to lead us than T.J. Hooker.
kosmasp No pun intended btw with the summary line. And I'm sure not everyone will like the ending. But I think it's almost the only way to end this. William Shatner is really great in this and you can feel him, playing the ridiculousness of the script. There are even scenes, were he "fights" with Spiders, were you could be excused thinking this was directed by Mr. Ed Wood.But of course this does has something to say and since the spiders were real (well at least most, maybe they a few plastic one thrown into the mix), this also feels real. Which must have been good and bad for the actors. Good because they didn't need a great motivation to act scared and bad ... because some actually must have been genuinely scared!Having said that, the movie does not have a big budget (I even read this might have been initially made for TV, although I'm not sure if that's true) and the dialog is off quite a few times. If that doesn't matter much to you, you will get a really quite good, eerie and scary horror movie.