What starts with the mysterious death of the prize calf belonging to farmer Walter Colby (house favourite Woody Strode) quickly turns out to be the spiderpocalypse in a rural US small town. Apparently, humanity’s love for nuking insects with poison has killed off the main food sources of spiders. Tarantulas have moved habitats and have developed new and rather exciting habits, now swarming together instead avoiding each other, making tactical strikes, and killing humans.
Will local vet Rack Hansen (William Shatner) and quickly called-in arachnologist Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) solve the little spider problem, or will they waste valuable time on a romance so horrible, even 50s monster movie romances may suddenly feel swoon-worthy to a viewer?
Well, they certainly will do the latter, but stuntman turned director John “Bud” Cardos’s Kingdom of the Spiders doesn’t seem to put much stock into their efforts of fighting off those pesky arachnids in more than skirmishes anyway. This is a 70s animal attack movie, after all, so chances of winning out against an angry nature are slim to non-existent. Which, even more so from today’s perspective, seems like the proper way to treat these things. This of course doesn’t make the bizarre “romance” between people who’d rather kill each other than fuck in real life more believable or less squirm-inducing to watch, but it does explain it as an attempt (emphasis on “attempt”) to make us sad to see humanity go. Even if the result may very well lead to the opposite.
Though, to be fair, the rest of the character work is good enough. Cardos clearly puts effort into making the audience care for the characters, at least enough not to want to see them get eaten by spiders.
The first act is a little slow for my tastes, but the small town apocalyptic business in the rest of the movie does make up for it rather well, with the effectively shot panic in the spider-infested streets of the town late in the movie and the final, absurd yet utterly awesome, shots of the film being particular favourites of mine.
Tonally, Kingdom is a very 70s movie, having a rather bleak outlook on humanity’s place in the world even while keeping inside of the lines drawn by silly monster movies (that’s a good thing) and clearly having a lot of fun with all the tropes this suggests. Apparently, not even William Shatner (here in a comparatively controlled mood) can save us all.
Before the Shat fails, Cardos sets quite a bit of unobtrusively fine filmmaking in front of the audience, the film pretty much having all the visual and stylistic hallmarks of the sort of lived-in US 70s film that looks less carefully made than it actually is. It’s the filmmaking version of classic working class values, and it’ll make you happy (or unhappy, if you prefer humanity to tarantulas) just fine without making a lot of fuss about how good it is at what it does. Doesn’t mean it isn’t good at it, obviously.
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