810-The Giant Spider Invasion

Film Year:  1975
Genre:  Science Fiction, Horror
Director:  Bill Rebane
Starring:  Alan Hale Jr., Barbara Hale (no relation), Steve Brodie, Robert Easton, Leslie Parrish, Bill Williams, Christiane Schmidtmer, a lot of spiders, and a plush clump posing as a giant spider
MST Season:  8

The Movie

Was I particularly hard on the special effects in Earth vs. the Spider?  If I was, then I take every word back.  Earth vs. the Spider is Avatar compared to Giant Spider Invasion.  I mean, holy crap.  Bert I. Gordon at least knew that a real spider blown-up to a large size on the big screen might have some semblance to realism, whereas Bill Rebane (the original director of the classic Monster A-Go Go) makes his large spider a mostly immobile plush toy with the largest pipe-cleaner legs you'll ever see.  I know suspension of disbelief is a thing, but if you're able to employ it on this movie, congratulations, because you have a much grander imagination than I have.

At least they had the decency to use real spiders for the small ones.  Though it might have been more amusing if they had consistency and just pulled along little rubber ones on strings.

Giant Spider Invasion sees meteors from space (or another dimension...in space) landing in a redneck's yard in Wisconsin.  In the fragments, he finds crystals which he believes are diamonds.  He spends his spare time collecting as many as he can and cheating on his wife, but, unknown to them, space spiders also hitched a ride on those meteors, and they're growing...and hungry.

Giant Spider Invasion also stars Gilligan's Island's Alan Hale Jr. as the laid back town sheriff, which helps this movie go down easier.  Hale is easily the least rage-inducing character in the movie, which is due to the man's gosh darn lovable nature.  Almost everyone else in this movie is trash, and I'm happy to see shoddy spider creatures devour them.  Even the two scientist characters, who are trying to save the day, range from dull to shrill ("BeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeN!") and don't really encourage me to root for the spider.

Alan Hale has a line in this movie that has always bugged me a bit, where he compares the giant spider to the movie Jaws and says "This spider makes that shark look like a goldfish!"  It's not uncommon for a bad movie to throw shade at a good one to try and trick the audience into thinking it's the better film, and say what you will about the "fake shark" in Jaws, but comparing that plush spider to the thing is just a slap in the face.

The Episode

There may need to be some context to the MST version of Giant Spider Invasion that should be noted for anybody from a potential new generation of MSTies that discover the show today, because I'm fairly certain the crew didn't know people would still be watching this episode twenty years later.  There's a running gag late in the movie that features a mob chasing the giant spider and causing a ruckus, which our riffers riff on with a constant slew of "PACKERS WON THE SUPER BOWL!  PACKERS!"  This episode was filmed not long after Super Bowl XXXI, where the Green Bay Packers beat the New England Patriots 35-21.  In the aftermath of that event, they're given a movie that was proudly made in Wisconsin and features an abundance of angry mobs, so they took an opportunity to spin it into references to sporting riots.

The reference runs a bit dated today, and feels very random the further away from 1997 we get, but as someone who watched this episode during MST's original airing, I can confirm it was very hilarious at the time.  It also makes it the perfect episode to burst out whenever the Packers might win the Super Bowl again, which they did do in 2011 (and yes, I had this episode handy, just in case).

Other than that, Giant Spider Invasion is noteworthy as a bit of an expansion of MST's Sci-Fi Channel run.  It's the first color movie they showed on the network, moving away from black-and-white genre pictures from Universal International and American International, which dominated the previous nine episodes.  While I love a good black-and-white episode of MST, it's nice to have some room to breath with diversity.  Here we're faced with a really bottom budget movie from the 70's, with vile, unlikable redneck characters and effects that are much shoddier than you'd find in those 50's productions from earlier in the season (and who says special effects get better as time goes on?).  There is so much more to poke fun at in Giant Spider Invasion than they've been offered in a while, and Mike and the Bots dig in, because they're starving.

The host segments are pretty fun too, as the show plays with a rare episode-long arc with them, and this is probably one of the best ones they've done (up there with Timmy the Dark Crow).  They take inspiration from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the storyline sees Pearl and Observer taken over by pod replicas who send up pods to try and replace Mike and the Bots.  Fun shenanigans follow, which is highlighted by the crew fighting fatigue in fear of being replaced, getting annoyed with duplicates, and relying on Bobo to save the day.  There are a couple of logic holes in the storyline, such as Pearl and Observer being replaced in an instant when they had no logical time to fall asleep and the idea that Mike and the Bots were struggling to stay awake when they were in the middle of a theater experiment, but "Repeat to yourself it's just a show..."

The ending to this episode tickles me, as the reawakened Pearl becomes annoyed at the fact that Mike, Servo, and Crow sat through the movie and she wasn't there to see it, so she makes them sit through the movie a second time.  I enjoyed the first go-around with Giant Spider Invasion so much that I wouldn't have minded joining them for another run at it.  The movie is a bit of a pain in the ass, but this is one that I watch often despite that.

Good

PACKERS!  WOO!

The DVD

Giant Spider Invasion was featured on Rhino's Volume 10 box set, and was also featured on their eventual Volume 10.2 reissue.  Audio and video were both excellent, and the only bonus feature was a Video Jukebox of songs from the show.

Shout Factory later re-released Volume 10.2 on DVD.  The Jukebox was still featured, but it also contained an interview with director Bill Rebane on the making of Giant Spider Invasion called Spider Man:  Looking Back on Giant Spider Invasion.  He talks about conception, spider wrangling, the crappy giant spider on a Volkswagon, and writing clashes.