Tarantula

Can all mankind escape the terror of its dread embrace...

Professor Gerald Deemer has been working on a special nutrient that will help offset a predicted food shortage, the serum he has created escalates growth in his lab animals at an alarmingly quick rate. Deemer quickly loses control of the experiment and during a fight at his lab a fire breaks out and a Tarantula that is already 50 sizes bigger than it should be, escapes, and soon all species are on the menu!

Tarantula is a big personal fave of mine from this particular genre, so I make no apologies for my uncontrolled bias! The film opens with a facially malformed man running through the desert until he collapses, and from then on in we are treated to a story involving acromegal...

Boy, does this show its age!* But, you know what, I really enjoyed it.

'<a href="https://letterboxd.com/film/eight-legged-freaks/">Eight Legged Freaks</a>', eat your heart out! I seem to have found a new go-to Spider Rampage Flick. To be serious, 'Tarantula' achieves what it intends to - it is relatively creepy in parts.

The special effects, as alluded to, have aged averagely, but there are still some excellent shots in there. When the spider is in a wide shot it looks very neat, the issues tend to arise when the creature is at the forefront of the shot - which turns into a sharp black-and-white shadow clash. Speaking of the b/w, it is a very dark film visually; especially for the night scenes. The make-up effects look great, either w...

Allowing for the fact that the special effects are getting on for 65 years old, this is a cracking little sci-fi/horror feature. John Agar is the scientist on the trail of an industrial-sized spider that is wreaking havoc on a local Arizona community. Leo G. Carroll (in increasingly "Elephant Man" style make up) and Mara Corday help keep this Jack Arnold film moving along well. Herman Stein's music is a little derivative but it also helps to create some tension as they all race to stop the arachnid terror from desiccating everything it meets.