Professor Deemer (Leo G. Carrol) and two of his colleagues have holed up in a lab out in the desert where they are experimenting with a new non-organic nutrient that will feed the world as its population explodes. The experiment goes awry -- don't they all? -- and Deemer's colleagues both contract a fulminating pituitary disorder, acromegalia, that distorts their features and then kills them. Before he dies, enraged, one of the colleagues gives the unconscious Professor Deemer a shot of his own medicine.
When the corpses begin to show up, the small-town doctor, John Agar, is prompted to visit the lab out of curiosity. It is about this same time that Carrol's beautiful young assistant, Mara Corday, arrives. The young doc and the lab assistant fall for each other.
This nutrient -- I hope you're following this -- this nutrient promotes dramatic growth in organisms. In one day a baby rat is the size of a bunny rabbit. Imagine what this will do for the world's cattle supply! One cow would fill up the barn and eat nothing but this non-organic nutrient fluid! Oh, by the way, the professor's prediction about population growth was a little off the mark. He predicted that by 2000 the planet would be host to something more than three and a half billion people. It's now 2007 and we are just shy of six billion. The best estimate is that in another 50 years we'll have doubled that figure. Someone place a long-distance call to Thomas Malthus and tell him he was right after all.
Well, see, most of the experimental organisms were destroyed in a fire, but one managed to escape. It could have been a guinea pig but if it had, there would be no picture. No -- it was a tarantula the size of a foot stool. The wretched thing hobbles about secretly in the desert, making a nuisance of itself by eating cattle, horses, and people. Before you know it -- and, more important, before Agar, Corday, the local sheriff, and the US Air Force know it, the spider is the size of Shea Stadium and is crunching whole houses beneath it. (The now gruesomely disfigured professor is hoist by his own petard.) Tommy guns don't stop it. It doesn't even pause when a load of dynamite is exploded under its cephalothorax.
Only an infallible super hero could save us now. And here he comes. Clint Eastwood, leading a pack of jets, demolishes the lumbering creature just as it is about to attack the town of Desert Rock. Well, we knew Mara Corday would survive anyway, because she was later to appear in "Sudden Impact" with Clint, many years later, as a waitress.
The movie is made on a low budget and it has no ambitions beyond inspiring fear and wonder at the special effects, which look a bit shoddy to today's audiences used to CGIs. It has no lesson to teach us, unlike, say, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," but its very cheesiness lends it a charm that's lacking in multimillion-dollar f/x extravaganzas like "The War of the Worlds." It's comforting to see a small-town doctor who makes house calls. The vistas of empty desert enchant the eye. And if the characters are stereotypical, well, stereotypes exist for a reason. They are fixed points in a changing and unpredictable universe. We sort of like our doctors to be humanists and one of the crowd, and we like our professors thoughtful and quirky, and the sheriff hard-headed, realistic, and given to derisive laughter when he hears an implausible tale.
There's a scene in which John Agar and Mara Corday are driving in the doc's nifty 1950s Ford convertible through the empty desert, and he shares with her his sense of awe at living in a landscape like this. Everything that has ever walked or crawled has left its mark in this desert. . . . She asks him to pull over and stop. They sit on a rock and chat in the middle of this vast void. The scene only lasts a few minutes, but for those few minutes we could wish we were part of that couple, innocent, capable of inspiration, still able to look at emptiness and recognize beauty in it. My guess is that the location for this scene is now part of a strip mall and the vacant lots sparkle with bent soda cans and styrofoam. Would that we were at three and a half billion and there were room enough left for wonder at a natural landscape.
It's a simple, unpretentious movie made for adults as well as kids. You'll enjoy it.
When the corpses begin to show up, the small-town doctor, John Agar, is prompted to visit the lab out of curiosity. It is about this same time that Carrol's beautiful young assistant, Mara Corday, arrives. The young doc and the lab assistant fall for each other.
This nutrient -- I hope you're following this -- this nutrient promotes dramatic growth in organisms. In one day a baby rat is the size of a bunny rabbit. Imagine what this will do for the world's cattle supply! One cow would fill up the barn and eat nothing but this non-organic nutrient fluid! Oh, by the way, the professor's prediction about population growth was a little off the mark. He predicted that by 2000 the planet would be host to something more than three and a half billion people. It's now 2007 and we are just shy of six billion. The best estimate is that in another 50 years we'll have doubled that figure. Someone place a long-distance call to Thomas Malthus and tell him he was right after all.
Well, see, most of the experimental organisms were destroyed in a fire, but one managed to escape. It could have been a guinea pig but if it had, there would be no picture. No -- it was a tarantula the size of a foot stool. The wretched thing hobbles about secretly in the desert, making a nuisance of itself by eating cattle, horses, and people. Before you know it -- and, more important, before Agar, Corday, the local sheriff, and the US Air Force know it, the spider is the size of Shea Stadium and is crunching whole houses beneath it. (The now gruesomely disfigured professor is hoist by his own petard.) Tommy guns don't stop it. It doesn't even pause when a load of dynamite is exploded under its cephalothorax.
Only an infallible super hero could save us now. And here he comes. Clint Eastwood, leading a pack of jets, demolishes the lumbering creature just as it is about to attack the town of Desert Rock. Well, we knew Mara Corday would survive anyway, because she was later to appear in "Sudden Impact" with Clint, many years later, as a waitress.
The movie is made on a low budget and it has no ambitions beyond inspiring fear and wonder at the special effects, which look a bit shoddy to today's audiences used to CGIs. It has no lesson to teach us, unlike, say, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," but its very cheesiness lends it a charm that's lacking in multimillion-dollar f/x extravaganzas like "The War of the Worlds." It's comforting to see a small-town doctor who makes house calls. The vistas of empty desert enchant the eye. And if the characters are stereotypical, well, stereotypes exist for a reason. They are fixed points in a changing and unpredictable universe. We sort of like our doctors to be humanists and one of the crowd, and we like our professors thoughtful and quirky, and the sheriff hard-headed, realistic, and given to derisive laughter when he hears an implausible tale.
There's a scene in which John Agar and Mara Corday are driving in the doc's nifty 1950s Ford convertible through the empty desert, and he shares with her his sense of awe at living in a landscape like this. Everything that has ever walked or crawled has left its mark in this desert. . . . She asks him to pull over and stop. They sit on a rock and chat in the middle of this vast void. The scene only lasts a few minutes, but for those few minutes we could wish we were part of that couple, innocent, capable of inspiration, still able to look at emptiness and recognize beauty in it. My guess is that the location for this scene is now part of a strip mall and the vacant lots sparkle with bent soda cans and styrofoam. Would that we were at three and a half billion and there were room enough left for wonder at a natural landscape.
It's a simple, unpretentious movie made for adults as well as kids. You'll enjoy it.