KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977)

 As a lover of spiders I'm torn between how cool this movie is with its portrayal of massive amounts of killer/world-conquering tarantulas and how many of said creepy-crawlies get quite clearly squashed to death by being stepped on or run over by various fleeing humans throughout the film. At least they perished for art(or in this case cheesy 70s animal-running-wild cinematic goodness). William Shatner is our heroic lead and as usual he's pretty awesome here playing a cowboy/ veterinarian, and of course he gets the ladies! Sammy Davis Jr.'s wife Altovise has a fairly big role playing the wife of spaghetti-western and 80s eurotrash staple Woody Strode. Spiders run around in packs and build big mounds to live in together just like they would never do in reality but I guess we can just blame their unlikely actions on all the pesticides which is the catalyst for their revenge in the first place. A great slice of 70s cheese that I was able to catch at the drive-in recently along with FROGS and SQUIRM on what might have been the greatest triple-feature I've ever seen.




                              On a double-bill with the not that great RUBY:

                             Known in France as THE HORRIBLE INVASION!:

MYSTERIES OF THE GODS (1976)

 If you took the show IN SEARCH OF... and replaced it's narrator, Leonard Nimoy, with his fellow STAR TREK hero William Shatner and stretched it into a full length feature this is what you would get. Of course that show was only a half hour long including commercials so it was a bit more entertaining at that length. Here things do tend to wear a little thin with all the crazy-ass unprovable theories about ancient astronauts and UFOs. It is saved by getting the chance to see Shatner doing some of his best over-acting work interviewing some folks with some very off-the-wall interpretations of reality. If you weren't raised on IN SEARCH OF... you might want to give this a pass but it might still be culty and weird enough for lovers of the more bizarre side of the 1970's. AKA WILLIAM SHATNER'S MYSTERIES OF THE GODS

THE DEVIL'S RAIN (1975)

 This might have more sentimental/nostalgic value to me than actually being a great movie or anything but I think it's still a goofy entertaining watch. Plus you get a bunch of 60's/70's stars including Eddie Albert, Tom Skerritt, William Shatner and the great Ernest Borgnine looking like a goat/ram-man and playing the eternal leader of a group of desert-dwelling Satanists. I musta blinked a couple of times the last time I watched this because I completely missed John Travolta but I know he's in there somewhere(this was his first film) and Anton Lavey who, of course, plays a Satanic priest. I did watch it on an ancient VHS tape with an extremely full screen print with constant audio noise. Perhaps a DVD-upgrade is in order but this did serve to remind me of how it looked when viewed on some late night showing back in the late 70's/early 80's. Another cool thing about this film is that it uses a Hieronymus Bosch painting (that I also have hanging on my wall) in an effectively creepy way. Also there's a crazy melty finale which kinda made me think of the movie STREET TRASH that came out a decade later. So if you dig the Satanic 70's this one might be worth a look.

WHITE COMANCHE (1968)

 Spanish western starring William Shatner as a half-breed Indian and also his identical evil twin(who's evil because he smokes too much of that ole' peyote, and according to this movie peyote makes Indians want to rape and kill whitey).  The jazz score for a lot of this movie seems very out of place and I kept waiting for some old west beatniks to show up.  Also native Americans are not really shown in a very positive light except it's such a goofy movie I can't imagine anyone ever getting offended by it.  Shatner does his usual over-acting, which I can dig, and it works perfectly with the silliness of it all and he gets to fight himself.  Probably only of interest to Star Trek-nerds who want to see what Shat did in between Trek seasons or your typical cult movie obsessive-types.  For a better Indiansploitation flick check out JOHNNY FIRECLOUD.