Tarantula
All this month, we’re saluting the Kaiju, the giant monster movies of Japan. In case you’re thinking we’re unpatriotic, today’s Trillion Dollar Movie is the all-American-made Tarantula. This 1955 release from Universal Pictures wasn’t the first big bug thriller to come out of Hollywood. That honor belongs to Them!, the 1954 Warner Brothers’ hit that turned loose an army of giant, atomic-mutated ants in the deserts of New Mexico.
Tarantula lifted the same premise — oversized insects running amok in the desert — but gave it a different spin. The ginormous arachnid is the byproduct of a misfired scientific experiment with an altruistic goal. At a secret lab outside an Arizona town, researchers have been injecting animals with a nutrient serum in hopes of solving world hunger. With the serum coursing through their veins, the animals transform into king-sized grubsteaks. It’s never explained why the experiments involve creatures like tarantulas and rats instead of cows and chickens, but hey, why spoil the movie-making magic by insisting upon any adherence to standards of realism?
Tarantula has a few slow stretches and also asks us to buy the silly notion that a country doctor (John Agar) and his hot-looking girlfriend (Mara Corday) are best-equipped to stop the spider menace. It’s also funny how, even after it swells up to the size of a barn, no one ever seems to spot the tarantula on the prowl as it devours a pen full of horses and begins to feast upon human prey. These inconsistencies aside, this is one chilling creepy crawler spectacle, with top-flight special effects and dramatic shading by director Jack Arnold, who also gave us the Black Lagoon Creature movies as well as The Incredible Shrinking Man. As an added bonus, an uncredited and quite young Clint Eastwood appears as one of the fighter pilots assigned to blitzkrieg the rampaging beast.
Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.
But, of course he does. His victims — er, subjects — include his servant Pedro, a prospector searching for the radium mine and three fellow scientists who make the mistake of traveling 10,000 miles to answer Dr. Thorkel’s request for a little lab assistance. It’s these scientists who come to dub him “Cyclops,” not only because he towers over them after they’ve been miniaturized, but also because he wears Coke-bottle eyeglasses to compensate for his poor vision.
