Spiders are very much one of the ‘horror animals’ and Kingdom of the Spiders is clearly one of the best films to be based around them! Many people seem to have a phobia of spiders – personally, I love them; but I can certainly see why a lot of people find them creepy. This film makes best use of that fact, as while the spiders aren’t monstrously over-sized, there is a lot of them – and it soon becomes clear how being overrun by spiders could lead to a very frightening situation! One of the things I liked best about this movie was the fact that it uses actual tarantulas! Many films featuring spiders use crappy looking fake ones, or in the case of more modern films – CGI, and it never works very well. The story is simple as you would expect, and focuses on a small country town. Cattle are dying mysteriously, and when a good looking female entomologist turns up; she quickly deduces that spiders are the problem. They’re migrating in huge numbers after the loss of their food source, and this making them aggressive…
The film benefits from a nice country atmosphere, and to go along with this; we get a nice cheesy country soundtrack! William Shatner is the main star, and he delivers a nice performance which fits in with the tone of the movie. My main gripe with the film is the fact that not a great deal happens for the first hour. Don’t get me wrong; this film is never actually boring, but it does feel like the spiders aren’t posing all that much of a threat for a lot of the film. Kingdom of the Spiders takes obvious influence from classic creature features such as The Birds, in that it puts its focus on a small group of people amidst nature’s attack. The characters really aren’t all that interesting; but the spiders are the star of the show, so the characters themselves aren’t all that important. The death scenes tend to be quite samey, but still they’re effective; and the film does manage a handful of really suspenseful and somewhat harrowing scenes. The film is obviously pure trash throughout; but its enjoyable pure trash, and I have to see that this is one of the best films of its type that I’ve seen.
