Kingdom of the Spiders

Editors note: There has been a tremendous question lately of what has happened to my blog i wanted to assure everyone that it is still here by presenting this blog in progress. i thank you for your time.

I spent last night in terror watching the screen in agony wondering how it would all end; and it was presented magnificently in full color Shatner-vision. Yes friends, I watched the entire classic film from 1979, Kingdom of the Spiders. It stars our intrepid hero William "Tyberias" Shatner in a role that he was born to play, just like the *gods were born to eat grapes and bring torment upon us poor humans who deign to serve them.

* Reference to classic 1969 episode of Star Trek entitled "Who Mourns Adonis" where the Greek god Apollo captures the crew of the enterprise and forces them to serve him. The third season was low on budget and a bit silly. It also featured the infamous "Spock's Brain episode. I don't want to go into details on that one.

Shatner plays small town veterinarian "Rack" Hansen, a smooth-talking, small town doc ready to lay the charm on any beautiful out of town specialist female who might happen to come by to verify some blood samples that were taken from a recently deceased cow with cobwebs hanging from its mouth.

Synopsis with commentary is as follows:

I must begin by expressing my tremendous dissapointment that the spiders in question, who naturally ravage the town, are not giant spiders from space but a large scale invasion of tarantulas. Thus you can understand my confusion when in the opening scene we see a cow grazing on the field and then the screen pulls back to a wide shot and slowly approaches the cow with that sort of traditional horror device I can only refer to as the "monster camera". The monster camera lets the audience know that a monster is on the trail of some unsuspecting bystander and we'll see a shot of the bystanders doing something which requires them to basically just stand there, be it eating, cooking, playing, etc. If they ever happen to move slightly out of the way, then well, tragedy averted.

I was really hoping that it was like a small space spider of some sort that would grow bigger through eating flesh. Alas. Ayway bottom line: cow's dead. The black rancher couple notifies our small-town cowboy hat wearing doc who gets a blood sample from the poor animal after "doing all he can for him". This upsets Colby the rancher and he lets loose a stirring line of disappointment that seems lifted somehow from should have been at some time academy award nominated actor Louis Gosset Jr. for his stirring command performance in Iron Eagle III: Aces High. "A thousand dollars for that prize cow shot all to hell. He was going to win at the county fair this year."

The blood sample was sent for testing, and this prompts the arrival of the aforementioned out-of town specialist and damsel in distress to be, referred to in the movie only as "Miss Ashley". She wastes no time in sidestepping Rack's advances and requests for dinner and makes her way to a local bed and breakfast where she was promptly hit on by a really awkward married man (with his wife sitting at the table) who, after his wife finds that Ashley is into science thinks that she might be interested to know that her husband is into science too. he brags to her that his expensive mobile home parked outside was paid for by inventing a cleaning agent for portable toilets and then askes if he can buy her a drink. This is called "local color" I suppose.

But of course poor Miss Ashley stood no chance for the brute charm of Shatner, who after getting his second request refused runs her car off the road with his van, engages her in conversation, then jumps into her car and pulls her in, driving off to their dinner location, wherever that might be.

Around this time there's a fun bit of useless sideplot where Kirk reveals to Miss Ashley at dinner that his brother is dead and that he looks after his wife and daughter. There's a scene where his sister in law comments, "You take such good care of the cow that I thought you'd want some milk after all this time." "You watch out or I might milk that cow one of these days." She's got a huge crush on the captain which makes him look like a huge jerk when he brings Miss Ashley over to his sister in laws house to take her daughter out on a hiking trip.