Themes: When Animals Attack, Mutants, Experiments Gone Awry
Main Cast: John Agar, Mara Corday, Leo G. Carroll, Nestor Paiva, Ross Elliott
Release Year: 1955
Country: US
Run Time: 81 minutes
Plot
A man with a strangely misshapen face wanders out of the desert near a small town and falls to the ground dead. The county sheriff (Nestor Paiva) tentatively identifies the dead man as Eric Jacobs, a laboratory assistant to Professor Deemer (Leo G. Carroll), a research scientist living a few miles out in the desert. But there's something strange about Jacobs; his facial features and bodily extremities are distorted to a point where he's barely recognizable. The sheriff calls in Dr. Matt Hastings (John Agar), the local physician, who makes a diagnosis of acromegalia, a glandular disorder that affects the body's growth. He also tells the sheriff that it can't possibly be acromegalia, because symptoms as pronounced as those he sees in this case take years to develop, and the man was in perfect health just three months earlier. Hastings refuses to believe the professor's account of Jacobs' rapid deterioration, but the sheriff takes the word of the scientist. Back in his laboratory, Deemer continues his work, going over tests of a chemical on various animals, all of which are jumbo-sized, including guinea pigs the size of rabbits, baby mice the size of full-grown rats, and a tarantula three feet long. Suddenly, the professor is attacked by his assistant (Eddie Parker), whose face and hands are distorted in the same manner as Jacobs, and who injects the helpless scientist with the experimental chemical before collapsing dead. A fire starts during the attack and in the confusion, the tarantula's glass cage is broken and it escapes the burning laboratory, wandering out into the desert. Weeks go by, and a new assistant, Stephanie "Steve" Clayton (Mara Corday), arrives to begin work for the professor. When Hastings gives her a ride to Deemer's home, the scientist explains to the doctor that he's been working on a radioactive nutrient, that, if perfected, could feed the entire world's population. He also says that Eric Jacobs made the mistake of testing the chemical on himself and it caused the disease that killed him. Hastings and Steve begin a romance, unaware that wandering around the desert is the tarantula from Deemer's laboratory, now grown to the size of an automobile and getting bigger with each passing day. Soon livestock and then people begin disappearing, and the sheriff is at a loss to explain any of it, or the one clue left behind in each case: large pools of what seems to be some kind of venom next to the stripped skeletons of the victims. Hastings takes some of the material in for a test; meanwhile, Steve notices that Deemer is going through some bizarre changes. His mood has darkened and his features now appear to be changing, as the acromegalia, caused by the injection, manifests itself. Hastings learns that one of the professor's test animals was a tarantula, which was presumed destroyed. When he learns that the pools near the deaths are composed of spider venom -- equivalent to what it would take many thousands of spiders to generate -- he's certain that the tarantula from the laboratory survived. By this time, the title creature is bigger than a house and ravaging the countryside, killing everything in its path and knocking down power lines and telephone poles as it moves. Hastings arrives just in time to rescue Steve from the attacking creature, which destroys Deemer's house and kills the professor. The sheriff and the highway patrol are unable to slow the creature, now the size of a mountain and moving at 45 miles an hour, even with automatic rifle fire, as it follows the road through the desert toward the town. Even an attempt to blow it up with dynamite fails when the monster walking right through the blast. Finally, the creature is poised to attack the town, when jets scrambled from a nearby Air Force base (led by a young Clint Eastwood, barely recognizable behind an oxygen mask) swoop in. When rockets fail to divert the monster from its path, the jets roar in for a second pass and drop enough napalm to incinerate the creature. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Review
Jack Arnold's Tarantula was clearly modeled after Gordon Douglas' Them, the first of the giant insect movies, which had scored a huge hit for Warner Bros. the previous year. The story, however, was also tailored to the elements that Arnold favored in his own work, utilizing the notion of the isolated desert community as well as the topography of the desert and its psychological implications to full effect. Tarantula used as its jumping off point a distantly related script entitled "No Food for Thought," which had been done on Science Fiction Theater, and added the element of the giant spider ("No Food for Thought" was about an artificially developed nutrient that renders its victims incapable of surviving on natural sustenance). The script was especially clever in seldom more than hinting at the horror to come through most of the first 30 minutes, even as it offered all kinds of tantalizing elements of horror and mystery, assembled like points on a map leading us to the conclusion. The mystery here isn't as deftly woven as it was in Them, but there is more than enough to keep audiences guessing as to how all of these elements can possibly tie together with the monster that we know we'll be seeing at the denouement. John Agar, Nestor Paiva, Hank Patterson, and Leo G. Carroll handle the acting chores with success and even some inspiration, and Mara Corday makes one of the most delectable-looking heroines ever seen in a mid-'50s monster movie. It's Jack Arnold who pulls it all together, evoking his expected poetic look at the desert (a staple of his movies since It Came From Outer Space) and handling the personal elements of the story very smoothly. He even uses the desert shots that were a fixture of his horror titles to play off of the chills that we know are coming -- shots linger for long seconds, teasing us (will we see the ever more menacing spider, and if so, for how long?). There are enough horror elements before we get a look at the mountain-sized tarantula in the daylight to keep fans entertained, though it is obvious in the final phase of Professor Deemer's acromegalia that it is someone other than Leo G. Carroll under the makeup. The only major flaw with video, laserdisc, and television transfers is that its very difficult to discern the giant arachnid's size or shape in the scenes depicting the night attacks, which was not the case when this movie was shown on television during the 1960s, and certainly wasn't true in theaters -- perhaps the eventual, inevitable DVD release will solve that problem. Universal should also probably consider adding "No Food For Thought" to any DVD edition of Tarantula, to enhance its value and show off other, related aspects of Arnold's work. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Clint Eastwood - 1st Pilot; Edwin Rand - Lt. John Nolan; Raymond Bailey - Townsend; Hank Patterson - Josh; Bert Holland - Barney Russell; Steven Darrell - Andy Anderson; Edgar Dearing - Miner; Donald Dillaway - Jim Bagney; Jane Howard - Coed Secretary; Jim Hyland - Trooper Grayson; Tom London; Eddie Parker - Paul Lund; Vernon Rich - Ridley; Bing Russell - Deputy; Bob Stephenson - Warehouseman; Stuart Wade - Major; Billy Wayne - Murphy; Rusty Wescoatt - Driver; Bud Wolfe - Bus Driver; Bob Nelson; Dee Carroll - Telephone Operator; Jack Stoney - Helper
Credit
Alexander Golitzen - Art Director, Alfred Sweeney - Art Director, Jay A. Morley, Jr. - Costume Designer, Frank Shaw - First Assistant Director, Jack Arnold - Director, William Morgan - Editor, Joseph E. Gershenson - Composer (Music Score), Henry Mancini - Composer (Music Score), Herman Stein - Composer (Music Score), Joseph E. Gershenson - Musical Direction/Supervision, Bud Westmore - Makeup, George Robinson - Cinematographer, William Alland - Producer, Russell A. Gausman - Set Designer, Ruby Levitt - Set Designer, David S. Horsley - Special Effects, Clifford Stine - Special Effects, Leslie I. Carey - Sound/Sound Designer, Frank H. Wilkinson - Sound/Sound Designer, Martin Berkeley - Screenwriter, Robert M. Fresco - Screenwriter
The plot concerns a biological researcher, Professor Gerald Deemer who is trying to prevent the food shortages which will result from the world's expanding population. With the help of atomic science, he invents a special nutrient on which animals can live exclusively, but which causes them to grow to many times their normal size. In his laboratory, he houses several oversized rodents and, inexplicably, a tarantula.
When his researchers try the nutrient, they develop runaway acromegaly and one of them is driven mad, half destroys the lab (freeing the animals) and attacks Deemer and injects him with the solution. As a result, Deemer gradually becomes more and more deformed while the now-gigantic tarantula ravages the countryside. A sympathetic doctor and Deemer's female assistant investigate the mystery of the clean-picked cattle bones and the eight-foot pools of arachnid venom, and the spider is eventually destroyed, after several failed attempts, by a napalm attack launched from a fighter squadron.
The film's poster, featuring a spider with two eyes instead of the normal eight, and carrying a woman in its fangs, does not represent any actual scene in the film.
The special effects for both the giant animals and the unfortunate scientist's deformity are fairly advanced for the time, with real animals (including a rabbit and a guinea pig in Professor Deemer's lab) being used to represent the giant creatures. A real spider was also used for shots where the whole monster was shown, with models reserved for close-ups (and its skyscraper-sized version), resulting in a rather more convincing monster than the giant ants in the previous year's big-bug film, Them!.[2]
The movie was filmed in and around the rock formations of "Dead Man's Point" Lucerne Valley CA, a frequently used movie location for many early western films. Like Them!, Tarantula makes atmospheric use of its desert locations; and although a radioactive isotope does make an appearance, it differs from most big-bug films in having the mutation caused by the peaceful research of a well-intentioned scientist rather than nuclear weapons and/or a mad genius. Arnold was to use matte effects again two years later to show miniaturisation rather than gigantism in The Incredible Shrinking Man, which also featured an encounter with a spider.
Notes
^ The poster shows the spider (inaccurately depicted with only two eyes instead of eight) carrying a woman in its fangs, à la Fay Wray in King Kong, though such a scene does not appear in the film.
^Searles B (1988). Films of Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: Harry N. Abrams. pp. 165–67. ISBN0-8109-0922-7.
