Giant Spider Invasion

"The Giant Spider Invasion" was released theatrically in 1975 grossing 15 million against a minuscule budget of only $300,000. While by no means a good movie, it can be a lot of drive-in fun if you watch it with the right frame of mind. The film is perhaps even more well known as being featured in a 1997 episode of the cult show Mystery Science Theater 3000 in which a lot of joke mileage came at the expense of Alan Hale Jr. (Gillian's Island) who has a role in the film as the local sheriff. If you like cheeseball creature effects, cornball acting and bad dialogue, then it is a lot of fun. It almost makes you wonder if it was all deliberate.Dark Force Entertainment brings "The Giant Spider Invasion" to blu-ray featuring a brand new HD transfer and restoration from the original 35mm camera negative. The film is presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio (opened up a bit from its 1.85:1 theatrical presentation) utilizing the AVC codec at a solid bit rate getting up to 30 mbps during busy sections. The film looks absolutely amazing! Detail is superb, skin tones are natural, contrast/black levels are near perfect, and no digital noise reduction or edge enhancement seems to have been used. There is some very slight telecine wobble in some scenes but it is very minuscule and does not detract from what is a beautiful presentation of this cult classic. Everything looks perfectly filmic. This is quite possibly the best the film has ever looked.The only audio option is English 2.0 DTS-HD mono which sounds great with no hiss at all. No English subtitles are included with this release.Special features are as follows:- Bill ReBane interview (10 min. 49 sec.)- Robert Easton last interview (25 min. 35 sec.)- Giant Spider music video promo (2 min. 53 sec.)Fans of "The Giant Spider Invasion" should pick up Dark Force Entertainment's blu-ray release without hesitation. The film looks amazing, sounds great, and features some nice special features. Highly recommended!

I've always enjoyed a good enormous insect devouring the Earth film, with some of my favorites being Them! (1954), The Black Scorpion (1957), and even Empire of the Ants (1977), but The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), while having its' moments, barely rates as a blip on the silver screen, or any screen, comparatively speaking. Directed by Bill Rebane, whose other credits include Monster a-Go Go (1965) and The Capture of Bigfoot (1979), stars Steve Brodie as NASA scientist J.R. Vance. Now, Brodie looked familiar, but I couldn't recall what other films I've seen him in until I looked up his bio and saw such cinematic flotsam as The Wild World of Batwoman (1966) and Jerry Warren's Frankenstein Island (1981)...ugh...I'm still reeling from that last one. The film also stars Barbara Hale (from TV's Perry Mason) as Dr. Jenny Langer, character actor Robert Easton, and Alan Hale Jr. aka the skipper from Gilligan's Island...oh man, I feel a serious cinematic hurting coming on...The film starts out with some kind of foreign object traveling to Earth, crashing spectacularly on Dan Kester's farm in Hicksville, Wisconsin (okay, the town wasn't named Hicksville, but it shoulda been, given the complete idiotic, backwoods nature of the residents we've met so far). Shortly after impact of the extraterrestrial object, residents begin reporting problems with radios and televisions, but that's the extent of incident. No one really seems to have noticed that a fairly large object from outer space has slammed into a Wisconsin pasture, and even the farmer puts off investigating until the next day. A scientist, Dr. Langer, working at the local observatory does report strange and unusual readings to NASA...to which they dispatch Dr. Vance to investigate. The following day Kester and his alcoholic wife decide to investigate the strange happening at their farm, and discover a number of cattle have been partially eaten. They also find the impact site, and a number of geodes around the area. After breaking one open, they find what appears to be diamonds inside, and dreams of wealth begin to swirl in their heads. What they missed was the spider that popped out of the geode, and scurried off to do whatever it is spiders do...soon the spiders begin to make frequent appearances, creeping and crawling all over the place. And not just wee, bitty spiders but great big uns, too...and they appear to be hungry. After several townspeople get all et up in a particularly gruesome fashion by the biggest spider (I tell you, he's fifty feet tall if he's a foot!), Dr. Langer and Dr. Vance postulate that the object that crashed to Earth opened up a portal to an alternate universe, one that is populated by spiders, and they are now coming through this portal to Earth. That seems like quite a presumption, but since Vance is a NASA scientist, who am I to argue? Anyway, various plans begin to formulate, with the scientists looking for a way to close the portal, and local yokels forming gun-toting mobs to hunt down the giant spider what et up their kin. After getting to know the various residents of this small farming community, I formulated my own plan...let the spiders gorge themselves on these knuckleheads, and then perform a tactical nuclear strike on the community. Do they manage to stop the invasion of voracious interstellar arachnids? Or are we all doomed to become space spider sweet meats?Okay, first of all the effects are really shoddy, but I that doesn't automatically make a film bad. If the acting, script, dialog, direction and/or characters are decent, I can let poor effects slide, especially in the context of low budget filmmaking (the cost of the film was about $250,000 to $300,000). Well, guess what? Most of those elements were pretty shoddy as well...I will say that it did look like a lot of effort and heart were put into this rather doomed production, but it seemed the director was never able to muster anything near the overall impact he was looking for, as I think this was a definite case of over reaching ones' limitations, specifically in the budget department. Alan Hale Jr. makes a few appearances throughout the film as the sheriff, but he spends more time in his office than anything else, making some of the lamest jokes you've ever heard. You can tell the writer tried to inject a comic element into the script, but mostly these elicited a great deal of groaning from this viewer. The funniest elements were the ones not meant to be funny, like the giant spider (it's actually a VW bug with fake legs attached), the theories thrown about by the scientists, and just the general character development. In many scenes real, smaller, spiders were used, and certainly provided many creeps, but what I found even creepier was the casual notion of relations of a biblical nature between some of the characters who where related to each other...none of this was shown, but it was eluded to, and given the characters involved, it was certainly not great stretch of the imagination. (Things that make you go `ewwwww')Fred Olen Ray's Retromedia Entertainment provides a decent full screen print (about as good as a VHS copy) here with some noticeable wear and tear at a couple of spots. A real plus is the inclusion of some pretty good special features like an introduction by Akron, Ohio's Son of Ghoul, a mini reproduction of a four page comic book put out at the time of the film's release, a theatrical trailer for the film, and an interview with director Bill Rebane in which he basically points out the weaknesses in his film, lack of money, too many producers (five, at one point), and lack of a decent script, to name a few. Despite my criticisms, I am happy to know that someone out there is releasing films like this on DVD.Cookieman108

Enjoyable for those who like an occasional Ed Wood style of laughably incompetent filmmaking. The larger than pickup truck sized spider(s) bore little resemblance to the real spiders shown nor any thing known in Biology. They(it) appeared to have been stitched together using fabrics from the Costumes Department. Some enjoyable acting performances especially Alan Hale Jr. away from his more familiar roles back in the 1960s. The quality of my Bluray copy was excellent. If you are only interested in the best films, you can pass on this one, but if want something enjoyable, this is a good one.

I'm a great fan of these old creature features,but was a bit disappointed with this one. The film itself is great,and I was surprised to see that it's in colour as I expected it to be B+W,but the film's picture quality is not so good. There appear to be several issues of this film,and on the one I have there's far too much contrast on the picture. In nightime scenes you can't see anything at all,and it's often difficult to see what's going on even in the daylight scenes due to the pronounced shadows. Altogether a typical and entertaining film of the genre,but spoilt quite a bit by the poor picture resolution.

a chi piace il genere dei b movies questo è un classico, che cmq risulta molto piu ben fatoo dei recenti shark vs octopus etc

Delude anche oltre le peggiori aspettative questo dvd di pessima qualità: le immagini non solo non sono restaurate, ma sembrano provenire da una videocassetta scadente tanto sono prive sia di definizione (a tratti appaiono addirittura sfocate) sia di luminosità; l'audio è impastato e per di più di tanto in tanto diventa in inglese (ma senza sottotitoli!) presumibilmente perché si tratta di scene tagliate a suo tempo nella versione italiana. La domanda: perché uno deve pagare per acquistare un prodotto che può trovare altrettanto disastrato ma gratuitamente sul web?

I've recently been collecting b-movies and decided to buy this one as it appeared in the recommendations.Usually with these movies I like the fact they're so bad they're actually good, but this is just bad!Not really a plot to follow, terrible effects and acting and I was glad when the movie had finished!I don't think I'll be watching this again!

Ora io posso accettare che un film del 1975 possa anche vedersi e sentirsi male visto che non è stato restaurato,ma quello che infastidisce di piu è che in un dvd originale salti ,il doppiaggio in italiano per quasi tutto l film,cioe tu vedi il film a volte in italiano e a volte in inglese,per tutta la durata....questo è davvero inconcepibile