7 fun films about SPIDERS ON SCREEN
1 TARANTULA (1955)
SPIDERS have been movie villains for decades and this 1955 offering promised cinema audiences “crawling terror 100 feet high!” It saw a tarantula dosed with an experimental growth hormone. Predictably, it escapes from a desert laboratory and promptly starts causing giant problems for an unsuspecting farm community by munching on the local cattle.
2 KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977)
STAR Trek’s William Shatner is no stranger to dealing with alien menaces, but this sci-fi horror saw him facing a swarm of killer tarantula spiders. Thousands of fake spiders were painted on walls and buildings and 5,000 real tarantulas were also used. Tiffany Bolling got the leading female role largely because she was the only one not scared of her creepy eight-legged co-stars.
3 ARACHNOPHOBIA (1990)
JEFF Daniels, John Goodman and Julian Sands found themselves dealing with a deadly little creepy crawly from South America after it hitched a lift to the US in a coffin and began breeding with local spiders. The film’s publicity confidently declared the comedy horror had “The suspense of Alien! The excitement of Jaws! The fun of Back To The Future!”
4 ARACHNID (2001)
KILLER spiders are discovered on a remote island and they like munching on human flesh. Director Jack Sholder later said: “I basically did it for the money and it was a stupid script. I got to live in Barcelona for six months and, you know, they paid me well. Everything was good except I had to go to work everyday and shoot a dumb script.”
5 EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS (2007)
LET the squashing begin! warned the film posters as David Arquette and Scarlett Johansson headed this action comedy about venomous spiders who become super-sized overnight after being exposed to a chemical spill. The film was originally called Arac Attack, but after David Arquette, pictured, ad-libbed an insult, it became the title.
6 ARACHNOQUAKE (2012)
GIANT albino fire-breathing spiders attack New Orleans after they are released from their underground lair by an earthquake caused by a fracking company. The spiders quickly develop an appetite for snacking on human eyeballs, are filled with venom and have also developed a skill for running across water. Campy B-movie fun.
7 LAVALANTULA (2015)
STEVE GUTTENBERG, star of hit 80s comedies like Police Academy and Three Men And A Baby found himself dealing with giant lava-breathing tarantulas when he appeared as a 90s action movie hero called Colton West. A volcanic eruption in Los Angeles unleashed the menace. Sequel 2 Lava 2 Lantua! followed in 2016 with Colton dealing with another spider infestation in Florida.