Spiders… why’d it have to be spiders?

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. This time around, I’m looking at the 1975 horror film Kiss of the Tarantula directed by Chris Munger. Munger only did three films, of which this film was his last. A few years later, he directed a single episode of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. That was pretty much the end of Munger’s career.

This movie… Well, I thought I knew what this movie was. This found its way onto the list to cover because the title of the film was so recognizable. Kiss of the Tarantula is the title of a movie that somewhere in my mixed-up memory was this creepy movie. That’s when I realized I was thinking of Black Belly of the Tarantula, the Italian gaillo film by Paolo Cavara. Trust me when I say that will eventually make it onto the blog.

But then I thought, “Wait… Isn’t there a movie from the 80s about kissing spiders? Yeah. Is that what I was thinking of?” Then I was like, “Oh, no, you goober, that’s the 1985 Academy Award-winning film Kiss of the Spider Woman.” That movie is probably a little too high-brow for B-Movie Enema. It was at this point that I realized I had no idea what this movie was. This was only furthered by the fact that I recognized no names in the cast. This was a movie that was entirely new to me and I had no idea of anything about it.

What I learned in order to write this preamble for the review was that it will heavily feature pet spiders. Now… Look. I understand the role spiders play in the ecosystem. I will even go so far as to say they play a very important role in pest control. This is especially true in gardens. You want to have a spider and/or a praying mantis around to get rid of those bugs that will eat your shit. That does not mean I want to be around spiders. I hate the things when they are in my presence. I prefer the mantis because I’ve long come to an understanding with them that they don’t scare me and I feel like they have some intelligence in those beady little eyes of theirs.

But with spiders? Not only do they have eight beady little eyes but they also always seem to JUMP THE FUCK OUT OF NOWHERE to scare the holy livin’ shit out of me every time. They build their webs waiting for things to get stuck in them or for you to walk through them when they build them real fuckin’ quick in between your car and the one next to it. Okay, maybe those little jumping spiders are cute, but good god so many of them are scary or creepy looking. I just don’t like them. They freak me out. Seeing one makes me itchy. Yeah, I know that means I’m arachnophobic, and, yeah… That’s one “phobic” adjective that I’ll proudly wear, man.

And goddammit, we have a whole movie of a girl using her pet spiders to get revenge so I guess we need to get into it.

So not only do we have spiders all over the place in this movie, but the movie also starts with creepy children’s music while we look at a little girl who looks like she juuuust missed the cut for being one of the Village of the Damned. When she plans to pluck a spider from a web in the brush, her mother scolds her for wanting to touch spiders and then destroys the web and, presumably, the spider in the web. Later, as the little girl got a little older, she has a spider at the end of her finger and introducing it to her dolly, and the mom, again, barges in and shakes her hand to drop the spider so she can step on it. The little girl, Susan, goes to her father for help. Her father is the mortician at the town’s mausoleum where Susan and her parents live. While Susan hides, her mother says she’s sick of Susan and sick of living in the mausoleum.

Susan’s mother, Martha (WHYDIDYOUSAYTHATNAME?!?), has her own plans for how to deal with her frustrations. John, Susan’s father, has a brother named Walter. Walter is a cop in this town and, according to Susan, quite different than John. At least different enough for her to want to have an affair with him. He comes home from work and finds her waiting for him dressed in black. She says she’s only practicing… For what? For the Black Outfit Regionals? For starting a new life as a goth girl? For showing how black her soul…

OH.

Look, I don’t like spiders. I find Susan’s choice of pets to be a little spooky, but I am digging this movie’s vibe out of the gate. Martha is a cunt. She clearly has plans to kill John (or at least kill him in the proverbial sense with a broken heart), but the man she plans to take up after getting rid of John is a fucking cop! You gotta love exploitation. Cops are just as dirty and possibly evil and plotting as 80% of them probably are in real life. And, yes, I’m even counting you, Officer Flannery. I know you read this blog. And I know you are a plotting son of a bitch. Right now, you’re plottin’ getting lunch. Don’t deny it, pig.

Where was I? Oh yeah… Susan watches Martha and John argue about her collection of spiders. When John tries to be loving toward Martha, she slaps him and runs off to the bedroom to call Walter while Susan eavesdrops. Susan goes to the basement where she’s stashed some of her pets and brings a container upstairs. She sneaks into her mother’s room and places a little hairy sack of a surprise onto her arm… a tarantula!

That’s a big honker too! So she put that onto Martha’s arm and watches as it crawls up Martha’s body. Martha wakes up to find the spider on her chest and… dies. I don’t know if the spider bit her or if she had a heart attack or what. But fuuuuck yeah. That bitch had it comin’ for being such a… well, a bitch. At the funeral, Susan looks up lovingly, almost happily, at her father.

Years pass and Susan is now a teenager and she has multiple tarantulas. One she calls Jennifer. When we see her spider room in the basement, it looks like Susan has something like 20 tarantulas. Look. Jennifer’s super cute. She’s played by Suzanna Ling in her only film role. In this, she laments how kids at school either ignore her or make fun of her. I wouldn’t do that, but she is most definitely a spooky chick. Her spider fetish(?) is… peculiar. I also know she lives in the mausoleum which is… scary?

I definitely know one thing I do not like about Susan’s situation. She has a creepy uncle. Yeah, Uncle Walter is a creep. A couple of her father’s friends and Walter come over for the evening to hang out and do man shit. Walter gets a little too close to Susan and she does not like it one bit.

Walter tells Susan that she’s as lovely as her mother was. He then tells her that if she needs anything while her father’s away on an upcoming trip, she can just give a loud whistle. He then maybe pinches her ass or something? Worse, Walter has risen to the rank of Chief of Police. He should investigate himself.

Here we are, fifteen minutes into this movie, and it shot right the hell out of the gate. Like… The movie opened with Susan already hating her mother and she kills her very quickly. It’s almost as if we walked into the movie theater while this was playing and already well into the second or third act of the movie.

The day that her father takes off for a trip, she gets a call from a boy at school named Joe. She decides to invite him over to hang out. Boy is he going to be surprised when they start playing grab-ass and she wears tarantulas for a bra. I’m only kind of kidding… Before she got the call from Joe, she was lying in bed with one of her tarantulas and I was not totally unconvinced she wasn’t going to either do something with the tarantula or do something while holding the tarantula if you know what I mean and I think you do.

A little later, a VW Beetle pulls up to Susan’s place full of drunk teens. They are on their way to a Halloween party and sneak into the mortuary to steal a casket for the party. Because they are drunken idiots, they make too much noise, which Susan hears so she comes downstairs to investigate. She goes into the coffin showroom (is that a thing… I mean I know that’s a thing but is that what it’s called? eh…) and the guys jump out to scare her. They say they just wanted to borrow a coffin for their party and she says no. They say yes and they also think she would be to go along with them to the party. She, again, says no and wants to call the police. She attempts to run to the basement door where the guys catch up and surround her.

Because this is a 70s horror movie and guys are generally pretty awful, they suddenly decide they want to know what’s behind the door she’s standing in front of. They force their way into the basement where they fuck about with Susan’s spiders. One of the guys drops one of the cages and then stomps on the spider. Susan is quite upset about this. The guys decide that maybe it’s best that they just leave while Susan caresses the dead spider. Joe comes over to find Susan sad on the floor of the basement.

Now… Joe is a real good guy. He takes pity on the situation and says he wishes he had a way to pay them back for what they did. Sadly, he knows that they will brag about killing the spider and then make fun of her for having them. He says there’s not much they can do about it now because they went off to the drive-in to watch a double feature of Dirty Harry movies. Susan ponders what he said about there not being any recourse to take. We know she simply does not fuck about with people who kill her spiders.

I got to thinking about something… You know the guys who snuck into Susan’s place to steal a coffin for a party? I mentioned they arrived in a VW Bug and it was chock full of drunk assholes. How were they going to get the coffin anywhere? Actually, fuck that… They were going to the drive-in anyway. What were they going to do, put the coffin on top of the car, then go to the drive-in, and then go to the party? That seems, hmm, ill-advised? I think I smell me a plot convenience situation with them just going to the mortuary so they could kill one of Susan’s spiders so she can then start her revenge plot. And, you know what? I’m fine with that.

When the drunk idiots arrived at the mortuary, there was a key thing that was visible and also played out as part of something the guys had to do with the VW Bug. The passenger door was all messed up. In fact, it was a different color than the car itself. Using this defect, and the gap the door left from the frame of the car, Susan slips some of her spider buddies into the car to set her revenge into motion. As the kids are making out with their girlfriends, the spiders crawl up their legs and bodies and position themselves to bite.

And when the couples finally do notice there are extra fingers touching them on their necks and arms and faces and stuff, they flip the fuck out. They desperately try to escape the car, they crush each other trying to get out. One of the girls gets her fucking throat slit open by the broken passenger side window. Another guy dies from being crushed against the steering wheel. And another guy dies while being trapped in the car door where I think it chokes him to death? One girl has a spider crawling on her head and now I can’t think about anything but that scene in Nothing to Lose with Tim Robbins and Martin Lawrence. I think she dies from many venomous bites.

Susan comes back to the car, whispers “oh my god”, and collects her spiders before driving back home. Not sure what she expected to happen, but here we are. Maybe she just wanted to scare the guys. She ran the risk of more of her spider buddies dying, but oh well. There as one survivor of all this. More on her in a bit.

Once she returns all her little spider buddies back to their cages, she pulls the dead one out of its little coffin-like box and strokes it as if to say she is doing it all for it. Now, I sincerely doubt that is an actual dead tarantula. I do believe it is more likely the molt of a tarantula. If you ever want to see something that looks like it came directly out of an H.P. Lovecraft nightmare, watch a video of a tarantula molting its outer layer. It’s… unsettling. But also cool. But also unsettling.

Considering the spider supplier and wrangler for this film, Jay Scott, is also acting in this film, I would be shocked if they actually killed one of the spiders he supplied so they could have a dead one for Susan to mourn and be reminded of what she’s doing and what her true love is.

Alright, so the girl who had the spider on her head in the car did not die. She is Joan. Joan is not doing too hot. She’s in the hospital and probably a complete vegetable. Frankly, I would be so I get it. Creepy Uncle Walter is investigating what happened because it does seem pretty damn peculiar that a bunch of kids died in a car at a drive-in and was found in the state they were in. No blood, no indication of foul play, no… nothing.

After the showing for the drunken fool who stomped on Susan’s tarantula, she places the crushed-up carcass of that spider in his hand inside his coffin. Susan goes to see Joan in the hospital to tell her she’s sorry and that she never intended to hurt her. A girl who was at the funeral slipped away to see Joan too and overhears Susan apologizing. She confronts Susan and then goes to her guy friend or brother or boyfriend or whatever he is, Bo, one of the guys who was messing with her that night, and tells him that she is pretty sure Susan had something to do with the three people who died at the drive-in. Bo says he’ll fix her himself.

By fixing her, he concocts a bit of a plan. He approaches her and tells her he’s sorry for messing around with her with the other guys and he wants to take her out on a date and talk. He says he has a surprise for her. When they get together, he takes her to the very drive-in where she was to kill the others. He tries cozying up to her, but she rejects his first advances. The second time is when she talked about liking lighter-tone movies. He then tries to force her into telling him how his friends were killed. Susan is able to get away from him and get back home.

There, she begins to concoct her next plan of revenge with her spider buddies.

Later, Bo is doing some duct work on a construction site. Let’s see… He’s pissed off Susan. He’s crawling into a tiny air duct. He’s being left alone after his co-worker takes off. I wonder what’s going to happen.

Yeah no shit Susan shows up to slip some of her spider buddies into the duct to attack Bo. And by “some” I mean like ten or twelve? There were a lot in a fairly small box. Those spiders catch up to Bo pretty fast. It’s almost like he’s got fly-scented boxers on. So the spiders got Bo.

I did have a question, but the very next scene with creepy Uncle Walter kind of answers this but not really. My question concerns the fact that no one seems to find any bite marks from the spiders. Considering how many bite marks there would be on Bo specifically (after all, there were like 20 goddamn spiders in that air duct that attacked him), you would think that would be visible. Wounds should be there on the body. If we’re going with the visually plausible but not realistic concept that tarantulas are big therefore they have big teeth and therefore would be deadly, there should be fang marks all over the bodies so far. Yet, there are not. I also feel like there should be all kinds of autopsies going on here now that there are multiple deaths from mysterious causes. Creepy Uncle Walter does get a break in the investigation, though. He discovers in Bo’s shirt, a curious artifact that could indicate how he died… a piece of a tarantula’s leg.

One more possible clue comes when Joan is up and moving around with plans to be sent home in a couple days. The nurse brings in some flowers left at the desk for her. When Joan sees a small garden spider in the flowers, she flips out again and goes back to being catatonic. The nurse tells Walter what happened and he starts to connect some dots.

He picks Susan up from school. He talks to her about Bo and how he wasn’t one of Susan’s favorite people on the planet. At dinner, Walter ponders if Bo could have been scared to death. He’s cramped in the duct and then something like a snake… or a spider… comes into the duct and scares him to death. He asks Susan if spiders like dark places, and she agrees they they do. He then tells Susan and her father that the girl in the hospital is doing much better now and can now provide exact details about what happened that night at the drive-in. This puts Susan on edge. She excuses herself from the dinner table saying she has “work to do”.

The next day, Bo’s girlfriend, Nancy, comes to Walter to make a statement. She swears that Susan is responsible for his death. Her proof? Well, nothing concrete except she did cop to the fact that she was in the Bug at the time they went to the mortuary to steal a casket. The three guys who went in are all dead. That seems circumstantial but also kind of substantial that it would seem like Susan would have a motive. The night before Bo’s death, he called Nancy telling her she had to have something to do with everyone’s deaths.

Nancy leaves Carl says that he won’t help her. She decides that she’ll find the answers herself. So… She goes to the mortuary that night to snoop around. At the same time, Walter arrives to talk to Susan about what Nancy said. He says he can’t protect her because what she brought to him earlier that day is compelling if not material evidence, but he might be able to keep Nancy quiet for a little bit. He does need Susan to cooperate.

Exactly how he would like for her to “cooperate” seems to be a little in the air, but I can tell you being a creepy uncle and also being witnessed by the snooping Nancy isn’t exactly the best play here.

I did not have “incest” on my bingo card for Kiss of the Tarantula, but here we are. I do like the complication of Nancy snooping. When Walter leaves the mortuary, he sees Nancy sneaking around the property. She tells him that she saw them in the window and he must be protecting Susan. She killed Bo and now her uncle is being creepy and protecting her. He tells her that he’s worked too hard to get to where he is in his career and he won’t let anyone take that away. I should mention that while he says that, he’s putting on leather gloves. He then chases Nancy through the woods before catching her and strangling her to death.

I’m thinking that being a creepy uncle and the chief of police in a town where there is a string of dead bodies showing up would also be harmful to your career, but what do I know?

After John leaves for the evening to go to a meeting, Walter enters the mortuary where Susan is alone. I don’t like where this is going because she’s gotten herself ready for bed and Walter is coming up the stairs. He enters her room to talk about “their” future. He tells her he took care of “everything” after killing Nancy. He says he did it for her and so they can be together now. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Anyway, thankfully, there’s a struggle at the landing of the stairs and Walter takes a tumble. Apparently, he broke his spine because he can’t move. He begs for her help and she simply says “no”. She blames him for destroying her family. She says he made her kill her mother. She drags him into the coffin room while he says that Martha wanted to kill John so clearly it’s good she’s dead… I guess? Well, I mean yes. She sucked, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, Susan does something kind of awesome. You see, Nancy was placed into a coffin that will hermetically seal her inside. Susan takes Nancy’s body out of that coffin and puts Walter into it to seal him inside. He tells her they will find out, but she doesn’t stop. She doesn’t even say anything to him. All the while, John is coming home from the meeting with the Attorney General candidate he’s helping. Before her father gets home, Susan is able to finish replacing Nancy’s body into the coffin on top of Walter’s body and closes it after saying goodbye to her creepy uncle.

As a non-creepy uncle myself, I approve of this method of getting rid of creepy uncles.

And that is the end of the movie! Susan gets away with her lifelong successful plots of revenge. I actually really liked this movie. It’s fairly well-made as far as not having too many static, boring shots. Speaking of shots, I do think Suzanna Ling is shot exceptionally well as Susan. You can tell she’s not all that mentally healthy, but you also just kind of like her. Sure, she might have some oddball ways to get back at people for being jerks to her, but she’s also just kind of a lonely outsider who never really had any friends. I would have liked more scenes with this Joe fella who liked her and who she liked herself. However, that’s a very small complaint.

For the most part, the cast was mostly made up of people who only appeared in this movie. No other movies. No other TV shows. Ernesto Macias, who played Walter, was the most accomplished actor in the whole thing. He had a 50-or-so-year career and appeared in just a few movies like Grave of the Vampire and Scream Blacula Scream. He had guest roles on a whole lot of TV series in the 70s and 80s.

Considering this was a movie that mostly featured amateur actors and was mostly obscure or lost to time over the almost 50 years since its release, I do often wonder about what happened after it got made and released. I mean, it obviously got made, but did it get much of any kind of release? It almost feels like this was one of those more regional type movies that are made specifically to sell the drive-ins in the regional area of its production. Yes, this was made in Southern California, where so many movies are made, but it does have a very unique drive-in feel to it. Hell, it has so much of that feel to it that characters even GO TO the drive-in in two different scenes in the movie. The movie wasn’t so obscure that it didn’t get some home video love over the years. As early as 2006, it was on DVD in a multi-pack of, you guessed it, a few other drive-in cult classics. Five years ago, it got cleaned up and released on Blu-Ray. More recently than that, it also found its way onto various streaming sites and can even be watched for free right now on the Kings of Horror YouTube channel.

I found myself really enjoying this movie. It’s not Kingdom of the Spiders in terms of quality. Nor is it The Giant Spider Invasion in terms of being quite as memorable. What it is, though, is a pretty quality little creepy crawlies flick. I recommend it.

Alright, let’s all crawl back to our cages and eat some flies. Tomorrow, a new episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series hits the streaming airwaves with the poorly titled, 50s classic The Beatniks. Be sure to check it out on YouTube, Vimeo, or the B-Movie Enema Roku channel. Links to those various places can be found at the top of the right-hand column. Next Friday, get your favorite glasses with the big Groucho Marx noses and fuzzy eyebrows for the sexy 90s thriller A Brilliant Disguise!

Until then, don’t get caught in any spooky chick’s spider-themed revenge schemes!