Antibody, one of the first UFO films I’ve seen in a while—it seems like yesterday that they were making half the movies I ended up watching—proves a pleasingly decent low-budget riff on 1966’s Fantastic Voyage*. In that film, a medical team (including Stephen "The Oscar" Boyd, Raquel Welch and a typically squirrelly Donald Pleasance) are miniaturized and sent, via an equally wee sub, into the bloodstream of a defecting Russian scientist, following an assassination attempt. Their mission was to find and eradicate a potentially fatal blood clot.

[*I’m assuming the line in the film’s trailer, included on the DVD, which has the announcer noting, "Now a group of scientists must make an incredible journey inside the human body," is meant to be winking allusion to the movie’s predecessor.]

Here Lance Henriksen and Robin Givens lead a similarly miniaturized and equipped team who are also injected into a human body. Their mission is to search out and disarm a nano-detonator lodged in the body of a grievously wounded Russian terrorist. Should the man die before they do so, the detonator will trigger a massive nuclear blast that will kill millions and render much of Europe unlivable for years to come.

We open with a rather nifty credit sequence featuring flashcuts of CGI animations of the human body and a nice, driving score. This is the kind of thing you like to see in these movies, a bit of style in those areas that don’t require a lot of money to be effective.

The film proper begins outside the Russian embassy in Washington, as FBI bomb expert Richard Haynes (Henriksen) arrives to disarm a bomb found in the building’s basement. After some stuff meant to establish his credentials as a Guy Who Knows What He's Doing, he looks over the device until interrupted by a phone call. An armed Russian national has been cornered in the airport, and is waving around both a gun and what appears to be a detonator. Haynes gives the order to have the man shot down. However, this event appears to trigger the bomb, which kills a number of police officers and destroys the embassy building.

It’s eventually determined that the man at the airport had been implanted with a nano-sized detonator, one that was designed to trigger the bomb when he died. Given the spectacular nature of the results, an official scapegoat is required. Haynes quickly finds himself out of work.

A year later, Haynes is living in Germany, heading up a successful high-tech security firm. He’s providing the security for a conference on nano-technology that’s drawing several of the world’s most important scientists, as well as the German Chancellor. Unfortunately, Russian terrorists infiltrate the conference and kill several attendees. The rest are held as hostages. (I couldn’t quite follow what their cause was. The group is described as "right-wing"—of course—and the head terrorist at one point starts ranting about a "New World Order," but their actual motives remains tenuous at best.)

After publicly offing the German Chancellor, the head terrorist warns that he too sports a nano-detonator, one that will destroy Munich should he die. In the end, the authorities risk a raid, but the head terrorist ends up being shot by one of his own men. It’s determined that the wounds will undoubtedly prove fatal, and in short order.

Luckily, nano-expert Dr. Theodore Birhill has been heading up a secret project on miniaturizing people down to a microscopic size. With time against them, he shrinks Gaynes and a small team headed up by scientist Dr. Rachel Saverini (Robin Givens!) and injects them into the body to find and disarm the detonator. However, the team is not only against the clock, but must survive the human body’s defensive mechanisms, including the blob-like "whites," or white blood cells.

In the end, Antibody is most interesting (admittedly, to an extraordinarily narrow segment of the public) as evidence that that the folks at UFO are gradually getting a handle on this movie thing. The most obvious advantage the film possesses is the presence of Lance Henriksen as its leading man. While I still tend to wince at seeing such a fine actor reduced to taking parts in DTV junk like this, at least the picture gives him a decent showcase. Too often he appears in near-cameo roles in even cheaper productions, and usually, of course, as a villain.

Henriksen is an interesting actor. Unlike many of his B-movie star peers and predecessors, he’s not prone to hamming it up. Instead, he remains a minimalist actor, but one who manages to project a very credible intelligence and authority even in patently ridiculous circumstances. Given the script deficiencies generally inherent in these productions, such an actor is downright invaluable.

The rest of the cast ranges from adequate to awful. Robin Givens fails to embarrass herself as the de riouger beauteous scientist, but doesn’t exactly set the screen afire either. (Of course, given the kind of shooting schedules these things tend to have, you wouldn’t really expect her to.) Some might find her character’s ready acceptance of the markedly older Henriksen as a romantic partner problematic. However, since he makes every other male in the cast look positively lifeless in comparison, I had no difficulty in this department.

UFO vet William Zabke, star of Python and Python II, is a solid actor relagated to a truly pointless supporting role. He’s also victimized by his inability to provide in any halfway convincing fashion the German accent his part requires. If I hadn’t seen him in other movies, I probably wouldn’t have suspected him of being capable of better work.

At the lowest end of the spectrum, meanwhile, is the Romanian actor who plays the lead terrorist. One assumes he received a bonus every time he bugged his eyes out for Eeee-vil emphasis. It’s no doubt for the best that he doesn’t have any face-to-face time with Henriksen, whose traditionally expert underplaying would have made the guy’s performance look even more ludicrous.

The physical production is comparatively impressive. There are still times when one become aware of the fact that the actors are on some rather economical sets—the elevator whose low door forces the actors to bend down in order to enter and exit it being an example—but on the whole these are at least good enough that they don’t draw attention to themselves.

The most prominent sign of a higher budget, at least by UFO standards, is the generous amount of CGI. Unsurprisingly, all the action inside the body is computer animated, and it’s actually pretty decent. It was probably an advantage that the entire sequences were animated, rather than involving CGI effects placed into and purportedly interacting with real-life settings and actors, as in the studio’s myriad giant animal pictures.

The script is a hit-and-miss affair, although a bit more lively than those of many earlier UFO efforts. Again, though, it’s immeasurably helped by Henriksen, who manages to make the material seem less dubious than it actually is. Also, when the film isn’t given to lame repartee and one-liners, it can occasionally be affecting. Right on schedule, for instance, one of the mini-sub characters makes the ultimate sacrifice to save the others. I won’t say I burst into tears of grief over said demise, but the scene worked better than I had been expecting.

I also really, really liked the fact that none of the good guy characters turned out to be—gasp, shock—a terrorist mole. This kind of extraneous bad-guyism is depressingly standard in these films, and indeed, occurred in Fantastic Voyage. I admit to spending the entire film tensing for such a revelation, and appreciated being wrong in this instance.

UFO so far has been best known for their presumably successful series of giant killer animal/reptile/bug movies. Therefore it’s probably not much of a surprise that the micro-nauts finds themselves besieged not only by the protoplasmic white blood cells, but also by microscopic—but comparatively gigantic—blood-sucking mites. Such a beastie is featured on the DVD box art, apparently in an effort to attract the company’s normal consumers.

On the whole, however, the screenplay evinces the problematic qualities of most of the studio’s fare. One can’t really complain about the ridiculousness of the film’s central concept, because if it bothers you that much you wouldn’t be watching the film. Perhaps wisely, the script quickly glosses over the ‘science’ behind the smallifying process. However, it’s so brusque in this regard that it’s somewhat comical. In fact, they entirely skip over Dr. Bickell’s explaining the miniaturization thing to Gaynes. Instead, we come in at the end as he rather vaguely notes, "It was always a simple matter of molecular compression. Once I cracked the formula, the practical application was a fairly simple matter."

The physical action stuff is both poorly written and clumsily staged. It’s obvious, for instance, that we’re to view Gaynes as a highly competent professional. Despite this, the terrorists get into the conference, the one supposedly secured by Gaynes’ highly elite firm, by dressing themselves as caterers and proceeding directly to the facility’s kitchen. Needless to say, this doesn’t exactly burnish Our Hero’s credentials as a savvy operator.

Later, much time before the raid is spent warning that the head terrorist will try to kill himself—and hence set off the bomb—at the first sign of trouble. The attack then commences, and the guy is caught unharmed (at least at first), but only after he would have been able to kill himself a dozen times over. If you look closely, you can actually see him holding his pistol to his head for a good thirty seconds or more before they manage to disarm him.

One bit that kept throwing me was that, after the terrorists detailed the nuclear bomb thing and slaughtered the German Chancellor on television, they kept arguing over whether the public at large should be informed of the situation and evacuated. Even given the counterintuitive paucity of reporters on hand at the conference, and even if the TV report for some reason hadn’t gone out live, the idea that all this could be kept from the public remained farcical.

Even so, no doubt the biggest groan the film evokes occurs during the climax. Despite going into near-death cardiac arrest about three times during the proceedings, at the end the terrorist magically revives enough to grab a weapon and threaten the cast. (Oops, sorry.) Presumably the filmmakers thought it would be anti-climatic to just let the guy die from his wounds, but his sudden resurrection is more than a little risible.

Despite a fairly short running time of about ninety minutes, and generally solid pacing, the script also tends to introduce characters who really don’t have much relevance to the plot. Otto really doesn’t serve much purpose here and neither does Gaynes’ daughter. The most egregiously pointless character, however, is one of your standard Venal Reporters. She’s introduced as having unfairly maligned Gaynes following the Washington bombing, has a rather prominent amount of screentime during the hostage situation, and then disappears. I realize they needed to drag things out until they got to the miniaturization stuff, but they probably could have handled this aspect better.

If I were able to correct one common trait of the studio’s product, it would be to outlaw the attempts at "Hasta La Vista"-type one-liners the characters inevitably spout following what should be solemn moments of horror and/or violence. I realize this has been standard action movie material since the ‘80s, but it’s also something that should have been retired long ago. The film shoots itself in the foot when it goes out of its way to remind you that you’re watching a movie, which is the primary effect of the tiresomely witless quips.

By the way, a nod of Jabootu’s horns to Marty McKee for pointing this one out to me. Marty is well known to the more hardcore B-movie buffs as a moderator for the invaluable Mobius Home Video Forum, an Internet discussion board covering genre films in all their varieties, with an emphasis on their appearances on DVD and video. This is an essential resource for any self-respecting fan of cult movies, and you should really check it out if you haven’t before.

Summary: Better than average DTV fare.

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In Hong Kong, we see a villainous sort who looks a bit like Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love. Despite being a recurring character, I don’t think they ever call him by name, so I’ll call him ‘Guy.’ He meets with a local thug and gives him pictures of a man and woman, as well as a silenced revolver. Grant, the man in the picture later goes to meet Linda, the woman, in a park. To his horror, when he taps the sitting Linda on the shoulder she keels over, dead. Grant runs to an office and begins sending a teletype message to San Francisco, before he too is shot down.

The department who employed the two calls in veteran spy Michael Scott (Stewart Granger). When we first see Scott, he’s sitting on the floor and using an elaborate system of model trains to bring over the makings of a whisky and soda. These antics put him more in the school of such whimsical gentleman adventurers as the Saint or Bulldog Drummond rather than your James Bonds. He complains about being contacted, as he’s inevitably supposed to be on vacation. (Movie spies are always having their vacations interrupted, don’t you know.) However, he knew the victims and quickly accepts the assignment.

I have to admit, I had trouble following what exactly was supposed to be going on. Since this is a West German production, however, it probably wasn’t intended to make overmuch sense in any case. Apparently the McGuffin is nuclear technology being smuggled into Communist China.

The unnamed agency Scott works for* intercepts an enemy agent named Roger. He’s caught after procuring airplane tickets to Hong Kong for a compatriot. The man is led away and Scott takes his papers. Next we suddenly see Scott standing in the apartment of ‘Danny,’ a typical ‘60s Eurobabe. This transition was so abrupt that I wondered if the print they used for the video cassette had been missing a scene or something.

[*Scott’s agency either isn’t identified at first or else I missed it. In any case, we eventually learn that he’s an FBI agent. Apparently the Germans didn’t have a very sound grasp of our investigative departments, because an FBI agent would not be sent to work undercover to a foreign country. Such an assignment would fall under the jurisdiction of the CIA, especially as it’s an espionage case. Scott’s being an FBI agent becomes even more amusing when it turns out he is overseas 

1) without informing the local government, which in this case (Hong Kong) would have been British, 
2) was carrying a concealed firearm while doing so and 
3) actually shoots down some foreign nationals during the course of his assignment. 

I’m pretty sure those are all diplomatic no-nos.]

Danny is as bewildered to see Scott in her apartment as I was and produces a small pistol. After a bit of scampish shtick, however, he distracts her with the old "There’s somebody behind you" ploy and takes her gun away. Danny is taken into custody and Scott heads back to the office.

There he consults with Joe, his boss, before heading to Hong Kong. Joe explains that Scott will be working with Carol, an agent who’s also "our fastest telegraph operator." The reason Danny was going to Hong Kong was to take a job with Roger’s cohorts there, doing telegraph work. Carol is to impersonate Danny and see what she can learn. Scott is told to meet up with her at a local dive. Joe is intentionally vague as to what Carol looks like. They make a fairly big deal of this, so I’m assuming she’ll prove to be really hot. Scott will be surprised by this, thus affording us your standard flirtatious Meet Cute.

He arrives at the bar early and settles in to wait. Already there is a "gorgeous dame," one who quickly finds herself pestered by the sort of drunk who apparently finds Foster Brooks to be a tad too subtle in his demeanor. The chivalrous Scott intercedes, of course. However, a ‘humorous’ twist finds Our Hero getting punched in the breadbasket for his trouble, whereupon it’s the woman who dispatches the drunk with a judo flip. It’s all quite wacky. In a totally unforeseeable turn of events, meanwhile, Scott is astonished to learn that the woman is in fact his contact, Carol. Go figure.

We cut to the two having dinner in a Chinese restaurant. As if the film weren’t zany enough already, Scott proves to have trouble manipulating his chopsticks. "No wonder the Chinese are so thin," he grumbles as his food falls back to the plate. Noting that they mustn’t be seen together in Hong Kong, he presents her with a bracelet that doubles as a communication device. I don’t want to surprise the hell out of you, but they’ll quickly become romantically—if not sexually; it’s not that sort of picture—involved, despite the fact that Scott is 53 to Carol’s 27.

Carol’s plane arrives in Hong Kong. There she’s met by Guy, who believes her to be Danny Davis. He’s to escort her to her new employer’s house. This is witnessed by Scott, who sets off after Guy’s car in a rickshaw (!). (Scott’s sure comfortable ordering a coolie around, I’ll give that much.) The two slip Scott’s tail when they drive onto a ferry, but Carol manages to get directions to the house sent over her bracelet radio. She later arrives at this destination, the palatial home of the smarmy Pierre Milot. He obviously finds Carol worthy of interest, which raises the equally evident consternation of his associate, Blanche. As she unpacks, Pierre phones a message to the Secret #1 Bad Guy that she’s arrived.

Meanwhile, Scott rickshaws to a local Buddhist temple to check in with his local contact, Norman. Norman, of course, will eventually be exposed as the Secret #1 Bad Guy. Oops, sorry. It’s just that there’s no other introduced character in the film that it could be. Joe is back in San Francisco. Carol is Scott’s romantic interest, and this sort of film is too unimaginative to make her or Scott’s upcoming comic sidekick the villain. That leaves Norman. Lucky that Scott decides, apparently just for giggles, to keep Carol’s role in the investigation from him.

Norman assigns a fellow named Smokey to work with Scott. Smokey, of course, will fill in the Odious Comic Relief slot. After sending him off, Scott bumps into a blind man. Only he’s (duh) not blind, and begins to follow after Scott. (Here Our Hero blissfully pauses to look at a model train set in a store window. It’s actually a nice little character moment.) It’s pretty funny, actually, that Scott doesn’t notice this guy trailing five feet behind him, tapping his cane the whole way.

Carol/Danny is learning her duties. She sends and takes messages over the telegraph. However, they’re in code. Pierre translates the incoming messages later on. She offers to assume this duty, but Pierre puts her off.

Meanwhile, Scott has arrived at his rather spiffy rented house. He’s conferring with the tiresomely wacky Smokey, who will be staying there as well so as to be close to hand. Smokey asks for some tips on hand to hand combat. As Scott prepares to show him some moves—although this is a guy who got punched out by a drunk in a bar—the ‘blind’ man approaches from outside. His cane inevitably turns out to actually be a gun, and he takes a shot at them. Scott runs outside and captures him, but the guy takes a knife in the back, one that some really bad editing sort of implies was tossed from a passing car. (!!) It’s history’s first Drive-By Knifing.

The next day, Scott discusses the attempted assassination with Norman. The question is how the villains knew Scott was an FBI agent. (Uh, because your contact in Hong Kong tipped them off?) "Ah, well," Scott concludes, "we’ll find out somehow." Wow, dithering spy inaction at its finest!

In an example of less-than-airtight scripting, Scott is walking down the pier when he passes a souvenir photo stand. There he rather fortuitously spots an unclaimed picture of the two agents killed earlier in the movie. In the photo the woman agent is talking to a local fisherman. Scott grabs the photo and assigns Smokey to locate this fellow.

Scott meets Norman at the "Suzie Wong Bar" (!) to relate this latest clue. Smokey soon appears and reports finding a lead to the mystery man’s location. He and Scott go to follow it up, while a Miscellaneous Bad Guy puts a tail on them. Despite merely being told to "follow them," the second guy soon arranges for the two to be hit. Meanwhile, Scott is taken to their quarry and starts to question him. It turns out the guy is a fisherman who occasionally took the dead agents around the harbor in his boat.

There’s some ‘funny’ stuff where Smokey begins to question the guy in what he assures Scott is fluid Chinese. The fellow doesn’t appear to understand him, however, and then asks if they can just speak in English. (Waa waa waa.) Before he can tell them much, though, the recently hired assassin makes his move. He tosses a knife at Scott, but misses. I know why, too. The knife we saw him being given was a switchblade, and those aren’t weighted properly for throwing. Anyway, the would-be killer then jumps into the water and swims away. Scott draws his revolver and fires several shots (!!), but the miscreant gets away. Moreover, the fisherman begs off being questioned further, lest his family be endangered.

The next day, Scott and Smokey appear in Pierre’s backyard. Blanche is outside by the pool, and is irate at the intrusion. Scott represents himself as an insurance agent investigating the death of Grant. (Actually, he at first pretends he wants to sell Blanche a policy. Good undercover work.) There’s some quite lame ‘cagey’ banter between Scott and Pierre/Blanche, as the two sides feel each other out. After Scott leaves, Pierre calls Norman, er, I mean, the mystery Secret Bad Guy #1. SBG #1 admits to knowing about Scott, and tells Pierre to arrange for Scott to be taken out of the picture. "I’ll settle his future," Pierre gloats.

We go to Pierre’s warehouse, where we learn that electronic parts are being transported in hollowed out trees being sent to a main land Chinese lumber mill. Meanwhile, Carol calls Scott on her bracelet and lets him know that the bad guys are on to him. Gee, what a waste of that airtight ‘insurance agent’ disguise. Also, Smokey is almost done in by a falling crate while checking out Pierre’s warehouse. In other words, we’re at the point in the film where they’re treading water until we get to the end of the movie.

Scott makes an appointment to talk to Pierre. That evening, he drives out there with Smokey, but the directions to Pierre’s office take them up into some secluded hills. It’s an ambush, of course, as a waiting Guy and Misc. Thug blast their car with submachine guns. The car flies off a cliff, but it turns out that both Our Heroes had jumped to safety and are clinging to the cliff sides. This is pretty ridiculous, as the gunfire would have chewed both of them to bits. Also, you’d think Guy might have checked out the scene better. But, hey, it’s a movie.

Scott and Smokey then sneak over to Pierre’s house. Scott makes his way to Carol’s room to let her know that he’s not dead. The two declare their love for each other, yada yada, and end up doing to deed. Safely off-camera, of course, but still. Before that, though, they decide that Carol must find the code Pierre uses for his telegraph dispatches. This leads to a scene where Carol ‘accidentally’ drops her bracelet in Pierre’s study while dropping off the latest messages. Scott is listening in on his watch (that’s his device), and quite luckily Pierre and Blanche just happen to discuss in perfect detail right where the codebook is hidden. Man, that’s good espionage.

I probably shouldn’t go into much detail about the rather overstuffed final twenty-odd minutes of the movie, although I can’t imagine many people will stumble across a flick this obscure. In the end, Norman is shockingly exposed to be Secret Bad Guy #1 (oops, sorry), and everyone ends up on his junk as he makes to deliver the goods to his Communist masters. This is one of those deals where the heroes and the villains take turns getting the upper hand on each other. There are, in fact, so many such reversals in a short space of time that they quickly become comical. In the end, each of the bad guys suffers an evil fate, Carol ends up in Scott’s arms, and even Smokey is rewarded with a hot chick of his own.

Code Name: Alpha, which went by numerous other titles even here in the States (Red Dragon, Mission Hong Kong, etc.) is pretty much the defination of a routine programmer. It’s an amiable time-waster, but nothing really sets it apart from hundred of similar low-budget films, both foreign and domestic. In terms of its production values, it’s about on the level of a TV show episode. It sports few spy gadgets, and those are not exactly exotic. (On the other hand, you could also say they’re comparatively realistic.) There’re a few over-the-top elements, like the ‘blind’ assassin, but those looking for more overtly over-the-top material should search elsewhere.

Stewart Granger was a fairly prominent actor in the ‘50s, generally taking the leading man role in adventure films like 1950’s King Solomon’s Mines. He went on to star in several period films and jungle pictures (his specialty), before his career started fading in the early ‘60s. At that point he went to Europe, where he headlined several innocuous genre films like this one. He continued to work, although increasingly sporadically and mostly in television, up until 1990. Born in the UK but eventually naturalized as an American citizen, Granger possessed the sort of mid-Atlantic accent that fellow Brits Cary Grant and Ray Milland sported. Indeed, his breezy performance here is reminiscent of either of those actors.

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The Giant Spider Invasion is regional auteur Bill Rebane’s contribution the venerable Big Bug genre. Mr. Rebane’s oevre has been examined on this site in the past (The Capture of Bigfoot), and no doubt will be the subject of further scrutiny in the future. This remains his best-known film, partly due to its subject matter and lurid title, but more so because it was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

We open on a static shot of a starscape, accompanied by the sort of electronic ‘sci-fi’ music that makes one ponder what the worst Moody Blues-inspired rock/blues band in the universe might sound like. As the acting credits roll, we see several (assuming one is a hardcore B-Movie buff) familiar names. Although all are well past their prime earning years, their presence might at least partially explain the obviously niggardly amount spent to realize the film’s titular menace.

Following this, a ‘comet’ marginally less laughable than the papier-mâché artifact featured in Brainiac streaks its way across the screen. Next we cut to a small town Sheriff’s Office. Inside we meet the imaginatively monikered Sheriff Jones, who is assayed by sitcom demigod Alan Hale Jr. Suddenly callow young Dave Perkins enters the room, clad in the sort of petroleum-based, Cowboys & Indian-print shirt that gives scarred veterans of the era the night terrors to this day. Jones greets Dan with a cheery, "Hi, little buddy!" You have to admire a film that casts Alan Hale Jr., and then waits an entire two seconds before lobbing a Gilligan’s Island joke at us.

Despite the fact that Dave appears to be all of perhaps seventeen, he announces that he’s checking for stories for the town paper. Jones, however, reveals that all is well. They serve up a little exposition, including the fact that there’s a Christian revival meeting going on nearby, that Dave is dating Terry Kestler, and that Terry’s brother-in-law Dan is a surly badass.

So saying, we cut to the Kester abode, which proves a rather ramshackle farmhouse. Dan is heading out, with Ev, his booze-swilling wife, yelling after him from the porch. The state of their connubial bliss is signified when Ev angrily asserts, "Sometimes the only time I know you’re still alive is when I hear you flush the toilet!" Dan replies that he’ll be attending the aforementioned revival meeting, although we have our doubts.

On to said meeting, which proves a good ol’ Baptist-style affair. We’ll be cutting to the fire & brimstone exhortations of the presiding minister seen here throughout the film. Given that these utterances will have little direct bearing on the plot (such as it is), I can only assume that these recurrent glimpses are meant to Signify Something. What, I don’t know, although probably something negative about fundamentalist Christianity. I mean, having something good to say about fundamentalist Christianity is probably a bit much to hope for.

Dave drops by the Kester place to pick up Terry. Ev is already sitting on the porch, inevitably clasping a cocktail. Ev is not only a drunk, but also, in the grand cinematic tradition of neglected rural wives, a bit slutty. "If you were five years older," she leers, "I’d jump ya." Needless to say, Terry arrives just in time to hear this last bit. The two youngster hurry off, leaving Ev to seek solace in the bottom of her highball glass.

A quick peek into space shows the comet still approaching, or perhaps now reaching, Earth. Then it’s back to Sheriff Jones, shown reading a paperback called Flying Saucers Want You. It’s a joke. Or something. He then gets what I assume is supposed to be a comical phone call about whether the preacher from the revival meeting can be arrested for disturbing the peace. Then it’s back to said minister, talking about fire and brimstone being rained down upon the wicked, following which the comet is seen still approaching the Earth. So I guess the minister’s sweating sermonizing is acting as a sort of Greek Chorus to the general action, although I’m still a little vague as to the point of all this.

Back to Ev, whose on the phone calling a fellow named Dutch. It turns out that it’s a crisis situation, as she’s completely out of liquor. Needless to say, she offers Dutch the Hero’s Reward should he come to her rescue. Meanwhile, Dave and Terry are parking for a little sparking, if you know what I mean. Then we cut to Dan, seen leaving the trailer of a lingerie-clad floozy. Before he goes, she runs out, calling "You almost forgot your back brace!" I think this is supposed to be funny. To somebody. Somewhere. In any case, we’re not even five minutes into things and I’m starting to wonder where the hell the spiders are.

The comet is again indicated by the camera zooming in on a still shot of Earth. Then we cut to Dan in his truck, listening to the revival meeting on the radio. Then we cut to the minister, who’s preachings again foreshadow upcoming events. Then we cut to the Dan arriving home, leaving me to wonder when Dutch was supposed to be arriving. Ev, obviously aware of her husband’s extracurricular activities, grills the befuddled Dan on what was said at the revival meeting.

Luckily, all this Tobacco Row garbage is finally interrupted by the long awaited arrival of the *cough, cough* comet, which predictably crash lands in the fields behind their house. This event is rather comically communicated by a series of supposedly gigantic, rear-projected solarization effects. Dan and Terry are startled by a resultant burst of gale-force wind, which is indicated with newspapers being blown through shot by a large fan. More havoc is portrayed as well. For instance, a guy on a dirtbike is knocked over by the wind. Apparently aware that he’s in a movie, he immediately crawls away from his vehicle, which despite a soft landing in sand mysteriously and gigantically explodes moments later.

Back to the Kester place. The winds finally die down, and we cut to the dimly seen remains of the meteorite, which are given a, uhm, spooky touch via the economic expedient of having sparklers attached to it. Meanwhile, something horrible and unseen happens to the dirt bike driver. In this case I think the ‘unseen’ part is intentional, although it should be noted that all the night time shots in this film are so dark that you can’t see much in any of them.

We next cut to a stock footage airplane flying around, then to a shot establishing shot of a U.S. Air Force building. Trumpeting horns let us know that this is significant. This is following by further thrilling stock footage, this time of a military control center, then radar dishes, then jets, etc. and so on. The pilots in the jet note a problem with their instruments, after which we hear an explosion sound and see flames superimposed over the control room stock footage. This would seem to indicate that the entire center was eradicated by something, although it’s (somewhat) more logical to assume that only the plane was destroyed.

Back to Sheriff Jones, still reading his paperback. He gets another call, from someone complaining that both their car and radio won’t work (!). For those keeping track, this means the meteorite has affected cars, jet planes and radios, but not telephones. Jones ‘comically’ can only suggest his caller contact Joe’s Radio Shop and Ernie’s Auto Repair in the morning. After more grossly unfunny comedy, we thankfully skip to the next scene.

Terry, arriving late back home, sneaks herself a soda—good product placement there, PepsiCo—in the (extremely) dark Kester kitchen. Suspecting an intruder, Dan bursts in wielding a shotgun. In the movie’s supreme moment of horror, we see that he’s clad in grungy, stained BVDs, with his back brace straining against his pendulous gut. This leads to a gruesome scene in which the two converse while Dan eats leftover fried chicken. After a while he threatens to give her a spanking, she sasses him, and he begins to chase her as banjo music plays. Really. In any case, rampaging giant spiders are going to seem pretty anticlimactic after all this.

Cut to a science lab, one which looks suspiciously like a high school classroom. However, there are lots of oscilloscopes sitting around, so obviously this is a cutting edge facility. Dr. Jenny Langer (Barbara Hale) enters the room, and makes a telephone call—believe me, if you like watching fading TV stars engaging in one-sided telephone conversations, then this is surely the movie for you—during which we learn that the present locale is a local observatory. She worriedly reports to someone that the she’s "got a gamma ray shower, and the barometers dropped an inch in less than twenty minutes." There’s more jargon along those lines, but since I’m not a scientist, I couldn’t really follow much of it.

Next we meet Dr. Vance (Steve Brodie), who maybe works for the Air Force. Frankly, such minutia became harder for me to focus on as the film progressed. In any case, he’s a Scientist. However, he’s also a bit of a free thinker, since he’s first seen talking to his office plants. This raises the eyebrows of Paul, an arriving colleague. "My MO says that I’m half metaphysics and half astrophysics," Vance helpfully clarifies.

Then it’s back to more mundane matters, as Paul reports "more freaky stuff from Northern Wisconsin." This relates not to folks wearing cheese hats or painting their faces green and gold, however, but to Langer’s report. Vance, proving why he’s a Highly Regarded Scientist, immediately ponders a correlation between the weird phenomenon and the military jet that mysteriously crashed. Vance, needless to say, is assigned to travel there and investigate. They also have Vance call Paul "little buddy," which frankly makes no sense whatsoever.

The next morning, Ev nags Dan while fishing a breakfast Pabst out of the fridge. (Anyone want to bet on either of these two seeing the end of the movie?) Then we cut to Langer, giving an elementary astronomy lecture to some kids at the Observatory. It’s a good thing the film only runs just under 80 minutes, or they might have had to pad it out some.

Later, Vance—who works at NASA, we now learn—arrives at the Observatory and introduces himself to Jenny. In a bit that must have already seemed weirdly dated in 1975, Vance first asks to see her (deceased) father, then her (nonexistent) husband and finally her (interior decorator) brother before realizing that the woman in the lab coat before him is, in fact, ‘Dr.’ Langer. Yet despite his evident buffoonery, this is a movie, and so the two will no doubt end up romantically involved. I admit it’s ageist of me, but I seldom can rouse much enthusiasm for watching folks in their mid-50s become so entangled. Of course, maybe that’s because I’m usually watching films like The Swarm and Bog.

After a long stretch of the two walking around the Observatory and blathering to each other, we cut to Dan and Ev investigating their pastures. Needless to say, they spend the time slinging barbs, until Ev trips and lands next to a decapitated steer head. Then it’s back to the Observatory, where Langer and Vance are hunched over, what else, an oscilloscope. This must be a weird one, however, as it indicates a lot of radiation in the area. The two expository that anyone near the impact site would be in danger. They then discuss how to track the site down. I’m not an expert, but if it’s radioactive, wouldn’t a Geiger Counter help?

Meanwhile, Ev and Dan have come across more dead, not to mention partly consumed, cattle. Dan tells Ev he’ll butcher up the remaining meat and sell it in town. (!) Then back to the lab. Sigh. I think it’s time to pick up the pace, here.

• Looking at their accumulated data, Vance exasperatedly notes, "It’s against every known law of physics." What, every single one of them? Like, say, Boyle’s Law, that the pressure of an ideal gas is inversely proportional to the volume of the gas at constant temperature?
• By the way, I guess I should mention all the ‘spooky’ foreshadowing camera shots through spider webs and such.
• Ev and Dan, whose farm must be gigantic, eventually start finding strange rocks spread all over their land. Then they find the impact crater, which is weirdly small, all things considered. Finding another strange stone there, Dan decides to return home and smash one open.
• Cut to several minutes of the Sheriff yakking with some locals at the town diner/liquor store. This is killer stuff, and I can see why they didn’t want to lose a minute of it. [Note: The previous statement might reflect some degree of sarcasm.]
• Dan learns that he can’t saw into one of the stones, so he smashes it open with a hammer. The stone falls to the floor in the process, and so the two don’t see a tarantula escaping from its center. Meanwhile, the split stone is found to contain diamonds. (Just go with it.) Needless to say, the two both soon have dollar signs swimming before their eyes.
• In any case, if you ever wondered if you could make a weird sort of piñata by gluing a spilt geode together after sticking a live spider into it, then yes, apparently you can. It’s really not worth the effort, though, believe me.
• Langer and Vance arrive at the diner, looking for Sheriff Jones. Jones, a believer in crank theories, is mightily impressed to meet a scientist from NASA, and eagerly offers his help to their investigation. There follows the sort of comic banter that makes one wish those spiders would get their thoraxes in gear.
• Back at the farm, Dan has opened a number of stones and has accumulated a sizable collection of diamonds. (The fact that they’ve somehow consistently failed to notice the spider presumably in each is notably passed over.) There’s another go-nowhere plot thread about Dan cutting Ev out of the fortune, on the basis that he owns the farm. Don’t they have community property laws in Wisconsin? Anyway.
• Dave appears at the diner and joins the others. He’s wearing another hideous patterned shirt, by the way, and really should get a haircut, the damn hippie.
• Ev has started to notice the tarantulas around the house, and is getting even more plastered than usual. Dan just thinks she’s seeing things, though. I imagine he’ll learn otherwise the hard way.
• Dan goes out looking for more geodes, er, Space Rocks. He must be a great farmer, by the way, because he’s out standing in his field! Ha! I love that gag. Hello? Anyone out there?
• Dan comes across the horribly mutilated body of (presumably) the dirt biker. For instance, one of its arms has been entirely denuded of tissue, although the bones have remained oddly articulated. Perhaps that’s one of the Laws of Physics which are being violated. In any case, Dan buries the body, presumably for fear that others might learn of the diamond-laden geodes. Ur, Space Rocks.
• Things I Learned: A flyswatter is not an adequate deterrent against a horde of tarantulas. Nor, for that matter, is a blender full of Bloody Marys.
• Things I Learned: Tarantulas, or at least Space Tarantulas, spin webs.
• Things I Learned: Even if a movie is pretty crappy, it’s gross to watch someone drink a Bloody Mary that’s had a tarantula blended into it.
• Dan heads over to visit his floozy again, leaving Ev alone in the Spider House. (Where’s Terry during all this? Got me.) Ev slips her pants off for some extremely mild Hubba Hubba stuff, although this is somewhat offset by the large man’s shirt she’s also wearing. As she brushes her hair, another Space Rock hatches, loosing yet another arachnid. At this point it was becoming even harder to believe that Dan had managed to raid all these Space Rocks without learning where the spiders were coming from.
• The just released spider climbs up into Ev’s bed for a little suspense sequence. Since I myself really can’t stand spiders, I must admit that the scene did induce a little queasiness.
• Before she can notice the spider, Ev leaves her bed and goes over to a dresser. She opens the top drawer and a cat-sized Muppet Spider tries to climb out. (How’d it get in there?!) I have to give Rebane points for the concept here, if not entirely for his execution. While not completely successful, the idea of focusing on the smaller spider so as to shock the audience with the larger one is a sound directorial ploy. Unfortunately, the hand puppet nature of the larger beastie somewhat undercuts the result.
• Ev naturally runs screaming from the room, only to bump into a large web with a patently rubber spider in it. Then she scampers from the house entirely, seeking safety in the barn (??). There she meets her inevitable fate via a man-sized floppy spider that whisks down on wires from the hayloft. Due to the typically bad lighting, this artifact isn’t as comical as it probably should be, much to my chagrin.
• Dan shows his cousin some of the diamonds he’s collected. He assesses them to be only of industrial quality. Even so, given enough of them and they’d be worth some money. With the Space Rock littering his property, Dan is satisfied with that.
• The next day Dan is mildly annoyed about the missing Ev. Terry doesn’t seemed that concerned either, considering that Ev’s her sister. Dan ogles Terry, who decides to shake her stuff at him a little. Blech. The camera helpfully assists in this by zooming tight onto her cleavage. Dan then tries to bribe her with a diamond to, well, you know.
• A helicopter is used to seek out the impact site. Vance, Langer and Dave (?) are on the ground, waiting for confirmation of the site’s whereabouts. The radiation’s so high around the Kester place, they hear, that his view of the land below him is blurred. (!!) If this were even close to being true, wouldn’t everyone in the county be dead by now?
• Looking at an inkblot that supposedly represents a photo of the impact site, Langer pronounces it to indicate the existence of a "space warp." (!!) Vance explains to a confused Dave: "A space warp is a gravitational pull so intense that it makes a black hole in space." Uh…sort of. He and Langer agree that the only thing that could cause such a space warp is a miniature black hole. Everyone got that?
• Dave questions whether this is possible. (With good reason, one would think.) "With a billion black holes in our galaxy," Langer opines, "it’s a wonder it hasn’t happened before." Vance concurs. "Everything fits," he muses, "Einstein’s general theory of relativity." What now? Somehow I get the feeling that Stephen Hawking didn’t OK this script.
• With this rigorously research exposition out of the way, we can finally get the show on the road. Dan returns to the site—I guess being exposed to a black hole isn’t as catastrophic as I may have imagined—and begins to look for more Space Rocks. However, something now begins to emerge from the ground. Dan continues her perambulations, only to have a really, really big spider rise up behind him.
• This beastie is really the element the film’s fame rests upon. The body of the spider is, in fact, a VW bug (oh, the irony) that’s been covered with shaggy black fabric. Fuzzy stovepipe limbs have been attached, and move unconvincingly up and down via the simple expedient of levers operated from inside the car. Finally, red plastic covers have been place over the headlights, giving the creature glowing red eyes. In case my description has failed to convey the overall effect, well, it’s pretty damn silly. On the other hand, it has a certain amount of goofy charm, and certainly beats a lot of CGI spiders I’ve seen. Also, assuming they kept it after finishing the movie, it would make the coolest damn parade float ever. In fact, I wonder what that thing would bring today on Ebay. A goodly amount, I bet.

• In any case, exit Dan.
• Dan’s cousin comes nosing around the house, presumably looking to learn more about the diamonds Dan showed him. Meanwhile, Terry walks in fresh from the shower, allowing for a quick boobie shot. She flirts with the guy, but then kicks him out when he puts a move on her.
• The cousin drives off, but nearly comes to grief when he drives his truck into a huge web with another (?) monstrous spider in it. He manages to get free, but panics and drives into a stock footage shot (or so I assume) of a car driving into some service station gas pumps, with predictable results.
• Terry, now wearing panties and a short halter top, finds herself surrounded by tarantulas in her bedroom. Things aren’t helped when the Bigass Spider begins bringing the house down around her. Well, that’s what happens to hussies in cheesy sci-fi flicks, I guess.
• Dave, worried about everything that’s going on, arrives to find the Kester place decimated. Seeing the spider making its way across a field, he pumps some rifle fire into it, although to little effect. Say what you will for rural Wisconsin, though, at least they’re armed. Dave then sees the wounded Terry, and carries her to his car.
• Vance and Langer are in the area investigating, and run into the Bigass Spider.
• Let’s see, I liked how calm everyone was taking the ’50 foot’ spider thing. Also, when Langer hefts two normal looking geodes and notes that the lab said, "they’d never seen anything like them." Then she and Vance muse over how to kill the Bigass Spider. Among the options they don’t explore: Shooting it with lots and lots of guns. Spraying it with gasoline and lighting it up. Driving a truck into it. Also, I liked the way that no one even bothers trying to call in the military or even the State Police. I guess giant bugs are strictly a local problem.
• As for the black hole, Vance and Lange decide to "feed it so much extra mass, we can choke it." Since the BS came through the space warp, though, presumably that would require a lot of ‘mass.’
• Oops, my mistake. All they have to do is "shower it with neutrons." Whatever. Hearing this suggestion, Vance inevitably replies, "It just might work!" To bring this about, Vance calls NASA and orders a "Caltech Neutron Initiator," one loaded with "a six hundred gram charge, and set the pattern at 360º!" Everyone got that?
• With Sheriff Jones proactively sitting on his duff in his office and musing about how weird the whole thing is, some of the locals decide to act on their own. Of course, in a movie this nearly always results in disaster. Even so, the idea of getting together dozens of armed locals and just blasting away at the BS doesn’t seem like a bad idea, all things considered.
• The BS attacks a local carnival. (It’s in the Giant Monster rule book.) You’d think maybe Sheriff Jones could have at least warned people to stay home, but I guess not.
• Soon the BS is chasing masses of extras, er, citizens down the main thoroughfare, where the tarmac allows its tires, uh, legs, to move it along quite quickly.
• Oddly, during these scenes it’s bright daylight. However, when we see Jones getting reports on this in his office, it’s clearly dusk outside his windows.
• Jones finally decides to call the National Guard. Well, duh.
• Driver sees BS, drives into other car, explosion. Wowsers!
• That night, Vance and Langer (who he suddenly calls "honey") find the impact site. Once they block it off, I guess, all the spiders already around will magically disappear. Well, that’s pretty convenient, I must say.
• Jones rather belatedly attempts to send the mob home, but they engage the BS anyway. Since they’re not the movie’s Heroes, many fall in the attempt. Here’s a clue: When shooting a gigantic spider with a rifle, you don’t have to run right up to the thing. Also, hasn’t anyone around here ever heard of a Molotov cocktail?
• A deputy falls, though, as he runs up five feet away from the BS to shoot it with his .38. Good plan. When that proves ineffective, he whips it with his belt. Adios, deputy.
• In the end, they drop the Neutron Initiator at the impact site (of course, the BS has returned to the area to menace Our Heroes at the last moment) and all the spiders explode into flames. To make this look all cool and stuff, they apparently set the mock BS on fire—oh, the humanity—then printed the footage of it burning backwards. Then the BS turns into goop, for no apparent reason. Whatever.
• Cue another Hectoring Preacher voiceover, which accompanies the end credits and implies a sequel. Someday, my friends. Someday.

As noted, the movie sports a veteran cast. Alan Hale, Jr., everyone knows. However, there are several other players of note (not that they help much). Steve Brodie played Vance. His impressive pedigree includes appearances in films dating back to the mid-40s. In the ‘50s he appeared in some sci-fi films, including The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Donovan’s Brain. Jabootuites, however, will remember him for his roles in such films as Wild World of Batwoman and especially for starring in Frankenstein Island. Dave, meanwhile, was played by Brodie’s son Kevin.

Barbara Hale (Langer) was most familiar to viewers as Della Street, Raymond Burr’s secretary on the old Perry Mason TV series. She ended her long career returning to that role in the long series of TV movies that brought the characters back in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

[Jabootu Correspondent Zombiewhacker, meanwhile, notes that Dutch was played by veteran thesp Bill Williams, who was also Ms. Hale's husband. They were also the parents of William Katt, the star of TV's Greatest American Hero and several 'erotic' thrillers. Katt joined his mother as a regular cast member in the aforementioned revival of the Perry Mason character.]

Dan Kester was played by Robert Easton, a familiar character actor. His genre credits include an uncredited turn in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (in a part even smaller than Brodie’s), The Neanderthal Man, Voyage To the Bottom of the Sea and The Touch of Satan, which joined The Giant Spider Invasion as a MST3K subject.

Ev, meanwhile, was played by Leslie Parrish. Ms. Parrish played a number of sexbombish roles in the ‘50s through the ‘70s. Her most famous role was as the fiancée of the Laurence Harvey character in the paranoid classic The Manchurian Candidate. Following this film she acted in two more crappy B-movies before retiring from the screen.

Director Rebane, meanwhile, continued to make films for another dozen years. He’s still apparently around, too, since he is briefly interviewed on Retromedia’s DVD of this movie.