 Welcome to another episode of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies. We have another Patreon request, and this is requested by the Ageless Aesthetic, 1977's Kingdom of the Spiders. That's right. But before we get started, what are we drinking? We're drinking Miller Genuine Draft. This movie stars the Canadian national treasure himself, William Shatner. That's right. Mr. Jamereen Man! The co-starring with him is Tiffany Bowling. And Woody Strode is in this, but just to name a few things, he's been in Spartacus, the Ten Commandments, 1981's Scream, and The Quick and the Dead. Natasha Ryan is in this too, and she was in The Entity, and The Amityville Horror. Movie starts off with William Shatner's character, whose nickname is Rack. He's a veterinarian, last suing this calf. He's with, what we find out later, is his dead brother's wife, play-fighting after he gives that calf the injection, and get a little too close, and Shatner shoves her arm. I'm not my brother. Pushes her super hard, like just Kirk-style, an emergency at the Colby Farm, calf that's come sick. Poor thing is dying, and he doesn't know why. So he takes a bunch of blood samples, and sends him away to the big city, so they can hopefully find out what caused this calf to die. Drinking an out-in-his-porch, drinking some miller, the sheriff comes by, you know, throws a sheriff of beer, the mayor comes by, you know, gives the mayor a beer, they're drinking, and Diane swings by, and she's there to tell him there's a big problem here. What killed your calves was not some weird disease, it's a venom from a spider. Him and Diane together go over to the Colby Farm, and the dog is dead now. You mentioned the spider venom, well, spiders, but there just happens to be a big spider hill over here, I'll go show you. Now you mention it, and Colby takes them over to see this big, huge spider hill, this thing gets like this high on it, covered in spiders. Diane is kind of driving down the road, yeah, y'all super comes up behind her speeding, and like almost runs her right off the road, and then he all parks, and he gets out and he's all forceful. He's like, how about dinner, picks her up, puts her in the passenger seat, and drives her car off, and leaves his truck on the highway. Diane, isn't all that afraid of these spiders, right? A spider kind of gets into one of the drawers, and you think there's going to be a pretty tense scene. No, she opens up the drawer and the spider is there, she's like, oh, hey you. So while they're all trying to, you know, get an all lovey-dovey in the room, let's get rid of that hill. Colby had that in mind all along. Here it is, the gas can in the hand, burning hell, sons of bitches. They go on some sick picnic like some out in the desert, like they take those horses out in the four horses and they're going through all those cactuses. They see Colby driving in his truck. Colby's truck. Pulls the visor down, and all these spiders come on to him and he runs off the road. He all grabs the rope and lines himself down and he's like, what do you have to do with it? You're the veterinarian of the town. He comes down, he's all webbed up, come up with a plan, dust the whole area where they're finding all those spider hills. While he's up in the air, the spiders start to actually attack him. He flies over town with all those dangerous chemicals and everything, and then he just flies into that bar and it all blows up. The sheriff, he starts to drive into town, complete mayhem from these spiders. They're starting to kill like the town's folk, the mayor's all there and he's all flagging them down. He drives them over, runs over the mayor, there's that water tower that comes down and kills the sheriff. Rec, Diane, and the rest of the town, they start to hold up and that's where we're going to end it. So why should you watch Kingdom of the Spiders? William Shadiner to begin with, he's not that bad in this movie. Well he's not bad in any movie, but he doesn't ham it up, he's not overacting. Pretty relaxed movie. It's slow. And so the character kind of evolves like that too. And near the end where it hits the fan, then he kind of shats it up a bit, right? A little bit. Get back to the lodge. Give me a ham, I said give me a hammer and nails. When the spiders come through that window, they're climbing up and all slow up those stairs. Yeah, that's when he kind of shats it up a bit, but until then, he's playing it cool. It's not a B movie at all, it kind of like presents itself as one, but it's not. Like it looks great, like the effects are all good, the acting's all good, the dialogue is good. It's not campy at all really, besides maybe the few little things that Shadiner does just because it's him, but besides that, it's not a campy B movie at all. It's pretty A-list, takes its time, gets some character building in there, and just lots of story being built before the shit really hits the fan. And that brings us to the characters of this movie. They all have their little part to play, their own little pieces of dialogue that move the movie forward. None of them are a throwaway, like the gas station attendant and the guy, the drunk guy. Who is in convoy, mind you. Even that scene is not a throwaway scene. Every piece of dialogue serves a purpose. The effects, man, like you can't go wrong with real spiders, which is what they use for most of this movie, crawling on the street and crawling on people. The odd time you'll see someone pick up a fake spider and the legs aren't moving, but whatever, it's for two seconds, right? They do it quick. Shatner in the truck when he's kind of sweeping them off the bench, he's like, you get the real sense, that's real, it's not acting. You gotta say kudos to all the actors who can deal with that. Exactly, all the actors who had spiders put on them and stuff like, yeah, you earned your pay. The setting lends itself to some great shots and cinematography on the desert and all these like big planes, it looks really good. It is. Well, Sean, I'm well directed. The comedy in this movie is great and it's intentional. It's not like you're laughing because it's bad. Yep. You're laughing because it is smart and they put comedy in there on purpose. It's a well written movie. Social commentary in this is pretty blatant, but it works, you know, like the strong female lead, like you said, opens up the drawer, sees a spider, any other horror movie. This one, hey, that has a lot to do with what this movie is trying to say, that women can be strong people and they do do it kind of in a poor way at some points where the shatner shears to women's live, you didn't need that. They also touch on the overuse of chemicals, the chemicals you would use to exterminate these spiders in a mass capacity. Yeah. Well, yeah, what's that going to do to everything else? And they touch on all that. I love that part of it because like the spiders inadvertently take out a whole bunch of the town by stinging that guy with those, that crop duster, he kills all those people. They almost have an agenda of the spiders, right? They kind of know what they're doing. Yeah. It's kind of neat. This movie kind of plays out also like a bit of a zombie movie too, right? Like Night of the Living Dead. You have a group of people and they kind of hold themselves up in that diner. They're boarding up the windows, the doors, these spiders, they can seem to get into anything. I mean, a little crack, you know, not like a zombie, you have to like get in the whole door. Exactly. Yeah, which is kind of neat because you can't block every little crevice and hole, which is kind of, it's really cool. There was a lot of controversy with this movie too because as watching the movie, you can see that a lot of spiders got killed or harmed. You can see all these spiders being driven over by this car, like, all these spiders they killed. Yeah, yeah. You do actually feel, I kind of felt bad. Oh man, so that's the only downside about this movie. Last suing that poor calf and everything is like, oh man, a lot of animals seem to be hurt. That's one downside of this movie. It looks like there's a bit of animal cruelty involved, which we do not condone at all. No. But besides that, it's a fucking great movie. You know, if you haven't seen Kingdom of the Spiders, you wrote her off because it's, you know, Bee Movie, William Shatner, Trash, not at all. It's anything but, it's actually a very well thought out, well written, well acted, well paced movie. The reputation of this movie suffers because of the reputation of William Shatner. And it shouldn't at all. And it shouldn't. No. Because William Shatner has the reputation of campy acting. Yeah. That's total bullshit. It is. William Shatner, he camps it up when he wants to, but he's not a bad actor. No. And the thing is, it'd be interesting to see how this movie would have done if you would have had a different main actor. Yeah. Cass Burt Reynolds in it would have made me lean. Exactly. Exactly. Don't overlook it because Shatner's in it and don't overlook it because it's called Kingdom of the Spiders. Exactly. It's a great movie. It's a lot of fun and it builds tension and it builds characters. And what else do you want? Exactly. Next time.