Released in 1958 and shot in B&W, "Earth vs. the Spider" details the events of a small town in Southern California when a colossal spider living in a cave comes to town.While "Earth vs. the Spider" is great when you're 8 years-old its flaws surface when viewed as an adult. For one, the spider's size changes according to the sequence: In the cave it's huge, but when it's on display at the school it's noticeably smaller; then when it traverses the town it's gargantuan. Inconsistencies like this don't make for great movies. It's entertaining in some ways, like being a period piece of the late 50s, but it pales in comparison to Sci-Fi giants from the 50s like "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) and the monumental "Forbidden Planet" (1956). It doesn't help that colossal animal/monster movies made in the decades since are just all-around better, including being in color. Still, "Earth vs. the Spider" is worth catching if you favor these kinds of flicks and want to go back in time to the late 50s, not to mention there are some effective elements, like the horrific sounds the spider makes and the drained remains of its victims. The film runs 73 minutes and was shot in Bronson Canyon, Griffith Park and Los Angeles, California, with additional footage from Carlsbad Caverns National Park. GRADE: C

Two teenagers on a date(played by June Kenny & Eugene Persson) explore a cavern and stumble upon a gigantic spider(tarantula). Terrified, they escape from it and go for help. The authorities "kill" it with DDT, but a scientist(played by Ed Kemmer) wants to study it to see how it got so big. Big mistake, since the spider isn't dead, merely inactive, and after listening to a Rock & Roll band in the school gymnasium(where it is being kept!), awakens and goes on a rampage through town. Can it be stopped before everyone is killed? Bert I. Gordon directed this typical film of his, with inadequate F/X and a thin story. Some tension in the cavern, but too silly otherwise.

I wasn't really expecting too much from this, but compared to some of the "monster" movies made in the 1950's, this one actually stands up pretty well. To state the obvious strong points, there's a good opening as a guy is attacked by some unseen creature while driving along a highway one night, and given the limitations of special effects in the era, the spider scenes are quite well done, using for the most part shots of what seems to be a real tarantula superimposed over miniatures or backgrounds, and creating decent enough shots. According to the opening credits, the film also used Carlsbad Caverns for at least some of its photography (and perhaps some of its location shooting?) and that gave the cave setting a very realistic, claustrophobic atmosphere, which was effectively used in creating suspense. I also appreciated the fact that there was never really any attempt to explain the giant spider. I was half-expecting all the way through a typical 50's "radiation caused a mutation" theory, but it seemed to be just accepted that this was a strangely giant spider, with no real attempt to explain its size, which in some ways made this creepier.Now, this is certainly not perfect. I became very concerned about what the quality of the acting would be like early on as I listened to Ed Kemmer (playing high school science teacher Kingman) speaking to his class about electricity. He sounded completely artificial - like the monotone narrators of those science documentaries that are often shown in schools (at least when I was a kid.) Kemmer seemed to get better as the movie went along, but June Kenney as Carol also fell into that "artificial-sounding" trap on occasion. It also seemed to me that these high school students (Carol and especially Joe, whose car keeps getting borrowed) seemed too old to be easily accepted as high school students. The title also seems a bit overblown. "The Earth" was never really in on this fight - it seemed to be just the folks in River Falls, and they couldn't even get through to the state capital! Basically, though, this is an enjoyable and pretty well made movie. 7/10

Really bad film. The acting is okay, but the plot is very thin.One of the teenagers looks to be forty. A giant tarantula lives in a cave. How did it get so big? No answer given. The special effects were very lame. The spider's web was just a rope net - crisscross square pattern - nothing like a spider's web. The spider kept making noises like a mountain lion. The spider kept changing sizes. One minute, it's larger than a two story house; then it's ten feet long. The corpses that had their juices sucked out by the spider resembled aliens - big white heads, huge almond-shaped eyes. Dumb. Spraying copious amounts of DDT into a cave, more than ten times the industrial strength, and nobody so much as rubs their nose. An unresolved scene where a crying,bloodied toddler walks past a car wreck in the wake of the spider's rampage. Unresolved, needlessly disturbing. The spider's shots were almost all live action shots of a real tarantula. The film never showed the spider killing anyone - all inferred. Cheap, unimaginitive production. The velveeta of cheesy films.