Though riddled with all the flaws that have become a trademarks of Wisconsin auteur Bill Rebane (dreadful special effects, lengthy dialogue scenes killing time between dull action scenes, pseudo-scientific gobbledegook and lifeless direction), The Giant Spider Invasion is a lot more fun than the rest of his oeuvre, There’s something oddly endearing about it – it’s not by any means a great film (it has all manner of technical problems – though to be fair did day for night shots ever work?) but for all its faults it’s a hard one to dislike.

In rural Wisconsin, a hellfire preacher (Tain Bodkin) sets up tent and starts making ominous pronouncements (he turns up frequently as a sort of narrator though he doesn’t really add much to the proceedings. Meanwhile, a meteor crashes into the land of farmer Dan Kester (Robert Easton, who co-wrote the film Richard L. Huff) and his boozy wife Ev (Leslie Parrish). The Kester’s find their cattle horribly mutilated and the ground around the impact site littered with strange geodes which, when opened, reveal diamonds and tarantula-like spiders. As Kester carries on with local floozy Helga (Christiane Schmidtmer) and lusts after Ev’s jail bait little sister Terry (Diane Lee Hart), the spiders multiply, one growing to extraordinary size until their entire farm is overrun. A sheriff (Alan Hale Jr) and two NASA scientists Dr Vance (Steve Brodie) and Dr Jenny Langer (Barbara Hale) are soon on the case, reasoning that the meteor strike had opened a doorway into another dimension and it’s this doorway that has facilitated the invasion of flesh-hungry arachnids.

The Giant Spider Invasion 1

The Giant Spider Invasion was Rebane’s biggest box office hit, thanks to that enticing title, an eye-catching poster and a monster-heavy trailer – Variety noted that it was in that year’s top 50 money spinners at the box office. Rebane continued making films for many years after The Giant Spider Invasion until a stroke in 1989 stalled his career, but none were as successful or as (relatively) high profile – in 2011, Rebane announced that he was returning to the film to stage a musical adaptation though there’s been no sign of it since.

The invasion is really just a lot of normal-sized tarantulas with one “queen” spider, famously “played” for the most part by a Volkswagen Beetle in a giant spider suit, that turns up late in the film. Elsewhere, a smaller puppet sees off Barbara Hale and a model supported unsteadily by a crane appears in a few brief shots. Despite repeated claims over the years you can’t see the Beetle under the spider suit which, it’s silly googly eyes aside, is actually an effective bit on low-budget ingenuity. The opening arrival of the meteor is an awful soup of terrible optical effects but elsewhere The Giant Spider Invasion is surprisingly gruesome for a film rated PG with the spider seen a couple of times messily eating people alive.

The Giant Spider Invasion 4

At least Rebane got a halfway decent cast together this time, headed by faded stars who bring a bit more class to the film than it really merits. Brodie had been a hard-working regular in westerns and B thrillers in the 1940s and 50s, with roles in M (1951), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Donovan’s Brain (1953) among others (his son Kevin also appears in The Giant Spider Invasion); Barbara Hale was still fondly remembered as Perry Mason’s secretary in the popular television series; Alan Hale Jr (no relation to Barbara) was a household face and name in the States after playing the skipper in Gilligan’s Island (1964-1967) but had a huge filmography to his name (he spends a lot of this film having one-sided conversations on the telephone); Leslie Parrish was another old hand, familiar from the likes of Missile to the Moon (1958), Li’l Abner (1959) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962); and Easton was one of those you know the face but can’t place the name character actors you’ll have seen in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Neanderthal Man (1953), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), The Touch of Satan (1971) and so many more.

The Giant Spider Invasion is unassuming fun though that’s not to say that it’s without its flaw – we get a lengthy and not terribly informative lecture on astronomy whether we want one or not; there’s an annoying synthy sound effects whenever the spider attacks that very quickly becomes deeply annoying, the humour is as feeble as ever (though there’s an amusing bit of business with Ev making herself a Bloody Mary unaware that a spider has fallen into the blender and the ending is rather abrupt, with the giant spider dissolving into a puddle of goo after being set alight and Langer warning – with no evidence whatsoever – warning that it could all happen again, probably leaving the door open for a sequel that was never made.

The Giant Spider Invasion 3

And yet for all that… it’s just strangely entertaining. The spider is of course the star of the show and you might be surprised by how effective it is, particularly in long and medium shots, though the close-ups reveal too many ragged edges. By any standards it’s not a very good film at all (Rebane later claimed that they were making up the script as they went along and it frequently shows) but when it’s as stupidly entertaining as this, who cares?

Rebane went on to make several other genre films, none as enjoyable as The Giant Spider Invasion – The Alpha Incident (1978), The Capture of Bigfoot (1979), Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake (1981), The Demons of Ludlow (1983), The Game (1984) and Blood Harvest (1987).