50 Years Ago, A Giant Spider Invaded Wisconsin

Up there — or should we say down there — in the pantheon of bad movies we love to watch is The Giant Spider Invasion, a 1975 horror/sci-fi indie directed, produced, and scored by maverick filmmaker Bill Rebane. A Latvian-Estonian immigrant, Rebane went on to run for governor of Wisconsin and open the state’s first film studio, but is best known for this monster cheesefest, which was shot for a rather impressive $300K and featured faded stars like Gilligan's Island skipper Alan Hale.

A Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite, The Giant Spider Invasion is the nadir of a string of '70s "nature gone amok" movies, which makes it kind of a perverse must-see. Released 50 years ago today, the twist here is that the title spiders actually come from another universe, the result of a meteor crash near a small town that opens up a miniature black hole. Through this opening fall a whole bunch of geodes that contain not only diamonds, but also spiders that begin growing to monstrous proportions.

Filmed in several small Wisconsin towns, The Giant Spider Invasion gets off to a slow start thanks to dull opening scenes that introduce the characters and the disinterested actors playing them. As is often the case with low-budget quickies like this, everyone in town is sexually frustrated, intoxicated, depressed, or some combination thereof: the perpetually soused Ev (Leslie Parrish) says she’d like to “jump” her younger sister Terry’s (Dianne Lee Hart) boyfriend Dave (Kevin Brodie), while Ev’s loopy farmer husband Dan (Robert Easton, who also churned out the script after original writer Richard Huff couldn’t complete it) is off somewhere shagging a local waitress (Christiane Schmidtmer).

When NASA scientist Vance (Steve Brodie) arrives to investigate the meteor crash, he’s flummoxed that the local astronomer, Dr. Langer (Barbara Hale), turns out to be a woman, although he recovers quickly and respectfully enough. Meanwhile, not even a giant spider rampaging through a carnival is enough to get Sheriff Jones (Hale) out of his office — the one-time Skipper of the S.S. Minnow must have had a clause in his contract allowing him to stay seated for as much of the shoot as possible.

The film finally kicks into gear in the last 25 of its sparse 79 minutes, as the title monster rears its ugly head and eats Robert Easton in a scene that’s unintentionally hilarious yet morbidly unsettling (watching Easton trying to climb into the full-sized spider’s mouth while pretending to be gorily devoured is the kind of pleasure that only movies like this can provide). The spider itself was a 50-foot, five-ton beast created by special effects man Bob Millay out of aluminum tubes, wire mesh, and a Volkswagen chassis, all found in local junkyards. The eight legs were hollow and operated by a person tucked inside the main body, and while the thing looks ridiculous, there’s still something charming about seeing a full-sized, practical monster onscreen.

Between crashing cars, fleeing mobs of townspeople, and exploding spiders, Bill Rebane got some real production value out of his little homage to 1950s monster movies. It paid off; when all was said and done, The Giant Spider Invasion reportedly earned somewhere between $15 and $22 million on the drive-in and exploitation circuits. Stints on The CBS Late Movie and MST3K elevated it to cult status, where it’s remained entrenched in the five decades since its release.

As for Bill Rebane, the 88-year-old is still with us after directing a dozen or so low-budget horror and sci-fi features between 1965 and 1988. His accomplishments actually go further than that: in his early twenties, he developed a 360-degree wraparound film process that made him a millionaire. He went on to launch the Wisconsin Film Office and open the Shooting Ranch, the Midwest’s first full-time feature film studio (and the only one for 30 years), yielding scores of commercials, industrial films, corporate productions, and features. And yes, he did run for governor of Wisconsin in 2002 on the Reform Party line, and toiled for years to bring more Hollywood filmmakers to the Badger State.

Still, Rebane’s biggest claim to fame remains The Giant Spider Invasion, the only monster movie in which the title creature was played by a Volkswagen Beetle. Long may it crawl.