It was director Bert I. Gordon's 100 birthday a couple of days ago. Let's celebrate!
EARTH VS. THE SPIDER-1958-A small town has a spider problem. Two teenagers Mike (Gene Persson) & Carol (June Kenny) searching for the girl's father (Merritt Stone) stumble into a cave where a giant spider is nesting. They escape and warn the sheriff (Gene Roth) who scoffs. A school professor Art Kingman (Ed Kemmer) convinces the sheriff the threat might be real. A whole group goes out to the cave. They find Carol's dad's corpse and the giant spider. They think they kill it with DDT and Kingman convinces the sheriff to bring it back to the school to be studied. It's locked away in the gym but Hugo the janitor (Hank Patterson) allows bass playing Sam's (Skip Young) rocking combo to rehearse there and their swinging rock & roll brings the creature back to life! It wrecks the town endangering everyone including Kingman's wife (Sally Fraser) and their kid. Stupidly Mike and Carol go back to the cave to look for her lost bracelet. Unfortunately the spider heads back there. They get lost and the town plans to dynamite the cave.
Mike's dad Mr. Simpson (Hal Torey) owns a movie theater that's showing THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN & ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE both directed by SPIDER's director Mr. BIG himself Bert I. Gordon. There's also a scene of a teenager reading “Famous Monsters Of Filmland” number 1!
The strange part of this story (forgetting that there's a normal sized spider blown up to look gigantic on the screen) is that Kemmer's character of Kingman is really responsible for all the the destruction and death. Co-screenwriter Lazlo Gorog also penned THE MOLE PEOPLE. George Worthington Yates, the other screenwriter scripted several other Mr. BIG movies and THEM!
Thnaks for reading and thanks to Mr. BIG. Hope you had a nice day!
