Tarantula (1955) - film review

When the body of a man is found on the outskirts of a desert town, the county sheriff calls in Dr Matt Hastings to ascertain the cause of death.  From the man’s misshapen appearance, Hastings deduces that he died from acromegaly, a rare glandular disorder that causes extreme swelling of the body.  The odd thing is that it normally takes years for the symptoms to become this advanced, and yet the sheriff is certain that the man was in perfect health only a few days ago.  It transpires that the man was a laboratory assistant to Professor Deemer, an eminent research biologist who is working on a radioactive nutrient that will help to alleviate a global food shortage.  Despite some promising results, Deemer’s food serum has the undesirable side-effect of promoting unnatural growth, so that a mouse will grow to the size of an adult rabbit in a matter of days.  In spite of this setback, Deemer’s assistant Jacobs injected himself with the serum, the result being the acromegaly that killed him.  Another of Deemer’s assistants is about to go the same way and attacks the professor, giving him a dose of the serum before wrecking the laboratory.  When he regains consciousness, the professor believes that all of his over-grown specimens have been destroyed.  In fact, one has escaped into the desert – a tarantula the size of a cow.  A short time later, Deemer’s new assistant, Stephanie Clayton turns up in town, eager to begin work on a project that could potentially save the human race from starvation, although she is soon distracted by the dishy Dr Hastings.  Miss Clayton’s arrival coincides with reports of bizarre events in the area.  Vehicles and property have been wrecked, people have mysteriously disappeared, and human and animal skeletons have been found strewn over the desert floor.  Near one of the skeletons, Hastings notices a pool of a strange sticky substance which is soon identified as spider venom.  His worst fears are rapidly confirmed.  The tarantula that escaped from Deemer’s laboratory has grown to the size of a house and is roaming the desert in search of food.  The gigantic spider appears to be invincible, undeterred by rifle fire or explosives.  And it is hungry – very, very hungry...

Tarantula was one of the more successful follow-ups to Gordon Douglas’s groundbreaking sci-fi thriller Them! (1954), the film that engendered something of a craze for movies in which mankind is menaced by overgrown beasties of the kind that you normally squash underfoot in your back garden.  After giant ants tried and failed to destroy humanity in Them, spiders had their turn in Tarantula, giving the arachnophobes a good excuse to stay at home and wash their hair.  The film was directed by Jack Arnold who had already made a few tentative forays into the sci-fi genre with It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); he would later give us the all-time classic The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).

Whilst it may lack the gritty realism and unremitting tension of Them!, Tarantula is superior in at least one respect: you can look at the central monster without cringing and wishing you did not have that particular gene that made you so attracted to old science-fiction films.  In the mid-1950s, audiences were remarkably forgiving over Them!’s frankly rubbish giant ants which, today, instil far more hilarity than horror.  The hairy-legged star of Tarantula (that is the spider, not the infeasibly handsome John Agar) which filled the entire cinema screen as it wreaked havoc in an oddly male-only desert community must have came as a boon for dry cleaning companies at the time.

It helps that a real tarantula was used for most of the sequences featuring the spider (blown up to mammoth proportions through adept use of the matte process).  Only when Mr Eight Legs has to interact with its victims (i.e. pick them up and eat them) does the film resort to props that pose a slight challenge to our willing suspension of disbelief.   Over all, the effects are pretty impressive, and even with the benefit of colour photography and CGI effects, it is doubtful whether the end result could be greatly improved upon.

The only real weakness with Tarantula is one that afflicts most sci-fi films of this (and indeed any) era – a story that is riddled with plot flaws and populated by implausible, undeveloped characters.  Plot flaw number one is the real killer.  Just why do Professor Deemer’s staff inject themselves with the food serum when it has clearly been established that it causes animals to grow to abnormal sizes?  What were they expecting – to oust Robert Wadlow from the Guinness Book of Records?   And why is it always unnamed radioactive isotopes that always cause people and animals to grow or shrink or go berserk?

There is a lot to be said for a high school education but one of its unforeseen downsides is that it can really spoil your enjoyment of a 1950s sci-fi movie.  For those who are happily untainted by the black art that is high school chemistry, the word isotope is one that teems with mystery and inspires irrational terror; for those who lack such ignorance it is only moderately less banal than the word custard.  (Indeed, for anyone who was subjected to school dinners of the kind that prevailed until the mid-1970s, the word custard is one that is infinitely more likely to chill the marrow.  The worst that an isotope can do to you is to make you a father to a race of blind three-armed mutants.  Being confronted with a dish of school custard, by contrast, was like entering into a pact with the Devil.)  And what are we to make of the ending?  If in doubt, blast it with napalm!  We see this rather a lot in science-fiction of this decade: scientists mess things up, fail to solve the problem, and the American military have to come to rescue, with bombs.  Nothing like a story with a nice cogent moral, is there?  I’m still waiting for the sequel with the giant guinea pig.

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