EDITOR’S NOTE: Kingdom of the Spiders was on the CBS Late Movie on April 28, 1982 and January 12, 1983.

Directed by John “Bud” Cardos and written by Richard Robinson and Alan Caillou, whose real name was Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe MBE, M.C. and who was an author, actor, screenwriter, soldier, policeman and professional hunter.

Despite the initial fright they may cause, it’s worth noting that tarantulas’ venom is about as dangerous as a bee sting. They mostly cause itching from the shedding of their bristles, which are used to make itching powder. This fact, coupled with the humorous association of itching powder with comedy movie scenes of mischief, adds a delightful touch of humor to the film.

This film features 5,000 tarantulas in its cast, a staggering number that took up 10% of the film’s budget. It’s safe to assume that star William Shatner was compensated more than his eight-legged co-stars. Interestingly, these spiders, being cannibals, had their own set of demands. All 5,000 of them had to be kept in separate containers, adding a unique challenge to the production process.

They’re also very shy, so to make it appear that the spiders were attacking people, fans and air tubes were used.

Let’s take a trip to Camp Verde, Arizona.

That’s where Dr. Robert “Rack” Hansen (Shatner) practices. He’s heading out for a house call to see Walter Colby (Woody Strode), whose prize calf dies for reasons that puzzle Hansen. Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) comes down from the big city of Flagstaff to blow his mind: spider venom killed the cow.

It gets worse. Walter’s wife, Birch (Altovise Davis, Sammy Davis Jr.’s third wife), soon discovers that their dog is dead and that a giant spider nest is in the backyard. Thanks to all the pesticides, the spiders have lost their natural food source, and instead of turning on one another, they’ve decided to eat larger meals.

Their big scientific plan is to burn the spider hill, which doesn’t go well because the arachnids escape into tunnels and show an advanced intelligence that conducts a revenge hit on Walter, his wife and Hansen’s sister-in-law Terry (Marcy Lafferty).

The mayor (Roy Engel) gets Sheriff Gene Smith (David McLean) to spray the town with pesticides, which is how things got this bad in the first place. Ashley says rats would have been a better idea, but obviously, the mayor met Larry Vaughn at a convention of mayors in Las Vegas and saw his seminar on never canceling the county fair, no matter what common sense tells you. More pesticide is planned, but the spiders deal with that by crashing a crop duster.

The survivors plan on escaping in an RV, but by the time they try, the entire town has been webbed up as the outside world forgets them and plays country music on the radio.

In 1998, Shatner told Fangoria that he was working with Cannon Films in the late 1980s to produce a sequel, but he probably meant Menahem’s 21st Century, which did run trade ads for Kingdom of the Spiders 2. Shatner would direct, write and star in the film, in which a man would be tortured with spiders. As you can imagine from Menahem’s playbook, this ad was just a photo of Shatner and the title of the movie.

Producers Igo Kantor and Howard James Reekie, using the name Port Hollywood, planned a sequel in the 2000s that promised Native American myth and spiders driven mad by secret government experiments involving extremely low-frequency tones.

I love this movie because you can tell that the spiders want nothing to do with anybody, much less feel the need to attack them. The entire cast of Bela Lugosi fights an octopus, and the emotion of fear is present, but no one is ever in danger.