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 fact that tarantulas are frightening to us, their 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. That said, I have never seen actual itching powder and think its something that only shows up in comedy movie scenes of mischief.

This has 5,000 tarantulas in its cast, which took up 10% of the film’s budget. I’m sure star William Shatner was paid more than his eight-legged co-stars. They had potentially more demands than him, too. All 5,000 spiders had to be kept in separate containers because they’re cannibals.

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

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: it was spider venom that killed the cow.

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

Well, 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 pesticide, which is how things got this bad in the first place. Ashley says that 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 pretty much 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, who 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 the playbook of Menahem, this ad was just a photo of Shatner and the title of the movie.

Producer 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 and that’s because you can tell that the spiders want nothing to do with anybody, much less feel the need to attack them. It’s an entire cast of Bela Lugosi fighting an octopus, as the emotion of fear is there, but no one is ever in danger.