Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Animal attacks

1975 was the kind of time that we worried about insect attacks and meteors. This movie gives us both. It also gives us Alan Hale Jr. as the law in this town, Sheriff Jones. It also has Leslie Parrish in it, who was Miss Color TV early in her career and used as a human test pattern for early television to see how it displayed skin tones. She plays Ev, whose husband (Robert Easton) is sleeping with a waitress named Helga (Christiane Schmidtmer) instead of going to revival meetings. Yes, that is the same actress who plays the sexually charged piano teacher in Hot Bubblegum, one of the many Menahem Golan movies that have this particular fetish.

There’s a reporter, Davey (Kevin Brodie, who is in this with his dad Steve, we’ll get to him) and his girl Terry (Dianne Lee Hart) who spend most of the film running from giant spiders. And oh yes, brave scientists  Dr. Vance (there’s Steve Brodie) and Dr. Jenny Langer (Della Street! That’s Barbara Hale! Her husband Bill Williams is in this and man, I just found out that her son is William Katt) who figure out that the meteors have caused small black holes that bring spiders out of them because, sure, of course, and they get a neutron weapon because those are just everywhere and also the Skipper as sheriff has the power to call down B-52 bombing runs.

Richard L. Huff and Robert Easton wrote this but had one page complete just before filming. Director Bill Rebane locked Easton in a cabin, telling him he had to write ten pages a day or he would not be fed. He did not go to jail. The movie got made.

There are so many stories about this movie, like how one of the spiders was covered with gunpowder and wouldn’t blow up while the cameras were on, but as soon as they stopped filming, it blew up so good it sent crew members to the hospital. Or that one of the spiders was stolen by thieves and sold as scrap metal after it was restored in 2013.

As for the spiders, they are legs and a body on VW bugs. This is how movies get made.

This played enough on the CBS Late Movie that I was positive that I would be either killed by a killer bee or a giant spider by the bicentennial.

You can watch this on Tubi.