Also known as Kitty Can’t Do It, this was directed by Peter Locke, who also produced The Hills Have Eyes and directed It Happened in Hollywood. It was written by Paul Ross (who also wrote Journey Into the Beyond and Beyond Evil) and Michael Blank, and edited by Rick Jackson and Wes Craven, with second-unit direction by John “Bud” Cardos. It tries to be a nurse’s cycle movie, but reminds you how good the people who made the great ones are, like Stephanie Rothman.

Kitty, as you can expect from the alternate title, is the heroine, and she’s played by Kitty Carl. Speaking of better female-cast movies, she was also in The Centerfold Girls. All of Kitty’s friends are getting laid while she’s still a virgin,  perhaps because of her overbearing mother (Fay DeWitt). Those friends try to get their men to sleep with Kitty, but it never works out.

One of those men, MacGregor (Jack DeLeon), is seething into lusty rapist territory by the end, which gives us our chase scene. Otherwise, this is worth watching for the female cast, which includes I’m With the Band author Pamela Des Barres as Vickii, Lisa Ferringer from Coffy as Cindy, Marcie Barkin from Fade to Black, Janus Blythe from Eaten Alive and The Hills Have Eyes as a waitress and Uschi Digard as “Lady in Hotel Room.” She’s barely in it, but she’s what you will remember.

Do you know how much I love you, dear reader? I actually bought this to watch, and luckily Wide World Movie also threw in a triple pack of Invasion of the Bee Girls, 2069 A Sexy Odyssey, and Dr. Dildo’s Secret, all of which I would recommend over this. It’s not even Starhops, which is saying something.

If you’re looking for the ultimate example of Shatner vs. Nature, look no further. This isn’t just a movie; it’s a masterclass in how to take a humble Arizona town and turn it into a literal web of madness, all while the Shat wears the hell out of a Canadian tuxedo.

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 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, which posed a unique challenge for 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 pesticides, 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 display advanced intelligence, carrying out a revenge attack 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 mayor’s convention in Las Vegas and saw his seminar on never canceling the county fair, no matter what common sense tells you. More pesticides are planned, but the spiders deal with that by crashing a crop duster.

One of the most effective parts of the film is the ending, a bleak, The Birds-esque finale that subverts the typical happy ending of the era. The use of country music on the radio as a backdrop to the town’s total isolation is a stroke of low-budget genius. It suggests that while we’re all going about our business, listening to the latest hits, an entire civilization could be getting cocooned just down the road. It’s also basically a painting.

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 movie’s title.

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 fights an octopus Bela Lugosi-style, if you will, and the emotion of fear is present, but no one is ever in danger. Sure, this was made by dumping buckets of spiders on people, but that warms my heart.

If you’ve ever found yourself watching a teen sex comedy from the ’80s and thinking, “This is great, but it really needs more gastrointestinal distress and a much lower production budget,” then boy, do I have a gift for you. King Frat isn’t just a movie; it’s a biological hazard caught on 35mm. It’s the kind of regional filmmaking that feels like it was developed in a bathtub filled with stale beer and regret.

Before he became the founding editor of The Huffington Post, Roy Sekoff starred in this movie, filmed in Miami and Coral Gables, as a takeoff on Animal House. The Bluto Blutarsky of this film is J.J. “Gross-Out” Gumbroski, played by John DiSanti, who, believe it or not, would go on to be in other movies (*batteries not included is one of them).

Set at Yellowstream University, this movie follows the Pi Kappa Delta fraternity, who are only concerned with drinking. A good chunk of the film involves them mooning people, which leads to the death of the dean of the school. Then, a farting contest is announced, and everyone battles to have the best farts in a scene that goes on longer than you’d expect, then goes about another seven minutes past that.

And then there’s the music. Most films have a soundtrack. This is a hostage situation. The same bouncy, synthesized earworm plays throughout the entire runtime, looping with a psychotic persistence that would make a CIA interrogator blush. By the thirty-minute mark, you’ll be humming it. By the end of the film, you’ll hear it when people talk to you, and then you’ll start wondering if the soundtrack has come to life to further torment you.

Amazingly, King Frat comes from Ken Wiederhorn, the same man who directed Shock Waves, Return of the Living Dead Part II and Meatballs II. How do you go from the eerie, waterlogged Nazi zombies to a movie where the primary plot point is a synchronized flatulence symphony? Wiederhorn is a man of many seasons, and apparently, one of those seasons was spent in the absolute gutter. This feels like the moment he decided to see exactly how much the human spirit could endure. It’s filmed in Miami and Coral Gables, but it feels like it was shot in the locker room of a condemned bowling alley.

King Frat is literally the bottom of the absolute barrel of filmmaking, and I love it. If Animal House was too classy for you, if you wondered if they could make a movie where a frat could murder a dean by farting in his face and stealing the body and then have a scene where numerous men and women fart and nearly shit themselves, good news. This is the movie for you.

The 1970s were a gold mine for hagsploitation and Southern Gothic grittiness, but The Killing Kind occupies a strange, lonely corner of that subgenre. It’s not just a thriller; it’s a suffocating character study directed by Curtis Harrington, a master of the macabre and the misunderstood (see: Night Tide and What’s the Matter with Helen?).

Harrington was a pioneer of New American Cinema who transitioned into the studio system without losing his avant-garde sensibilities. In this film, he creates a palette that feels as damp and stagnant as a basement. He doesn’t rely on jump scares; he relies on the inherent wrongness of the domestic space. The boarding house is less a sanctuary and more a terrarium where resentment festered until it became lethal.

Terry (John Savage, The Deer Hunter) was forced to participate in a gang assault and served two years in prison, losing his sanity. His mother, Thelma (Ann Sothern, so many roles, but also the titular voice of My Mother the Car), runs a boarding house for old women who all gossip about the strange nature of their relationship; if you didn’t know the truth, you would think they were a married couple, not a son and his mother.

Thelma wishes that the victim of the assault, Tina (Sue Bernard, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), were dead. So Terry runs her off the road. He hears how his attorney Rhea Benson (Ruth Roman, whose slate of movies in the early 70s was absolutely wild between this, The Baby and Impulse) didn’t protect him enough, so he kills her too. He even kills new tenant Lori (Cindy Williams, who was commuting between the set of this film and The Conversation), and they move the body out in full view of their suspicious neighbor, Lori (Luana Anders, Night Tide).

Speaking of that librarian next door, the same character appears in 1980s The Attic, which was also written by Tony Crechales and George Edwards.

The true monster of the film isn’t necessarily Terry’s fractured psyche, but the umbilical cord that was never cut. The film dances on the edge of the Oedipal complex, making the audience deeply uncomfortable with every shared meal and whispered confidence between mother and son. It suggests that while society broke Terry, his mother is the one who shaped the shards into a weapon.

Also, to those who worry about cat murder, yes — a cat does die in this. It was a real cat in that scene, but it was sedated by a vet. The one in the dumpster is an actual euthanized cat, but it was not killed for this production.

Sadly, this movie had poor distribution and was lost for a few years. How exciting is it that we live in a world where films get found and we can find them ourselves so easily?

You can watch this on Tubi.

After a home invasion leaves Joseph Lawrence (Jeff Risk) paralyzed from the waist down and his wife sexually assaulted and dead, he reaches out to Larry (Jean Glaudé) to bring together their old army team, the Kill Squad: Tommy (Gary Fung), Arthur (Marc Sabin), K.C. (Jerry Johnson), Pete (Francisco Ramírez) and Alan (Bill Cambra). Once, they were prisoners of war, and Joseph earned their undying devotion by distracting the Vietcong by, well, standing on a landmine.

The man behind the attack is Dutch (Cameron Mitchell), but as the team tracks him down, a sniper keeps killing them as if this were a slasher movie and not a revengeomatic. Finally, Larry tracks down Dutch, who dies by accident, which is the very definition of anticlimactic.

It would be, except that — no spoilers needed for something you’ll figure out from the beginning of the film — Joseph explains that he resents the squad for the loss of his leg in Vietnam and faked his paralysis. In fact, he’s the one who paid for men to rape and kill his wife, all so he could get he rmoney and then kill the squad who left him behind.

Then Larry kicks Jeff right into an axe.

You really need to see the intros for each squad member. Tommy is working as a gardener and when that guy refuses to pay him and calls him a slur, he destroys the man in front of a pool party. K.C. is now a pimp with two girls, Salt and Pepper and no, not the rap trio. Pete is a mechanic. Alan is a bad businessman who is just about to lose everything as he does research on bugs, but mainly has sex with all the women in the office. Then, they do fancy weapon katas to show Joseph that they still got it.

Director and writer Patrick G. Donahue also made They Call Me Macho Woman!, Parole Violators, Ground Rules (a modern movie that nevertheless has a post-apocalyptic motorcycle game; this stars Frank Stallone and Richard Lynch and why haven’t I watched this?) and as G. Padon made the adult film Passion Prcession and the poster for that film is in this movie.

The best part? Or worse? The three Vietncong characters are in the credits as Vietnam Dude,” “Another Vietname Dude” and “Yet Another Vietnam Dude.” 

Also known as Patrick G. Donahue’s Kill Squad, because of course it should be.

You can watch this on YouTube.