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.

Directed by John Landis and written by the ZAZ team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (who would go on to Airplane! and The Naked Gun), this movie is a complete mess, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve probably watched this film more than any other, thanks to a taped-off HBO copy I had throughout my teenage years.

Containing a number of exploitation films produced by Samuel L. Bronkowitz (a combination of everyone from Samuel Bronston and Joseph L. Mankiewicz to legendary American International Pictures producer Samuel Z. Arkoff), this movie just never stops or lets up. If a scene isn’t funny for a little bit, stick around. Something really comedic — or strange — is right around the corner.

How can you not adore a film that begins with a news anchorman warning you, “The popcorn you’ve just been eating has been pissed in?”

Starting with a commercial for Argon Oil, the first real segment of the film is an extended watch of A.M. Today, as a gorilla (special effects master Rick Baker) goes wild on set. That’s followed by a trailer for Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, which is pretty much every softcore sexploitation movie the late 1960’s and early 1970s foisted on drive-in and grindhouse screens. The sound effects alone make this segment worthwhile.

A segment titled ” See You Next Wednesday” features a theater that offers Feel-A-Round technology. It’s really just an excuse for Landis to get this catchphrase into one of his films, which he repeats throughout his career. It’s the last line that Frank Poole’s father says to him in a letter from home in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And Landis has used it in movies from Schlock and The Blues Brothers to the video for Thriller, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Trading Places and Spies Like Us (among many of his other films). It also shows up in Amazon Women on the Moon, which is pretty much a spiritual sequel to this. It’s called The Cheeseburger Movie, while the original is called The Hamburger Movie in France, plus they both end with the song “Carioca.”

There are so many moments here that it’s hard for me to list them all. I’ll try. Big Jim Slade, making the album The Wonderful World of Sex much better for the ladies. Building “a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude” in the film’s longest movie-within-a-movie, the Bruce Lee ripoff A Fistful of Yen. That’s Armageddon, an Irwin Allen-style movie that stars George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland as “the clumsy waiter,” a part that never fails to make me laugh. A Leave It to Beaver in court sketch that predates the way modern comedy would reinvent old shows, even bringing original Wally, Tony Dow, along for the ride. The blacksploitation (and jewsploitation) film Cleopatra Schwartz. Danger Seekers, which could never — and probably should never — be made today. And literally so much more.

The humor was going to extend to the film’s title, which was going to be either Free Popcorn or Closed for Remodeling, either of which would have led to total chaos.

I’ve been pretty fascinated by the filmography of John Hayes lately. The man who gave us the atmospheric dread of Garden of the Dead and Grave of the Vampire takes a hard turn here, trading in gothic horror for the neon-and-pavement grit of the exploitation circuit, though he also directed adult films.

The story centers on Vicki March (played with a mix of wide-eyed innocence and questionable judgment by Therese Pare). At just seventeen, Vicki is navigating the hormonal minefield of teenage life. Her boyfriend, Robert (Roscoe Born), is practically turning blue in the nether regions because she won’t go all the way.

Vicki isn’t exactly a prude, though. In a sequence that feels less like a teen romp and more like a low-rent Joe D’Amato Caligula rip-off, she throws a party while babysitting that quickly spirals into hedonistic chaos. This leads to a harrowing moment where a partygoer attempts to assault her, only for Vicki to be rescued by the sophisticated Lorraine (Lydia Wagner), who claims to be an executive liaison, a title that sounds prestigious until you realize it’s just 1970s shorthand for high-end sex work.

Eventually, Vicki tries to get into the trade but doesn’t charge her first client, who has a heart attack just trying to sail the seas of mayonnaise. 

This has a van called The Desert Fox, a story that comes around to having Vicki’s man knocking out her would-be rapist and a title that promises filth and does not deliver. Yet I enjoyed it. It could be the strange line readings, the dialogue like “No way was I training you to be a hooker, but I can teach you how to watch out for dog shit!” and an appearance by Mariwin Roberts, Penthouse Pet Of The Month April 1978. And is that Michael Pataki? It sure is. And Billie Mae Richards, the voice of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

You can watch this on Fawesome.

“It’s illegal…it’s immoral…and it’s so damned good!”

In the 1970s—hell, well into the late 80s—my grandfather drove an El Camino. He kept that beast in working condition long after most had been reclaimed by the earth, even if it eventually became more Bondo and black primer than actual Chevrolet steel. He loved that car with a religious fervor, so he’d be thrilled to see Eddie Joe Rodgers (Gil Gerard, TV’s Buck Rogers) tear-assing through the North Carolina backwoods, delivering moonshine in that same iconic silhouette.

In the grease-stained world of old-time bootleggers, Eddie Joe is a dangerous anomaly: a “go-getter.” He’s too fast, too bold, and he’s cutting into the established margins. He’s such a disruption to the local ecosystem that the reigning kingpin, Old Bill (William T. Hicks, the ubiquitous face of the Earl Owensby cinematic universe, which is very much a real thing), decides to break the sacred code of the hills. Instead of a local hit, Bill invites the “big city” mob—led by a young, menacing Danny Aiello—into town to liquidate the competition.

Sure, the sheriff (Mike Allen) would like to do something about it, but seeing how Eddie Joe is sleeping with both Old Bill’s daughter, Jamie Sue (Melody Rogers, who would go on to be Zack Morris’ mom) and his daughter, Ginnie (Erika Fox), does he even want to?

Director Edward Mann had an interesting career. He started as a cartoonist, syndicated for decades, and was a force in the cultural growth of Woodstock. He’d go on to direct and write several movies, including Island of Terror, Cauldron of Blood, The Mutations, Hallucination Generation and Seizure. 

The talent behind the camera is just as eclectic as the cast. Director Edward Mann had a career trajectory that defies logic. He was a syndicated cartoonist for decades and a pivotal figure in the cultural explosion of Woodstock. His filmography reads like a fever dream of cult cinema: Island of Terror, The Mutations, and Hallucination Generation.

Then there’s Gil Gerard, who didn’t just star in this. He co-wrote it. Gerard’s real life was a masterclass in “faking it ’til you make it.” After dropping out of college, he somehow bluffed his way into becoming an industrial chemist and a regional VP. When the firm asked for his Master’s degree, he didn’t confess; he just moved to NYC to drive a taxi and act. This film — which he also co-produced — served as his auteur-style calling card for Hollywood, leading him straight to the 25th Century as Buck Rogers. 

When I was a kid, he and Connie Sellecca were a power couple before she left Gil for John Tesh. 15-year-old me never got over that and also doesn’t understand that she didn’t marry Tesh until five years later, which still doesn’t explain me being irrationally mad at the composer of “Roundball Rock.”

The deputy in this is Worth Keeter, who would go on to make plenty of movies of his own, like Unmasking the Idol, Living Legend: The King of Rock and Roll, Snapdragon, and so many episodes of Power Rangers. Of course, this was made in Shelby, NC, at Earl Owensby Studios.

IMDbs often lazily claims that The Dukes of Hazzard remade this. That’s a total fabrication. While they share the same DNA of fast cars and corrupt lawmen, they are simply two different branches of the hicksploitation tree (they’re likely thinking of Moonrunners).

This is an entirely grittier, weirder beast. It’s at once Gerard making a movie where he writes, acts, sings and romances, while also being a hicksploitation film with authentic regional accents and a story perfect for the drive-ins that it would play at. I mean, how can you not appreciate a movie where a character asks her stuffed bear for romantic advice, only for the scene to veer into some of the most uncomfortable teddy bear intimacy ever committed to celluloid?

You can watch this on The Cave of Forgotten Films.

Wes Craven’s second full-length film — if we don’t include the porn film The Fireworks Woman that he directed as Abe Snake — is a trip through the Nevada desert that he wrote, produced and directed. You can see it as straight-forward narrative or you can choose to see it as a parable on how man will always be inhuman to other men.

The Carter family really gets it in this one. After being targeted by a family of cannibal savages in the Nevada desert, the family’s leader Big Bob is crucified to a tree, the daughter Brenda is raped, numerous members are shot and stabbed and also killed, one of the family dogs is killed and even the baby is threatened with being a meal.

But they retaliate with just as much inhumanity as they battle back against the desert clan of Papa Jupiter, Pluto (Michael Berryman!) and Jupiter. Even the second family dog joins in and takes out his rage on the mutant clan.

The idea of an irradiated gang in the desert is intriguing and was inspired by the Sawney Bean clan in 1600’s Scotland, which claimed the lives of nearly 1,000 people.

Additionally, Craven was inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and ended up making a film that — in my opinion — lives in its shadow. Interestingly enough, the films share product design from Robert Burns, as well as some of the exact same animal parts that decorate the homes of each film’s cannibal lairs.

There’s a sequel, a remake and a sequel to that as well. In the late 1980’s, Craven even debated a third movie that was to be set in space, while his 1995 film produced for HBO, Mind Ripper, was originally intended as the third film in the series.

Directed by Igor Auzins and written by Forrest Redlich, who created the Australian soap opera E Street, High Rolling has Tex (Joseph Bottoms) and Alby (Grigor Taylor) leaving behind their carnival jobs to head to the Gold Coast. They soon meet a hitchhiker named  Lynn (Judy Davis) and, along with two dancers, Barbie (Wendy Hughes) and Susie (Sandy McGregor), hijack a bus.

Tex is the impulsive American dreamer, while Alby provides the grounded, albeit reluctant, Australian counterpart. Their chemistry is the engine of the film, fueled by a 1970s obsession with the open road as a symbol of ultimate freedom.

What I didn’t like is that they get the Corvette they drive in by knocking out a gay man, Arnold (John Clayton) and then stealing the sports car. This scene is a jarring reminder of the year this came out. Using a marginalized character, even if they are the drug-dealing bad guy, as a punching bag to facilitate the protagonists’ journey complicates the likable rogue personas the movie tries to build for Tex and Alby.

At least the girls get to do their version of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” And you get to see Chantal Contouri from The Day After Halloween and Thirst on the bus.

Also: Before she became an international multi-award-winning actress, Judy Davis made her film debut in this movie as Lynn.