Kiss of the Tarantula (

1976

) ½

I tell you, there's nothing more exciting for me than discovering a new (well, at least new to me) sub-genre of horror films. Today's film is a representative of the lost “Weirdo with gross animal friends” or “A Boy/Girl and his/her Snake/Bat/Spider/Rat” school of horror movies. The genre started with Williard (1971) and continued on to such films as Stanley (1972), and Jennifer (1978). Apparently, Kiss of the Tarantula bucks the unwritten genre rule that the film has the same name as the main weirdo, which is just as well; I suspect that were this film titled “Susan” I might never have watched it since a title like that could just as easily refer to a horror movie, a romantic comedy, or a depressing melodrama about sharecroppers in the dust-bowl. The weirdo with animal friends movies was confined entirely to the 1970s, save for a remake of Willard (2003) thirty years later. The films themselves constitute a rather minor sub-genre, four films all but one completely obscure today, but they reflect a fascination in the broader American culture. Cultural revolutionaries of the mid-century had decided that, after racism and sexism, conformity was the next greatest sin of postwar America. Fitting in was no longer fashionable, and trendsetters competed with one another for how outrageous and freaky they could be. Eventually, the pendulum would swing back the other way and the freaks would be chased out of the limelight when the mainstream slowly realized that perhaps a little bit of conformity is in fact a good thing after all. However, for a brief window in the 1970s audiences were willing to accept as a protagonist (calling them heroes would be pushing it), an emotionally disturbed oddball that collected spiders, rats or snakes. The genre itself is minor, but the cultural phenomenon it reflects is much larger, the fascination with cultural outsiders and freaks was what gave better-known films like The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), Taxi Driver (1976) and Carrie (1976).

Speaking of Carrie (1976), it seems like director Chris Munger was on the same wavelength as Brian de Palma, even if there is a yawning gulf between the two in terms of talent and funding. Both directors cast a lead actress that is just odd looking enough to reasonably pass as an outcast, yet is still beautiful despite that (no small feat). Sure, Suzanna Ling, who plays Susan in today's movie, is nowhere near as extreme an example of this phenomenon as Sissy Spacek, but they are certainly in the same class. Susan's upbringing while different from Carrie's, is certainly on par when it comes to dysfunction as well. Her dad is a mortician who runs his business out of the family housing, giving the whole place the stink of chemicals and death. Perversely, he's probably the nicest of the bunch and seems to be an affectionate doting father, despite his absentmindedness. The real problem comes in the form of her mom, and her uncle Walter. Mom is a real bitch, who constantly harasses the young Susan about her harmless, albeit odd, fascination with spiders. She's also cheating on Susan's father with uncle Walter, the local chief of police. If that weren't bad enough, Susan's mom is constantly pestering Walter to kill his brother so they can be together. This raises the question: why do they want to kill him? Why don't they just get a divorce? It's not like they're royalty in medieval Britain, they don't need to get a sanction from the pope! I suppose there could be financial motivations, but it's not like Susan's Dad is rolling in it, for Christ's sake he's a mortician, not an oil baron.

Anyway, one day when she's about 10, Susan overhears the lover's plot and decides that she needs to protect her dad. So, she takes her prized pet tarantula and drops it into mom's bed while she's sleeping. Now, in real life tarantulas are only a danger if you happen to be a bug or very small lizard. They have venom, but not enough to even incapacitate a child, let alone kill a full-grown human outright. Some films get around this problem by just claiming the tarantulas are poisonous, but Kiss of the Tarantula is not one to fall back on cliches. Instead, everyone in this movie besides Susan has an extreme phobia of spiders. As soon as Susan's mom realizes there's one of the buggers climbing on her she promptly dies of fright. Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that Susan's life would get better after her mom died since now she's left alone with her mostly harmless, incredibly relaxed father. But that's not taking uncle Walter into account. You see, having lost his lover Walter transfers his affection onto his niece, constantly pawing her, kissing her and telling her how beautiful she is. It's made slightly less icky by the fact that teenage Susan is played by an actress who is pushing 30, but the sentiment is no less disgusting.

Being the weird girl who constantly talks about spiders hasn't done Susan any favors in the popularity department (though she does get asked out a date by Joe Penny, an event which has no significance on the plot whatsoever and makes me wonder why it was included at all). Indeed, it seems like the full extent of her social life is being visited by three drunken hooligans from her school: Bo, Eric and Bob one night while her father is out at a campaign meeting. The liquored-up trio demands one of the coffins in the mortuary to use as a prop for their Halloween party (how they plan to fit a coffin in the Volkswagen Bug they drove over in is anyone's guess). In the process, they kill one of Susan's pet tarantulas, which pisses her off to no end. So she takes the perfectly reasonable step of letting a bunch of spiders loose in Eric and Bob's car when they're watching a drive-in movie with their girlfriends.

This scene needs to be seen to be believed. For starters, the young lovers are so busy pawing each other that they don't notice the half dozen or so fist-sized spiders crawling all over their bodies. If the spiders just stuck to their clothing, I might be able to buy it but at one point a tarantula crawls onto a girl's cheek. Seriously, I don't care how focused you are on your date, there's no way you're going to miss that. Then when the kids finally do notice the spiders, they react with a fit of hysteria so over the top that it ends with three of the four dead and one suffering from such severe PTSD that she can barely speak. It had me asking: How did these guys survive this long? All it would take is a daddy long legs at an inopportune time to wipe out the lot of them. Now, if the film took the normal route and told me to just assume that tarantulas have enough poison to kill a human adult-like in Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977), or that they are vicious flesh-eaters like in The Beyond (1981), I am game to play along. Telling me that a bunch of adults are going to be scared to death by any normal spider is just asking too much of my willing suspension of belief.

Evidently, Susan didn't expect the spiders to be so successful either, nor did she know that the two boys would have dates with them (Just why did she think Eric and Bob were going to the drive-in if not to make out with some girls? Well to be fair, I imagine there is a lot that Susan doesn't know about normal human behavior, what with the amount of time she spends in the basement playing with her pet tarantulas). So she goes to the hospital to apologize to the one shell-shocked survivor. Partway through Susan's apology, another girl, Nancy, walks in and overhears the confession. Not enough to prove anything mind you, but enough to raise her suspicions. She goes to Bo, the last of the three hooligans that killed Susan's tarantula, and asks him to investigate the matter for her. Bo does this by following Susan through the woods for what feels like a ten minute, dialogue-free scene. I'm not sure if he's tailing her or if he's just debating whether or not this whole thing is stupid because he makes no effort to hide from her and when the scene ends he just goes up and talks to her. Bo asks her out on a date to the drive-in where he accuses her and watches her reaction, when Susan goes fleeing off into the night Bo has his answer. Somehow, the weird girl with all the spiders is responsible for killing his friends.

Bo is probably the second oldest man I've ever seen passed off as a high school student (the number one spot is still held by Joe from Earth vs. the Spider (1958) who is 40 if he's a day). At least, I think he's a high schooler. He hangs out with people who are said to be in High School, but shortly after his run-in with Susan we see him go to his job as an HVAC repairman, which seems to suggest he is just as old as he looks. I guess it could be an afterschool job, but it seems unusual that a high school kid would have the right technical qualifications. It probably shouldn't worry us too much though, because the sole narrative purpose of his job is so Bo can be attacked by a swarm of tarantulas while stuck in a ventilation shaft. While nowhere near as absurd as the first spider attack scene, it's still quite a bit of fun. The only problem is after Bo is killed by the spiders, that's the last we will be seeing of the eight-legged bastards. It's a bit galling when a movie has the title “Kiss of the Tarantula” and then flat out refuses to show you a spider for the entire third act.

That's not to say there isn't any excitement in the final sequence. Once Bo dies, Nancy goes to the police with her suspicions about Susan. The only problem is, that as I mentioned before, the chief of the police is Uncle Walter, and the way he figures, covering up a murder is the next best thing to flowers and chocolates. Surely, he thinks, if I protect her from a murder wrap my niece will accept my incestuous advances. If that means killing Nancy, well that's just an unfortunate cost of doing business.

This movie is dumb, it's riddled with plot holes and just downright absurdities. Of course, that's why I had such a blast watching it. Take this recommendation with a massive grain of salt, as I suspect anyone with a more sophisticated sense of humor will not have nearly as much fun with this movie as I did. Still, if you like movies that are good-natured, fun, and more than a little dumb, this is the film for you.