Tarantula
Hot on the heels of Warner Bros.’ THEM (1954), Universal entered the giant-insect arena with Jack Arnold’s TARANTULA (1955, TCM). Like its predecessor the film makes great use of its desert locations, though they’re not quite as evocative as those in Arnold’s earlier IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953). Still, it’s all good clunky fun and moves surprisingly well, considering that the giant bug doesn’t really start doing anything scarier than crossing the screen until well past the halfway mark. Instead, it keeps popping up just as town doctor John Agar leaves, as if it were out to get him. Maybe they should have called it Shirley Temple.
Leo G. Carroll is over a barrel as a researcher trying to solve the problem of overpopulation by using a radioactive nutrient to create giant animals with a radioactive nutrient. When two of his colleagues inject themselves with the thing, they start losing their minds (and their looks) and one injects Carroll after a decently staged fight that burns most of the test subjects but unleashes the creepy crawly. Had they fire developed differently, they’d have had to call the picture GUINEA PIG.
The film is very ‘50s. Carroll wears a tie in the lab even though it’s in his own home. When his assistant (Mara Corday) suggests something caused the rockslide that almost killed her and Agar, Agar pooh poohs the idea (maybe it didn’t jell for him). She may be a graduate researcher in biology, but she’s also just a woman. And the ugly critter eventually runs afoul of one of the studio’s prettiest contract players, the young Clint Eastwood, who delivers his single line as if it were in a language he’d never heard of. Still, the ‘50s era effects are good enough to make you realize how scary the critter was, and it gets some expert support from Nestor Paiva (“Jumping Jupiter!”) as the town sheriff, Ross Elliott, who would dabble in his own nutrient later trying to get some redhead to hawk Vitamitavegemin, and Raymond Bailey as a scientist more tolerant of tarantulas than he would later be of hillbillies.