Movie Title: Kingdom of the Spiders
Written by: Alan Caillou and Richard Robinson, from a story by Stephen Lodge and Jeffrey M. Sneller
Directed by: John "Bud" Cardos

Starring:

William Shatner ... Dr. Robert “Rack” Hansen
Tiffany Bolling ... Diane Ashley
Woody Strode ... Walter Colby

Dorsey Burnette is a poet, man. For proof I point to his amazing theme song, which he wrote all by himself, and sings at the beginning and end of Kingdom of the Spiders. Dorsey Burnette asks the questions that cut straight to the heart of America: “Will tomorrow bring the love we need to last forevermore?” he croons, before following up with the exquisitely redundant “Or could it bring the unknown that we've never seen before?”

Y'know, as opposed to the unknown we have seen before.

Oh, there were a lot of killer-critters movies back there in the '70s. You had bees (The Swarm, Killer Bees), rats (Willard, Food of the Gods), ants (It Happened at Lakewood Manor), and spiders. Especially spiders -- in 1975 we got The Giant Spider Invasion, and in 1977 we got the TV movie Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo. But none of those movies features William Shatner. Kingdom of the Spiders does.

The Shatman stars as Rack Hanson, cowboy-hat-wearin' veterinarian who we first see lassoin' a steer so's to inoculate it. "I want to play a guy named Rack who drinks beer and flirts with the ladies," Shatner possibly said to his agent, "and I want to ride a horse in my first scene," and so it was done. Larry McMurtry was busy, though, so Bill had to settle for a flick about pissed-off aggro spiders who start eating cows, dogs, and eventually humans. The cow belongs to old rancher Walter Colby, played by Woody Strode, he who once worked for Cecil B. DeMille, Stanley Kubrick, and Sergio Leone, but who now found himself taking direction from John "Bud" Cardos. I'd argue that, at that point, Woody had farther to fall than Shatner did. This was two years prior to Star Trek: The Motionless Picture, so Shatner didn't have much going on other than Barbary Coast and the occasional guest spot on Columbo or The Rookies.

Anyway, Dr. Rack examines the cow and sends a blood sample to entomologist Dr. Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling, the perfect porn-star name, even if she wasn't one). Dr. Ashley says the culprit is, like, super-nuclear spider venom, dude. Dr. Rack says, in essence, "Sure, honey, a spider killed that big-ass cow. Now why don't you get me a beer?" Dr. Rack is not, shall we say, a women's libber. But he will learn Dr. Ashley's wisdom! Yes, he will!

The spiders teeming all over the Colby farm are so aggro because man's pesticides have killed all the spiders' natural prey. I shouted out,” Who killed the Colbys,” when after all it was you and me. Yeah, the '70s were long on this sort of "hubris of mankind brings nature's smackdown" premise, though back then we didn't have Roland Emmerich and The Day After Tomorrow, so we had to make do with William Shatner doing what can only be described as a bunny-hop down a spider-covered street. (The ASPCA must've been on the set some days -- when we see various characters go out of their way not to step on spiders although, realistically, they should be stomp-happy like Ed Norton in American History X -- but absent on other days, such as when a cop car visibly runs some spiders over, to the point where we can actually see spider spooge squirting into the air.)

People keep turning up dead and cocooned in spider webs. (Cut to: front page of the Daily Bugle: WALL-CRAWLING MENACE TERRORIZES ARIZONA TOWN.) Rack holes up in a cabin with Dr. Ashley and his dead-in-'Nam brother's wife (played by Shatner's wife at the time Marcy Rafferty, who got lots of gigs because of him -- she was on T.J. Hooker four times) and her little daughter. Spiders are crawling all over the cabin, the windows, you name it. Rack gets the shit bitten out of him while trying to replace a fuse in the basement. He wakes up on the kitchen counter. The spiders are gone, but the entire house -- along with the entire town -- is covered with spider webs, the movie's one pretty decent image. And we're back to Dorsey Burnette singing to us about that “unknown we've never seen before,” which apparently includes rampaging spiders and a woman who attempts to get a spider off of her hand by shooting it. Yep, hadn't seen that before.