Mystery Science Theater 3000: THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION
August 2, 2017 5:11 PM - Season 8, Episode 10 - Subscribe

"Creeping!... Clawing!... Crushing!" Spider! He is our hero! Well it's not the hero of a small town in Wisconson, as it goes around eating residents, or it would be if he were actually a spider and not a poor special effect. Rioting and chaos are left in its wake. Guys, maybe it's friendly, and is trying to communicate by killing us? Okay maybe not. The movie this week is, once again, tough going. It's brought to us by MST All-Star Bill Rebane, who made... (wait for it)... MONSTER A-GO-GO. Mwa-ha-ha-ha! A film of the genre of people getting devoured by an otherworldly menace, in which way it is eventually poisoned by their accumulated awfulness. In Subplot Land, Pearl's group and the SOL are bothered by pod people. MRxL MRxL MRxL! GO PACKERS WHOOO YouTube (1h33m) Promo Premiered May 5, 1997.

Episode 810 THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION
Satellite News - Mighty Jack's Episode Review - War of the Colossal Fan Guide - Annotated MST3K - TVTropes

The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide entry for 810 was written by Paul Chaplin, and apparently upset director Bill Rebane enough that he took it upon himself to write Satellite News to complain. These are Paul's reflections on the movie:
I've recently come to a sad realization: I must surrender one of my fondest dreams, that of living in a small town or rural community in northern Wisconsin or Minnesota. You know why, right? Guess who else lives in these places: small-town white people, that's who. Granted, the drunkards and louts who streak across the screen (sometimes all too Seventies-style) in Giant Spider Invasion are not entirely fair representations. They're exaggerated by as much as fifteen percent. It's sad but true. As capitalism has decayed (I don't need to tell you about that, I trust) the bitterness in the hinterlands has increased a hundred-fold, so that long-haired guys in boots, a group I used to trust instinctively as being either fans or members of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, have evolved in a deadly manner. They don't like people who aren't like them. And they live in northern Wisconsin.
Movie
Daddy-O's Drive-In Dirt
Rotten Tomatoes (Critics N/A, Viewers 14%) - Wikipedia - TVTropes
IMDB (2.8 stars, 1975)
"Giant spiders from another dimension invade Wisconsin."
Directed by Bill Rebane. Written by Richard L. Huff and Robert Easton. Starring Steve Brodie, Barbara Hale, Robert Easton and Alan Hale, Jr.

Notes:
Satellite News links us to a news report from 2013 that the rusting metal carcas of the Giant Spider prop itself, long left to fester and decay in a field, was stolen (from a field?) and probably scrapped for its metal.

In 2011, after the Green Bay Packers did, in fact, win the Super Bowl, Satellite News' Sampo got a fair amount of Twitter traction when he posted a compilation of the PACKERS! bits from the movie.

Alan Hale, Jr. is in this, in a post Gilligan's Island role.

Although this movie, and (especially) Monster-A-Go-Go, are horrible, I'm still glad that Bill Rebane, now in his 80s, is a going concern. The people who made these films, one by one, are disappearing from the Earth.
posted by JHarris (10 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's time once again for MST CLUB, our weekly showing of Mystery Science Theater 3000! The show is, once again, on Thursday (tomorrow), at 9 PM Eastern time, 6 PM Pacific, at https://cytu.be/r/Metafilter_MST3KClub. And as usual, we'll have what I call "YouTube Potluck" for a while before and after the show, where we'll all enjoy funny and weird internet videos contributed by me and the other members.

It's always a good time. I hope you can make it!
posted by JHarris at 5:15 PM on August 2, 2017


PACKERS WON THE SUPER BOWL! PACKERS! WOOOOOO!
posted by SansPoint at 6:38 PM on August 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm old enough to remember the Packers won the first two Super Bowls in 1967 and 1968, then began a cold streak that was relatively short compared to Baseball's Chicago Cubs... Still, this movie could be tossed into the Big Barrel of Spider-Man Attempted Remakes/Reboots/Re-imaginings... maybe we could fill the YouTube Potluck with Spider-content, like John Goodman in Arachnophobia. But in my 40 SuperBowl years in Los Angeles, I haven't yet recovered from the fact that it wasn't until the Rams moved to St. Louis that they won a Soup. And I grew up a few blocks away from Merlin Olsen Audi, the first Audi dealership in the Western US, Americanized by the Rams Hall of Fame Defensive Knock-Your-Block-Off-er later known as TV's Father Murphy. I think my stream of consciousness has formed into a swamp.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:51 PM on August 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is a rare episode in which I think the movie is so bad that it is hard to watch even WITH RIFFING. ( see also Blood Waters of Dr. Z, Squirm)
posted by wittgenstein at 7:22 PM on August 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


Merlin Olsen, of course, appears in Mitchell.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:19 PM on August 2, 2017


It all returns to my childhood neighborhood, which also had the original Ralph Williams Ford car lot (that Johnny Carson made fun of before Cal Worthington), which started out with the celebrity name of Leon Ames Ford, who was best known in retrospect as the grouchy neighbor on Mister Ed.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:33 PM on August 2, 2017


Tough as this one is to watch, it clearly demonstrates that Rebane learned a thing or two since Monster A-Go Go. Though they both still have some of his signature touches, they're sooo far apart in terms of achievement.

As capitalism has decayed (I don't need to tell you about that, I trust) the bitterness in the hinterlands has increased a hundred-fold, so that long-haired guys in boots, a group I used to trust instinctively as being either fans or members of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, have evolved in a deadly manner. They don't like people who aren't like them. And they live in northern Wisconsin.

Wow, Paul! Now here's a guy who probably wasn't shocked when Trump won. Certainly not when Scott Walker won, and then won again. As someone familiar with, albeit not native to, northern Wisconsin, I can say that his assessment is not wrong.

On that topic, I've driven by the baseball field from this episode a couple of times. IIRC it's in Merrill, a little bit SW of Gleason. It's expectedly surreal to do so.

A fact that will blow your mind unless it already has: Robert Easton, the back-brace guy in this, played the Klingon judge in the very high chair who sentences Kirk and McCoy in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 3:11 AM on August 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


In case you haven't noticed, someone has posted all of the Cinematic Titanic episodes to YouTube, including one they only did live (I think) called Astral Factor.
posted by wittgenstein at 6:52 AM on August 3, 2017


A fact that will blow your mind unless it already has: Robert Easton, the back-brace guy in this, played the Klingon judge in the very high chair who sentences Kirk and McCoy in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

"Been hittin' the bloodwine again!"
posted by Servo5678 at 7:35 AM on August 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


This week in YouTube Potluck:
I think the movie kind of drained us tonight because most of us were pretty quiet through YTPL. Here's the videos that got shown:

The Goons: What time is it Eccles?
Pakistani Daleks
An old commercial: You & Your Johnson
Fencing with Fences
Animation vs. YouTube, although at 16m we couldn't let it play out.
Simon's Cat: For Love, which I did let play out even though it was 13m. It's actually a compilation of Simon's Cat cartoons.
Bill Wurst: I wanna be a movie star (he's the "history of japan" and "history of the world I guess" guy)
CNN: 19 Seconds of Drama: reaction to McCain vote, the play-by-play of McCain's vote denying the Obamacare appeal.
Monty Python: Llama Information
Vox: How fan films shaped the Lego Movie
And related, the first major Lego fan film: The Magic Portal, which was 15m long but I thought made up for it.
Animal Crossing: Apple TV, which I could explain, but is more fun without it.
Neil Cicierega: Ariel Needs Legs
So this is basically: The Legend of Zelda
Telegoons: The Canal
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: Find the Fish
Monty Python: Confuse-a-Cat
The Muppet Show: Spike Milligan and the Newscaster
The Muppet Show: Spike Milligan and It's a Small World
The Muppet Show: John Cleese's Final Number
The Muppet Show: The Ying Tong Song

Additionally, we put in Cinematic Titanic's The Alien Factor, which is on YouTube it turns out, and drive-in theater intermissions before the movie.
posted by JHarris at 10:56 PM on August 3, 2017


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