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Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 4. March 19 1979

[Introduction]

Who keeps dreaming up these titles? Not that that's important in this ease - Kingdom of the Spiders is as deserving a Z-grade title as any for this tired little tarantula yarn. Okay, it's not particularly incompetent, but I find it hard to forgive any film that is So blatantly and mechanically a copy of something that has gone before. And Kingdom of the Spiders is a direct copy of The Birds, only without the undercurrents of psychological tension in that film or any of the panache of Hitchcock's ending. (Cardos's ending, in fact, is the best piece of kitsch I've seen in years, and was greeted by the audience with the derision it deserved.)

It's one thing to allude to your predecessors in the genre by integrating some of their images or techniques into your own work (as It Lives Again and most of Brian DePalma's films do so skilfully), but quite another to steal someone else's characters and storyline wholesale (which is dishonest ) and expect to hoodwink the paying public in the process (which is a bloody liberty). Here, there isn't a shred of originality insight.