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

Film

page 12

Film

Hairy but Harmless

Kingdom of the Spiders

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.

Promise unfulfilled

I've said it once and I'll say it again: none of this would matter (so much) if the whole thing worked. But it doesn't. It starts off promisingly enough with an alack on a lone calf in a paddock. The camera creeps through the grass at ground level, from several different directions, moving manacingly inwards towards its prey: the prospective meal turns agitatedly this way and that, trapped; his cow-bell tolls forlornly. From here. Kingdom just slides down-lull. The threat is never again as immediate, and the calf turns in the best acting performance of the whole cast.

William Shatner is especially wooden, but can he be blamed? Most of his lines are on the "women and children first!" level, and the rest of the dialogue is as bad. Never is this worse, of course, than in the 'scientific' explanation for the sudden change in the spiders' eating habits, delivered with due deadpan seriousness (of the "You don' mean.........?" — ominous chord - "Yes. I'm afraid so......" variety) by the sultry blonde spider-expert in between playing hard-to-get with the hero. You get the idea. This was the kind of thing Hitchcock had the good sense to avoid.

Hairy but Harmless

Obviously John 'Bud' Cardos was counting on his hordes of hairy arachnids to carry the show. Let's just say he was over-optimistic. The film has only one horror effect — nasty big tarantulas crawling all over peoples' bodies — which is repeated over and over again. Unless you have an excessive fear of spiders (there must be a phobia to cover that), you're not likely to find it very frightening. And after a while it become downright boring.

Add to all this a specially composed soundtrack (by one Dorsey Burnette, if memory serves me correctly) of god-awful country and western songs, and you have all the making of a classic dud.

It's flicks like this that give horror films a bad name.

Paul Hagan

P. S. Everyone seems to be enjoying Alan Parker's Midnight Express (Regent), and sure enough I too found it well made, beautifully photographed, and really absorbing. But did on-one else also find it disturbingly superficial and hypocritical?

VUWSA Films

Drawing of a spider stealing money

Off the Edge

Imagine crossing the Southern Alps with a hang-glider and skis strapped to your feet. Imagine making a film of it. Imagine John Hanlon making a song about it "Off the Edge" does all this with style, and what it lacks in development it certainly compensates for with visual splendour. It's a question of how much snow you can really take. A prize-winning semi-New Zealand film.

The Magnificent Seven

This is real Hollywood at its best. "The Magnificent Seven" is a western remake of Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai", a powerful story of conflict between a samurai band and the villagers they purport to protect. The Japanese film is already close to a western in all its chief features; John Sr urges' Hollywood version forgoes some of the depth of theme but lacks nothing of the action, suspense and compelling attraction of its lead characters. Quite simply one of the best westerns around, from the maker of "Gunfight at Ok Corral", "The Great Escape" and "Ice Station Zebra". Starring Yul Brynner Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen.