USA. 1977.
Crew
Director – Stuart Hagmann, Teleplay – John Groves & Guerdon Trueblood, Producer – Paul Freeman, Photography – Robert Morrison, Music – Mundell Lowe, Special Effects – Rob Downey, Art Direction – Raymond Beal. Production Company – Alan Lansburg Productions.
Cast
Claude Akins (Bert Springer), Charles Frank (Joe Harmon), Bert Remsen (Mayor Jack Douglas), Deborah Winters (Cindy Beck), Pat Hingle (Doc Hodgins), Sandy McPeak (Chief Lee Beesley), Tom Atkins (Buddy), Howard Hesseman (Fred), Matthew Laborteaux (Matthew Harmon), Penelope Windust (Gloria Beesley), Edwin Owens (Frank)
Plot
Two pilots fly a flight of coffee beans from Ecuador to the US, along with three smuggled Ecuadorians. Bad weather causes them to divert to the airport at the town of Stanleyville. However, tarantula spiders have been hiding in the sacks of beans and fatally sting the pilots, causing the plane to crash. As the locals attempt a rescue of bodies from the burning plane, the tarantulas get free. Around the town, there is soon a spate of deadly tarantula deaths.
In the 1970s, successes such as The Birds (1963), Willard (1971) and the behemoth that was Jaws (1975) precipitated a series of films about the animal and insect kingdom on the march against humanity. (I have an essay on the topic here at Animals Attack Films). During the fad’s heyday, most animal and insect species had their turn. Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo was a TV Movie that came out in December of 1977 about a month after the more high-profile Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) was released and as such could probably be considered a Mockbuster.
Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo starts in quite well. The plot about deadly spiders accidentally being smuggled into the US and then overrunning a small town has a number of similarities to the subsequent high-profile theatrically released Arachnophobia (1990). Director Stuart Hagmann gets in a reasonable opening with the locals converging on the plane crash site and then trying to deal with the situation as the spider attacks begin to spread around the town. Crucially, while the animals attack film has been reduced to formula by too many low-budget copies for the Syfy Channel in the 2000s, Tarantulas never feels like it is a formula Animals Attack film during these scenes.
The main problem is that the tarantulas are not much of a massed threat. They are responsible for assorted individual attacks but there is never much the sense that the whole town is being taken over or at siege as there is in say Kingdom of the Spiders or various other of the Animals Attack films. The main climactic drama of the film rather weakly centres around whether or not to set an orange processing warehouse on fire to eliminate the spider menace. These latter scenes do feature Bert Remsen as one of the better Murray Hamilton-styled mayor characterisations, who is not only town mayor but also the owner of the orange warehouse, and is ruthlessly determined to protect his commercial interests, exhorting his workers to keep working and ignore the spider problems.
Stuart Hagmann had a minor career mostly directing television. He made a couple of films with the student protests film The Strawberry Statement (1970) and the crystal meth film Believe in Me (1971) but appears to have disappeared after making Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo.
Scriptwriter Guerdon Trueblood had a career mostly in tv. His other scripts included the tv movies The Love War (1970), Sole Survivor (1970), The Savage Bees (1976), It Happened at Lakewood Manor (1977), Terror Out of the Sky (1978) and Jaws 3-D (1983).
Full film available here