by Hal Astell
There can never be too many reasons to want to watch a particular movie but this one has even more reasons than most. It's a horror movie set in Arizona, shot in Camp Verde. It's a William Shatner movie, towards the end of the period when he was building one of the most fascinating film careers around, a period that ended two years later with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. His co-star is Tiffany Bolling, an interesting actress who I've seen recently in Wicked, Wicked and The Centerfold Girls. And of course it's full of spiders, real spiders, no less than 5,000 of them who constantly steal the show from everyone.
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Camp Verde is a rural farming community, as it should be, even though I've spent five years living in Arizona and not seeing any such thing. Almost everyone here lives in the Phoenix Metropolitan area where we don't have the space that folks like Walter Colby have at their cattle ranch. Woody Strode is a strange choice to play Colby, not because there aren't any black ranchers in Arizona, but because they're perhaps deliberately the first people we see and yet we don't see a single Mexican or Native American at any point throughout the entire film. The first victim of the spiders is one of Colby's calves that he expects to win prizes at the imminent county fair. The next is his dog and then his bull, which pretty much wipes him out.