Bill Rebane already owes me 90 minutes of my life and $1.99 + NY sales tax for Rana: the Legend of Shadow Lake, so by the end of Giant Spider Invasion, I figure ol’ Billy-Boy’s about due for an old fashioned Yakuza finger dismembering to make up for the heaps of dishonor he’s greeted upon me. What use would I have for Bill Rebane’s fingers? Hey, get ‘em autographed and I can sell ‘em off with the “MST3K Collection: Volume 10” DVD. You can make money off anything on eBay these days kids. Why, don’t you read those e-mails that generous and successful people send to you 4 or 5 times a day? You’re missing out my friends, cuz you might as well spell “financial failure” as s-p-a-m f-i-l-t-e-r...

The concept behind GSI isn’t a terrible one: a black hole opens a gateway into another dimension through which petrified coconuts seem to have been jettisoned. They land in the wilds of Wisconsin where coconuts aren’t exactly your native produce. The day after the event (which consists of a trippy light show blue screened behind the foreground of a dilapidated farmhouse) a local cow farmer finds a sizeable chunk of his herd slaughtered, but finds an armful of the aforementioned coconuts as a consolation. While he and Mrs. Cow Farmer practice their scientific method on the mysterious stones (i.e. taking a hammer and chisel to ‘em), a pair of scientists (an ugly little lump of pig fat from NASA and a local astrophysicist… in Wisconsin?!) and the local human garbage disposal/sheriff investigate the phenomenon in a less “ignorant hillbilly” manner… well, a little less.

Of course the wacky stones turn out to be geodes (you know, rocks with crystals inside) in which alien spiders from the other dimension have come to invade Earth… but which look remarkably similar to our common Earthbound tarantulas, go figure. Despite the title though, there’s really only one space arachnid amidst the group I’d really say was “giant”, but more about that steroid case of the animal kingdom later.

Before you can say “Ed Wood”, podunk yocals are either being dropped left and right by the venomous fangs of the furry little devils or being tramped under the fertilizer encrusted boots of their neighbors as panicked mobs flee from the film’s sole giant arachnid. The little guys are crushed easily enough under shoe, shovel or steam iron but conventional weapons (i.e. state issues police revolvers, whether fired or just thrown like loose masonry at a truck driver’s skull) are nothing in the presence of the mechanical jaws of a beast who, as the sheriff refers to it, makes the shark in Jaws look like a “goldfish”… way to shoot yourself in the foot Rebane; reminding the audience of an Academy Award winning Hollywood production while they’re just trying to survive your own cinematic backwash. I’d like to take a survey of people who actually rented this shitstorm, only to turn it off at exactly this point to go watch Spielberg instead.

Unable to kill the creature with their small town arsenal and drunken redneck posse, the creature’s defeat rests in the hands of the Science Squad, who overload the monster with some kind of neutron bomb flown in from NASA HQ because apparently the national guard can’t be mobilized as quickly as a NASA intern in a helicopter… or the movie’s budget just couldn’t support any uniforms or rifles for the extras. Either way, the black hole beastie (not the movie mind you, though it was obviously spawned from Rebane’s own festering, fecal encrusted black hole) kinda implodes or melts down or something, going up in a cloud of black smoke like the pile of burnt hair it is. The day is saved and the world has twenty or thirty less “sons of the soil” to litter it’s ass like the anal warts they are. Just call me Gloria Gaynor boys and girls, cuz I just survived… by the skin of my teeth… whatever the fuck tooth skin is.

Okay, so that’s the story. Could it have worked better in more capable hands? Is the potential there for something great, or at least entertaining? I dunno. I wanna keep the rest of this kinda brief cuz I’m working against a deadline here and I’ve got a headache that’s growing faster than one of those sponge creatures in the capsules when you plop ‘em in hot water. The extent of Bill Rebane’s talents encompass setting up a camera somewhere it won’t fall over and turning it on long enough to capture the train wreck in action. Everything is basic point-and-shoot stuff, the laziest possible filming you could do as a director. It actually gets worse though, as some scenes are shot in absolute darkness and others are shot with seemingly no audio equipment! Some of these soundless moments have the audio dubbed over later on, which is understandable, but what’s the story with the other sequences where we’re left to guess what the fuck is being said?! With a movie this bad it shouldn’t matter, but that doesn’t mean these lazy C.H.U.D. humpers should be giving us more excuses to hate them.

The cast is sad, ranging from the lame to the hideously ugly. If somebody held a gun to my head and said one man and one woman had to be nominated from this group for an Oscar, well, I’d like to just tell ‘em to blow my brains out and get it over with. Problem with this though is that ever since Russell Crowe and Marisa Tomei started getting awards, the whole thing’s a big joke anyway, so this is a case of dishonor before death. As such, Alan Hale would have to be my Best Actor and, errr, I guess Diane Lee Hart cuz she shows her tits. I’d say Leslie Parish, but somehow I think she’s had a little too much prior experience as a trashy lush to call her performance here “acting”.

I can’t really blame the actors on a whole though, as the characters themselves are all undesirable in their own disgusting little ways to begin with. Sheriff Jones (Hale) is a lazy, bloated sac of old with an IQ lower than the number of bullets that’ll fit into his gun and a really unappealing disdain for buttoning his shirt. Uggh. Dan Kester (Bob Easton, who also contributed to writing this, this, whatever it is) is our resident cow farmer, who cheats on his wife with the local Austrian import under the guise that he’s attending church services, sells the meat from his mysteriously slaughtered cows to the local bar & grill and makes sexual propositions to his barely legal sister-in-law, trying to buy a roll in the sack with her with his other-dimensional “diamonds” as found in the spiders’ geode-mobiles. He also looks like the really skeevy old brother to Chris Barron (lead of the Spin Doctors) and his trademark wardrobe consists of a pair of magenta colored full body thermal underwear, wrapped up like a festering Christmas sausage in a man-girdle/back brace. Barf. Dan’s wife Ev (Leslie Parish, who had a few reoccurring roles on the Adam West “Batman” series) is a stinking drunk who flirts with younger guys and seems to give sexual favors for gin as a means of escaping her tragic existence in a rundown shack, married to the human waste who ran her father’s farm into the crapper. Sad. Dan’s cousin Billy is the local jeweler (who still drives a rundown station wagon despite his position as the town’s diamond broker) who looks like he’d be better suited giving kids acid and playing his guitar on Spahn Ranch than he does giving his family members a sloppy raspberry and also making sexual propositions towards his cousin’s sister-in-law… whom he catches fresh out of the shower in a scene that made even me hate myself for being born a man. Dirtbag. Ev’s sister Terry, well, she’s not a bad character really. She’s in love with the only nice guy in town (Dave, as played by Kevin Brodie, who also doubles as the movie’s first assistant director), has to fight off two separate near-rape encounters with her brother-in-law and his equally slimy cousin, and is just there to run around topless or scream and wrestle giant puppet limbs in a tank top and low cut bikini panties. Decent tits. Dr. Vance (Steve Brodie, father to the previously mentioned Kevin) is our NASA scientist whose hairline has retreated to the neutral territory of his upper lip, looks like the lumpier cousin to Mean Gene Okerland, has a thing for rolling around on the ground with older women in pants suits and hasn’t quite grasped the concept of equality between the sexes when it comes to science. Guess he’s never heard of Marie Curry? Moron. His partner in scientific crime is Dr. Jenny Langer (Mrs. Hale), who reminds me of my girlfriend’s mom’s crotchety old cat. She talks with a drawn out whine, screams out Vance’s name a lot (thankfully not what you’re thinking you creepy little monkey) and wants to be taken seriously in the scientific community, but can’t bring herself to step on a few spiders without screaming and throwing a connip fit. “Vaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!”.

The rest of the cast is pretty much Dutch and Helga, who run the local eatery/drinking establishment like some badly written sitcom couple, and a preacher guy who’s just there to remind us that everybody in the town’s a sinner and these spiders are the furry, eight-legged sword of God. We of course get the squadron of extras too, who were no doubt paid with Pabst Blue Ribbon to run around waving shotguns in the air, pretending to fight a giant puppet without actually damaging it too much and retreating in terror in the wake of a mess of legs with a 4 cylinder engine. Speaking of which, our so-called “giant spider” is little more than a giant puppet for some segments and a big furry car cover for a VW bug the rest of the time. As a car cover, its legs move inconsistently with the movements of its body, you can almost hear the combustion engine in its thorax, and it manages to leave tire tread marks all over the grounds of the county fair it attacks. As a giant puppet, its legs flail limp through the air as it’s hit by a car, it stops short of its prey when nearing a hilltop so as not to expose its puppeteers on camera at the expense of letting it’s would-be victims go (all the while still waving its legs around while standing in place), and it seems to have 15 legs or varying size and no actual body as it attacks a dilapidated shack whose walls are made entirely out of particle board. As for the little guys, they’re either real spiders or rubber Halloween props tied up in giant synthetic webs.

So there you have it, a letter-opener… uhm, and by that I mean there’s our “movie”. I’d like to say that Rebane and pals just didn’t have the money to make their grand visions come to fruition, but even with a budget of something more than the bottle returns from the local fraternity, I still get the feeling it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Case in point? There’s a scene where Terry flips her shit and smashes one of the lesser spider foot soldiers with an iron. No matter how much money you could’ve thrown at this scene though, it wouldn’t have covered up the fact that the arm wielding the iron Is obviously of a different build and wearing a completely different shirt than that of Terry as the moment takes place ! My sphincter clenches… and that’s pretty much my summary of the entire Giant Spider Invasion viewing experience.

Please, somebody bring back “Mystery Science Theater”, otherwise I’m going to have to kill myself and those around if I have to sit through too many more movies like this one without a grown man and his puppet sidekicks making fun of those who need to be mocked most!