Kingdom Of The Spiders
Shout Factory
8/10
B-Movies alone are hard to seriously judge, but when the main character is none other than William Shatner, well, you have a whole new set of considerations. 1977’s Kingdom Of The Spiders now must be judged on two different levels: as a B-Movie, and where it rates on the Shatner Scale.
As a B-Movie, it has all the requirements:
– Terrible screams that make you wonder how long they practiced
– Normally beatable foes becoming all-consuming
– Soundtrack consisting of mostly stock songs
– Victims slowly stumbling around
– Woman succumbing to womanizer’s “charm”
– And take a wild guess as to what race the first human victim is
B-Movie grade: 8/10. Bonus for a sweet shot of exploding phalanges and unhappy ending, points lost for not having anything radioactive and/or mentioning conspiracies.
Now, on a Shatner Scale:
– He’s a lady’s man
– Lasso’d a chick
– Exhibited both humor and melodrama
– Drank a Miller High Life with the Mayor
– Got previously cold-blooded woman to get him a beer
– Spiders = More terrifying to be covered in than Tribbles.
Shatner gets an 88 on the Shatner Scale (out of 100).
Find Kingdom of the Spiders on DVD early 2010!
–Jonathan Yost