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