The universe: over 13 billion years old, stretching 93 billion light years from side to side and growing every day. Across this vast expanse spin over 70 sextillion stars-that's 70 thousand million million million. Our own star, the sun, is large enough to fit 109 Earths laid end to end across its diameter-and the sun is a runty little thing by cosmic standards. Sometimes, when one of these stars dies, its enormous mass collapses in on itself, all of its energy and strength crushed down to a single infinitesimal point. And when all of that gravitational power is compacted into a space no larger than the period at the end of this sentence, the concentrated, amplified force permits no escape. There, within walls too small to even contain a mote of dust, the laws of Nature are repealed. They call these things black holes. And, in 1975, one of 'em fell into some farmland in the Harrison Hills area near Gleason, Wisconsin.
This pesky black hole ripped a new one in the fabric of space and time, and through this hole some evil spiders from an alternate universe scrambled into our own, where they took to eating livestock and naked women. Luckily, some of Northern Wisconsin's top astrophysicists were alerted to the phenomena (when it started to interfere with the Gleason Days carnival) and were able to close off the dimensional rift before its pernicious effects were able to spread, you know, to places like Irma.
There are works of visionary science fiction whose greatness lies in the ability to take grandiose ideas and render them in a familiar, domestic context that makes the abstract real, the fantastic believable. And then there are those works of science fiction that misunderstand basic concepts of science and stager everything on a domestic scale because it's all they can afford. Guess which one is The Giant Spider Invasion?
Let us, for a moment, set aside our disbelief that a parallel world would be populated by malevolent spiders who travel inside geodes, or that such things would come out of a black hole. Let us also extend our generosity to forgive the crazy idea that a black hole, one of the cosmos' most bewitching marvels, would happen to fall to earth and end up in a cow pasture-even though this means that astronomers, who must typically search the heavens for black holes using the most sophisticated technology, were now able to look the thing up on a map and go drive to it in a Ford truck! But, once we afford the filmmakers even this much slack, we are still left with the unanswered question of why, of all places, this one-of-a-kind occurrence would happen in Gleason, Wisconsin.
Oh, no, wait-there is an answer. According to Dr. Jenny Langer (Barbara Hale) in the film, "With a billion black holes in our galaxy, it's a wonder it hasn't happened before." See? There you go! And she oughta know, as her lab is outfitted with the latest in bubbling test tubes and chemistry equipment (don't all scientists have those?) Of course, this is like arguing that since the American economy has $14 trillion dollars coursing through it, you should be a millionaire.
To be frank, the only reason giant spiders invaded Gleason was that director Bill Rebane happened to live there at the time.
Rebane used to live in an airport, more or less, jet-setting between Chicago, Los Angeles, and various points in Europe where he eked out an existence in the periphery of the film industry in whatever capacity he could find work. Tiring of that lifestyle, he decided to settle down somewhere nice and quiet-and a vacation to the region convinced him that Wisconsin fit the bill. It was certainly more of a reason to wind up in Wisconsin than the black hole had.
Rebane converted a farmstead (located off Highway J between Irma and Gleason, for those of you Star Maps folks) into a studio he called The Shooting Range. Fully equipped with production equipment and technical staff, the Shooting Range kept busy with corporate and industrial clients, while Rebane nurtured thoughts of making features.
The 1970s film industry offered but one avenue for independent filmmakers to find audiences: the exploitation circuit of drive-ins, grindhouses, and states' rights theaters in the South. To make a feature outside of Hollywood in those days nearly always meant making a monster movie. Anybody with a camera and a cockamamie monster idea could get their picture, no matter how shoddily made, seen-to which Rebane said, "Me too!"
Rebane's first attempt to mint his own horror feature went a little awry, and the end result wasn't even full length. The Wizard of Gore, Herschell Gordon Lewis, however, happened to be the cinematographer, and he had a hunch he could make the scraps into something else. Lewis took the thing, padded it out with some extraneous footage, and sold it as Monster A Go-Go (1965). Having learned some valuable lessons, Rebane was able over the coming years to turn out ten or so wild-n-woolly pictures like The Alpha Incident (1978), about an alien invasion of the Midwest, or The Capture of Bigfoot (1979), about the hunt for a legendary beast in... the Midwest. The Giant Spider Invasion, about another alien invasion of the Midwest, stands as Rebane's most... well, you could really finish that sentence with just about any adjective you'd like.
For all that is wrong with The Giant Spider Invasion, it has an irreducible charm. You expect movies to come out of Hollywood, and so to find one emerging from Gleason, Wisconsin has a certain cachet. It's like finding a couple of kids who've set up on their curb a stands that sells, not lemonade, but sushi. Sure it's not very good, but you gotta give 'em points for trying.
Rebane rallied his community around his pictures with a local-boy-makes-good zeal. His cast may be faded has-beens, but hey, they are famous and here they are in our little town! His "giant spiders" may be a ridiculous special defects nightmare, but hey, those spiders are landmarks of local achievement, memorials to a fleeting taste of Tinseltown glamour. The spiders stand today as memorials (you can see them yourself at Kris Hill's and Lori Stine's The Living Room store). This is a film that had its world premiere at the Grand Theater in Wausau!
Like Robert Altman's Popeye (1980), The Giant Spider Invasion is one of those rare moments in cinema where every single creative decision was made poorly, but where the cumulative effect of so many bad ideas piled on top of each other create a critical mass of enjoyment: a thousand wrongs making a single right.
A different filmmaker perhaps might have opted to play up the small town setting, emphasizing the ironic predicament of a sheriff used to no greater challenge than the odd bar brawl suddenly confronted with the imminent end of civilization. But that would have taken some effort, so why not just cast Alan Hale as the sheriff and let him yuk it up with some wisecracks instead? Hale's very first line in the film is, "Hi, little buddy." His first line! No effort is even nominally made to efface Hale's past on Gilligan's Island, and why not? We all loved Gilligan's Island, right?
Top-billed Steve Brodie and Barbara Hale take a different approach to their performances, playing their roles as astrophysicists with gravitas. Both in their fifties, Brodie and Hale play the romantic leads of the picture: they meet cute, banter playfully, and get the final freeze frame on their climactic embrace. Boy meets girl, boy kills giant spider, boy gets girl. Oh, and along the way, the two ageing stars tumble head over heels down a hillside in a clumsy, indecorous stunt no director with even a passing respect for his cast would have left in the final cut.
Then again, a director with a passing respect for anybody wouldn't have subjected them to the sight of his so-called "giant spiders." The thing about actual spiders is that many people find them creepy-those sticky webs, the way they ensnare and torture their prey, their broods of baby spiders-but none of these unsettling characteristics show up in the movie. The monsters of the movie aren't especially spiderlike, and are only threatening because of their size. The original plan was to have the critters about ten feet across-pretty darn big for a spider, you have to admit, and something probably within the reach of the $10,000 they had in the budget for special effects. However, producer Brandon Chase of the distribution company Group One insisted that if they were to compete seriously with Steven Spielberg's Jaws, released that same year, they would need a competitively sized menace. You are free to mull over the insanity of that remark on your own time. To assuage his backers, Rebane turned to special effects designer Robert Millay and asked him to make the spiders even more ginormous. Millay had a stroke of pun-addled genius: a Bug-bug! He stripped a pair of Volkswagens to their frames and had local welder Carl Pfantz attach spider legs on to the beams. They wrapped "fun fur" around the result, and fitted red globes to the headlights to act as eyes.
Despite having built their monsters from cars, the Volkspider couldn't drive properly without assistance. In scenes of mass panic, some of the fleeing townsfolk seem to be running very slowly, and hovering awfully close to the thing they are supposed to be running from - when in fact they are pushing it!
Meanwhile, there were nine teenagers huddled on a makeshift board on the inside of the Spidermobile, whose task it was to wriggle the legs to make the things seem slightly less car-like.
You could ask why Rebane did not delegate his special effects responsibilities to someone more experienced in the field, who could maybe have suggested better, more effective techniques, or at the very least to someone who wasn't spending more time drinking than he was attending to the job for which he'd been hired. The obvious answer is that the Gleason-Merrill-Wausau-Irma area was not really a hotbed of effects pioneers. Maybe people in sunny Southern California have time to imagineer such things while they sip their appletinis by the pool, but folk in the hardscrabble Midwest are an earthier, more pragmatic people. You need a spider? OK, go weld some legs onto a car and get on with your day. You need to make a movie? OK, round up your friends and family-they'll do.
In addition to directing, Bill Rebane also composed the soundtrack and designed the sets for The Giant Spider Invasion. His daughter Jutta was the set decorator, while wife Barbara served as unit production manager and second AD. Star Steve Brodie's family pulled their weight, too-his son Kevin served as first assistant director and took a role in the cast. Sue Brodie did the makeup; Robin Brodie did the costumes. Barbara Hale's hubby Bill Williams joined the cast, too. Moviemaking as pot luck-what could be more Midwestern?
What does it take to make a movie? Deep pockets, bankable movie stars, industry connections, technical know-how, or even a particularly good idea? No. Apparently all you need is gumption. And with millions of practical, git-er-done-ites all across the Midwest, it's a wonder it hadn't happened before.
by David Kalat
Sources:
Dave Coleman, Interview with Bill Rebane, Bijouflix.com
Gene Dorsogna, "The Spider Was a Beetle, or: Pardon Me But Your Chassis is Showing," Horror-Wood.com
Bill Rebane, BillRebaneNews.com
John Thonen, "Bill Rebane's Giant Spider Invasion," Mania.com
Cory J. Udler, "Reliving the Invasion," video documentary.
