jacobjohntaylor1
This is awful. It has an awful story line. The acting it awful. It is not scary. 4.5 is overrating it. This is a 1. The ending is awful. If you want to see something scary see King Kong (1933). Do not see movie. King Kong (1976) is also very scary. This is not scary at all. There are better movies out there like Halloween III season of witch. If you want see something scary see Son of Kong. I see that people keep giving it a 3 I do not blame them. This could scary a 10 year old. But I would not give this a 3. 3 is overrating it. Do not waste your time and do not waste your money. Do not see this movie. You have seen warned this is one of the worst movie of all time. Save your money. Life is to short to see pooh pooh.
calvinnme
From the first scene, little Susan seems troubled and is fascinated with spiders. She considers them her pets. And why not? Mom has all of the warmth and maternal love of one of dad's corpses on a slab. Dad is a mortician and full of love for his daughter. The actress playing mom is pretty stiff in her role (no pun intended) and actually seems much too old for the part she is playing. She is having an affair with her husband's brother, a cop. Susan overhears mom talking on the phone, figures out who she is talking to, and overhears their plans to kill her beloved dad.So Susan waits until mom is asleep and puts her pet tarantula on her. Mom awakens, doesn't jump out of bed, just lays there in terror, and then has a heart attack and dies. Mission accomplished. Dad is safe. Susan grows up. Her age is never specified, but it seems that she is in high school because she is walking to school with a backpack. Although, like mom, she seems about ten years too old for the part. By this time Susan has many tarantulas as pets in the basement and she is still the apple of her dad's eye.Pretty soon Susan is solving all of her problems with bullies and the kids who broke into the mortuary and killed one of her pets spiders by planting spiders on them when and where they least expect it. In every case they don't run away, they just sit there screaming with the spiders crawling on them and die of a coronary. Never have I seen so many healthy young people die of heart attacks.Now that Susan has matured, Dad's lecherous brother begins to have the hots for her, bothering her and getting just a little too affectionate. Blech! The girl is your niece! To make matters worse he's the local DA, and he and the cops are stumped at all of the deaths occurring around town. To make matters even worse he wants to run for state Attorney General. But for some strange reason he sends his brother out to campaign while he shadows Susan with his tongue dragging the floor. Usually voters want to hear from the candidate, not his brother.This all comes to a head with the DA committing a terrible crime himself, and Susan wreaking a completely ironic justice upon the guy that for once did not involve her spiders.The dialogue is wooden and the acting uninspired. And then there is the case of the high schoolers that look like they are in their 30s and the convenient way all of the victims die at the sight of a spider. However, this is a case of something you just don't see anymore - an independent low budget film with actors so anonymous you wonder why they bothered to give them names in the movie different from their actual names. For several of the players I think this was their only credited role.For me, it is an artifact of the last days of drive ins, and for that reason I enjoyed it. It is so authentic, so not mass produced, so something that no movie studio would have any part of today that it is just a guilty pleasure of mine. Your mileage may vary.
BA_Harrison
Mortician's daughter Susan Bradley likes to play with spiders, much to the disgust of her adulterous mother Martha (Beverly Eddins), who is having an affair with Susan's uncle Walter (Eric Mason), the local sheriff. When Susan overhears the cheating couple plotting to kill her father, she releases a tarantula into her mother's bedroom during the night, scaring the woman to death.Years later, Susan (now played by Suzanna Ling) is still obsessed with spiders, keeping a collection of the hairy horrors in the basement of her father's funeral home. After a group of school bullies start to make her life a misery, Susan once again uses her eight-legged friends to settle the score, and finally gets even with her pervy Uncle Walter.Scaring a victim to death with spiders isn't the most reliable way to commit a murder—not everyone is arachnophobic, the critters might run away from rather than towards the intended victim, or they might simply get squished—but as unlikely as it might seem, the plan works like a dream for Susan, making this a very silly film indeed. This might not be a problem, but director Chris Munger's handling of the action is so uninspired that the whole thing proves rather dull as well as daft.As a card-carrying arachnophobe, I should have been on the edge of my seat every time the spiders are unleashed; instead, I was merely bored. Kudos to the actors who let the tarantulas crawl over their face and hands, but it really wasn't worth the effort. For a much more enjoyable '70s spider feature, watch Kingdom of the Spiders—it's got William Shatner in it, for starters
Coventry
Susan, the young daughter of a hard-working mortician, has a strange passion for giant spiders, more particularly tarantulas, and engages her hairy friends to get rid of unpleasant persons in her life, like her own mother who plotted to kill her father anyway. By the time she's an attractive teenager, her passion turned into an obsession and it becomes all the more easier to find victims for the "kiss" of her tarantulas. This is a fairy enjoyable spider-feature, especially in case you like 70's drive-in horror. It's quite creepy, too! As long as you've got a bunch of spiders, you don't really need any other form of special effects as these icky critters provide the film with more than enough genuine frights. Unfortunately, there's very little coherence in the script and all the main events seem be juxtaposed without much connection between them. Also, as the story develops, the Susan-character shows more an more resemblance with Stephen King's "Carrie". She gets emotionally unstable, uncertain about herself, seemly all alone against the rest of the world and of course disposing of unique powers. Much like the 1978 movie "Jennifer" was a Carrie rip-off with snakes, "Kiss of the Tarantula" is a well-disguised Carrie rip-off with...duh...tarantulas! But then and completely unexpected, the story takes another few twists that don't involve tarantulas at all, and "Kiss of the Tarantula" once again becomes a one-of-a-kind 70's shocker. The ending is downright fantastic! This movie may not be flawless but it sure is creative.