The Crawling Hand – Five Fingers of Terror!

By Steve D. Stones

Alan Hale, who starred as the skipper on Gilligan’s Island, plays the sheriff of a small west coast town in this 1963 low-budget sci-fi feature - The Crawling Hand. The film features the song “The Bird’s The Word” by the Rivingtons. Producer Joseph F. Robertson also produced another cult classic from a year earlier in 1962 – The Slime People.  Robertson was an army buddy of cult director Ed Wood.

A Swedish curvy cutie named Marta and her James Dean wanna-be boyfriend Paul find the severed arm of an astronaut washed up on the shore of a small coastal town. Paul returns in the night to retrieve the arm in a shower curtain. Paul later finds his landlady dead – strangled to death by the hand of the astronaut.

The sheriff suspects Paul of killing his landlady. When he arrives at the scene, he discovers a recently fired handgun lying on the floor next to the dead landlady.

While making a telephone call to the Florida space program where the astronaut was launched from, Paul is choked by the crawling hand. Paramedics arrive to treat Paul, but he flees the vehicle. The paramedics inform the sheriff of his strange behavior.  This makes the sheriff even more suspicious of Paul.

The fingerprints taken from the scene of the murder of the landlady reveal that an astronaut named Lockhart committed the crime. The sheriff still thinks Paul is responsible.

The crawling hand exhibits a strange control over Paul’s thoughts and behavior. He refuses to see Marta ever again and becomes violent and out of control. He chokes the owner of a local malt shop, then attempts to do the same to Marta.

Paul captures the crawling hand and stabs it with broken glass at the city salvage yard as the sheriff arrives to arrest him. Two cats chew up the hand and eat it. The curse of the crawling hand ends, and Paul and Marta ride off into the sunset - sort of speak.

Some critics have suggested that The Crawling Hand is an anti-space travel, anti-space program propaganda movie when really the film is just a straight-forward sci-fi feature aimed at the teenage drive-in market of the 1960s. Happy viewing!

THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION: A Volkswagen disguised as a giant spider!

By Steve D. Stones

The 1970s was a time in low budget filmmaking when directors attempted to bring back the giant bug craze of the 1950s. Kingdom of The Spiders, Bug, Squirm, Empire of The Ants and The Giant Spider Invasion were just a few of these films in the 1970s to use the theme of giant insects.



Bill Rebane, who brought us the 1960s cult classic(k) Monster-A-Go-Go, directed The Giant Spider Invasion. Alan Hale, who played the skipper on TV’s Gilligan’s Island, is typecast as a local Wisconsin sheriff. Hale also appeared as a sheriff in the early 60s cult classic The Crawling Hand. Other veteran actors include Barbara Hale of TV’s Perry Mason and Steve Brodie of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.

A meteor crashes near a farm in Wisconsin. A farmer and his alcoholic wife soon discover their cattle are being slaughtered. The farmer picks up a small meteor fragment and takes it back to his home to crack it open. When he’s finally able to crack the meteor open, a larger spider comes out with fragments of diamonds. Soon, the home is infested with spiders. The farmer collects all the diamonds he can find in several meteor fragments he smashes open. He hopes to get rich from the diamonds.

Later, the farmer discovers a dead body in the field, which was attacked by spiders. He decides not to report the body to the sheriff, but instead buries it. He leaves his wife later that evening to fool around with his mistress who lives nearby.

While retiring to bed that night, the farmer’s wife discovers a giant spider in her dresser. She runs out of the home and into a shed, where she is attacked and killed by an even larger spider. The spider used for this scene reminds me of the cheesy rubber spider used in countless 1950s science fiction films, such as Cat Women of The Moon, Queen of Outer Space and Missile To The Moon.

Eventually the farmer is attacked and killed by the largest mother spider. Scenes of the farmer and other victims being attacked by the mother spider look similar to the victims being attacked by the giant carpet shag in The Creeping Terror. Victims appear to shove themselves into the mouth of the spider, instead of allowing the spider to pick up the victim with its teeth. This is an obvious special effects blunder from not having the capability to use digital technology at the time, or some type of animation effect.

There are a number of hilarious sequences in the film. The sequence of people running across a baseball field as the spider is chasing after them is perhaps the funniest. The giant spider appears to be made of paper mache. Most sequences of the giant spider are so quick that the viewer hardly has time to make out what it is made of. That is likely intentional.

Michael J. Weldon says in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film that the mother spider was attached to a Volkswagen beetle and driven around during filming (get it, a bug driving a bug?). The director Bill Rebane confirms this in an interview on the DVD of the film put out by Retromedia.

I would say that The Giant Spider Invasion borrows mostly from two 1950s films, The Blob and Tarantula. It’s a mixture of giant spiders and falling meteors. If you’re interested in seeing or purchasing this film, I recommend that you seek out the DVD version put out by Retromedia. It includes an introduction by Son-of-Ghoul washing a midget at a car wash. A comic book is also contained inside the DVD case. It’s a copy of the original comic book of the film that was distributed in theaters in the mid-1970s when the film premiered. You can also watch the film at Hulu.com. Keep a can of bug killer on hand for those pesky spiders!