Villian(s)  Alien spiders

Actor(s):  Steve Brodie, Barbara Hale, Leslie Parrish, Alan Hale

Brief Description  The Giant Spider Invasion (1975) is a low-budget, independent American sci-fi horror cult classic directed and produced by Bill Rebane. The film blends 1950s creature-feature nostalgia with 1970s rural exploitation tropes, following a plague of interdimensional, flesh-eating arachnids that terrorize a small town in Wisconsin. Because of the tight budget, the main 50-foot giant spider was built by stretching a furry, black-clothed frame over a Volkswagen Beetle. Crew members sat inside to drive the car backwards, while others manually operated the spider’s legs with cables.

Plot:
The story kicks off when a meteor crashes into a back pasture in rural Merrill, Wisconsin. Rather than normal space rock, the meteorite is actually a gateway—a miniature black hole or interdimensional warp. The property belongs to Dan Kester (Robert Easton) and his wife Ev (Leslie Parrish), a highly dysfunctional, squabbling couple. Dan is a sleazy, abusive farmer who is having an affair with a local bartender, Helga. When Dan and Ev find spherical geodes at the crash site, they break them open to find shiny crystals they mistake for diamonds. Unbeknownst to them, the geodes are actually alien eggs containing highly aggressive, flesh-eating tarantulas.

As the radiation and magnetic anomalies grow—causing a B-52 bomber to crash and power grids to fail—the eggs hatch. Legions of normal-sized tarantulas emerge and swarm the area, aggressively eating local livestock and human flesh. Meanwhile, the interdimensional portal feeds the main arachnid creature, causing it to rapidly mutate into a colossal, 50-foot-long behemoth. NASA scientists Dr. Vance (Steve Brodie) and astrophysicist Dr. Jenny Langer (Barbara Hale) arrive to investigate the bizarre gamma radiation spikes. Working alongside the town's cheerful Sheriff Jones (Alan Hale Jr., famously known as the Skipper from Gilligan's Island), they realize the horrific scope of the invasion.

The spiders quickly overrun the town, brutally killing several residents, including Billy, Helga, Ev, and eventually the greedy Dan Kester himself. The climax sees the giant monster spider marching into a crowded town festival, terrorizing the locals. Dr. Vance and Dr. Langer race against time to formulate a scientific counter-attack, ultimately utilizing a specialized "neutron initiator" device to overload the impact site, collapse the black hole, and destroy the spiders once and for all.Hundreds of live tarantulas were shipped from Arizona to be filmed crawling over miniature sets and live actors to simulate the hatchling swarm.