Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo

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Audience Member Beyond directing The Candy Snatchers, Guerdon Trueblood was the king of writing insect movies. Ants!, Terror Out of the Sky, The Savage Bees and this movie, all within two years is how he did it. Directed by Stuart Hagmann, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo pulls a switch on you as you've been led to believe that Tom Atkins and Howard Hesseman are the heroes as they fly out of Ecuador with a huge haul of coffee beans that just so happen to be filled with spiders. Yet after they crash in Finleyville, California, the movie shifts to the townspeople battling the furry eight-legged creeps, including Dr. Hodgins (Pat Hingle), Bert Springer (Claude Akins) and Cindy Beck (Deborah Winters). The town is more concerned about selling oranges than dealing with the spiders until it's nearly too late. The solution: make the sound of wasps so that the spiders stop moving, then dump them into buckets of alcohol. Also: these aren't tarantulas. They're Brazilian wandering spiders. That said, I'll let a silly TV movie play all day long, like a warm blanket when it's cold outside. It is my joy. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/06/23 Full Review Audience Member Killer tarantulas, oranges, and wasp sound that freeze spiders. This movie is ridiculous. It's just to bad that it is also beyond boring. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 01/29/23 Full Review Audience Member "Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo" is a critter feature that offers no scares and little thrills. While the acting and sets are good, the story moves too slowly and the spiders aren't used in any creative or inventive way. We always see the tarantulas simply crawling on the ground, which isn't frightening. Spiders are frightening because they can crawl on walls, hide inside little objects and appear at any moment; by using mostly static tarantulas (which are spiders that are easily recognizable and commonly known to be harmless) the scares simply don't happen. A long portion of the introduction is wasted on the setup where we meet characters that are simply killed off a few minutes later; precious time that could have been used to develop our main characters and make us care about them. Overall the film is dull and audiences won't be scared or excited to watch it and although there are a few jokes at its expense that can be made, even as a "so bad it's good" kind of film it's not terribly entertaining. (Dvd, November 16, 2012) Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 02/08/23 Full Review Audience Member It was actually kinda cool once things got rolling Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/07/23 Full Review Audience Member One of the better terrible movies of the seventies revolving around nature's revenge. Try not to sleep through it. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 02/11/23 Full Review Audience Member Boring movie about tarantulas accidently coming to a small town in Californa. All the actors seemed bored and not really wanting to participate and I can understand them, because the movie was soooo boring. There was barely ANY suspension at all, why would I care that some unnamed B-characters get killed by spiders they are too stupid too notice? I hate to say it, but the spiders actually seemed kinda cute... it was just too obvious they weren't going to hurt the actors. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/07/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo

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