Kiss of the Tarantula (1976)
aka
Shudder
Der Kuss der Tarantel
Poor Susan (excellently played by the lovely and beguiling blonde beauty Suzanna Ling). The comely, but weird misunderstood misfit teenage girl lives with her undertaker father in a mortuary. She has an unnatural affinity for spiders. Susan catches her shrewish mother cheating on her father with her dad's own brother. Susan kills her mom by putting a tarantula in her bed. She also sics her lethal arachnid friends on other folks who rub her the wrong way; said victims of her dangerous wrath include a bunch of local hooligans who break into the mortuary to steal a coffin and Susan's disgustingly incestuous and lecherous uncle (a superbly sleazy Eric Mason). Directed in an effectively blunt and basic manner by Chris Munger, "Kiss of the Tarantula" makes the grade as a creepy and effective low-budget 70's grindhouse scarefest thanks to Phillan Bishop's eerie synthesizer score, credible acting from a solid no-name cast, an arrestingly brooding rustic atmosphere, a grimly serious tone, Henning Schellerup's gritty photography, a wickedly startling surprise twist ending, and several genuinely unsettling spider attack murder set pieces (the sequence where a handful of libidinous kids doing just what you think in a parked car at a drive-in get assaulted by the spiders is the definite flesh-crawling icky highlight). A shamefully neglected and hence underrated teen terror tale that's well worth seeing. (IMDB Woodyanders) V&D
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