Weirdhouse Cinema: Tarantula

Yes, this week on Weirdhouse Cinema, the 1955 film “Tarantula” takes to the hills. Join Rob and Joe as they discuss this atomic-age sci-fi thriller’s titular giant spider, a mutating Leo G. Carrol and Mara Corday’s “lady scientist” character Steve.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is
Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and today we're
doing a classic heat hampered in God's Domain movie. It's

(00:23):
a nineteen fifty atomic age creature feature called Tarantula. Rob.
This movie was your pick, and I'm so glad you
picked it. I've never seen it before, but it is
both m hilarious and pretty good for what it is. Yeah,
I absolutely agree. And it's one that I hadn't seen either,
but I've been I've been familiar with it for ages.

(00:45):
Because of course, this is one of of many films
classic sci fi and horror films that's referenced in the
Lyrics to Science Fiction Double feature from the Rocky Art
Picture Show. It goes a little like this, It goes
Hi knew Leo G. Care was over a barrel wind
to Rancholla took to the hills, And that's Leo G.

(01:06):
Carroll's will discuss is in this film, and the tarantula
does in fact take to the hills. Now, Leo G.
Carroll was much more famous for being in Alfred Hitchcock
thrillers a funny coincidence. Just last week I watched north
By Northwest for the very first time, and he's in
that playing a character called the Professor, which is what

(01:27):
he's called in this movie. Yeah, he has, he had,
He has a great vibe. He has a very scholarly
atmosphere too, British actor that moved to Hollywood. But yeah,
this it's interesting because he's not one of these names.
Even though his name is now synonymous with science fiction
double feature, he's not one of these actors that that

(01:47):
was really in a ton of B movies. He's really
really should be more well known for these Hitchcock films.
But Rocky Horror Picture Show has immortalized him in another
direction as well. Well. I think that's the point of
the lyric, right, he was over a barrel when so
I think they're saying, like Leo G. Carroll he was
having some rough times when he ended up into ranchula.
I don't know if that's true. You know, some of

(02:08):
the times you see an actor more associated with prestigious
movies ending up in a creature feature, it's like, oh wow,
they were really slumming it. But other times you get
the feeling that this was just fun. They decided to
be fun to do that. I mean, it varies wildly
depending on the actor, certainly depending on the production. I
didn't run across anything that said Leo JI Carroll didn't

(02:30):
like the experience, But if he were inclined to dislike
the experience, and he does have to hold a monkey
and gets eventually covered up with a bunch of makeup,
so there's plenty of room there where I could imagine
an actor of his caliber maybe being a little uh
uh disillusioned by his his foray into sci fi B pictures.

(02:51):
Rob he does not only have to hold a monkey,
he has to catch a monkey, because this movie has
an exquisite uh monkey jumps care where Leo G. Carroll
is in the middle of the desert in the nighttime,
secretly burying a body in the sand, and then you
see a figure sneak up behind him. It's like a silhouette.
What is it going to be? Is it going to
be a giant spider? Is it going to be a

(03:12):
monster man? And then turn it's just a little monkey
and he has to catch it in his arms. It's adorable.
Quick poster note on this one. If you look at
the original poster that features a giant tarantula, like a
puppet tarantula, and I think this is an image of
one of the puppets that was used to some extent
in the film, though a lot of what you see

(03:34):
is just an actual tarantula. It's made to look like
it's crawling across the desert hills, but in the poster,
or at least most of the versions of the poster,
it is made to look like it is holding a
woman in its pinchers. This does not actually happen in
the movie at all, but it's one of those situations
where the classic trope of the time was, of course,

(03:56):
show your monster, generally a humanoid monster holding ann conscious woman,
and that was the that was supposed to, you know,
drawl in the viewers. It was what they came to expect,
even though nothing like that actually happens in this film.
There are so many movies like this from the fifties.
I think of Bride of the Monster, the Edwood movie,

(04:16):
which I think the poster for it showed Bella Legosi,
who is in the movie carrying an unconscious woman in
his arms, which he does not do in the movie.
The Attack of the Crab monsters. Poster has the giant crab,
the giant psychic crab who eats people and gains their knowledge.
It has a woman in a bathing suit in its claw.
That never happens in the movie. That puppet never carries anybody.

(04:39):
It does eat people, but it never holds anybody in
its claws. I used to have these, some of these
universal trading cards that I think had been my dad's
or something my way back in the day, black and white,
and they have all these images of classic monsters on them,
and a lot of them are those monsters either scaring
a woman or holding an unconscious woman, like we're discussing here. Yeah,

(05:00):
the way the posters always depict women sort of in peril,
especially in peril, and a kind of reclined posture I
think is supposed to be sexually titillating in some ways
in a way that would be enough to get people's
attention but also not to get censored. Yeah, yeah, and
it's you know, at the time, as a child, I

(05:21):
would look at these and other things. It was almost like, oh, well,
she needs to be carried to bed, and here is
an ape man to do it. Um. Fun fact, we've
watched a couple of movies that have the German born
actress Helga Line you know in them, uh, you know,
the redheaded actor from Horror Rises from the Tomb, as

(05:43):
well as what was the other film, Aloralized Grasp, Yeah,
the Looralized Grasp. There's some vampire film. I forget the
name off hand, but on the front of it, she
is holding a man in that pose like there's like
a skinny dude and she's holding him up like that.
So it's got a nice gender reversal on the trope.
That's what I want. I want fifties movie posters that
are switched like that, where it's the lady carrying a

(06:04):
giant crab in her arms. That would be good. Alright,
So Tarantula from nineteen five. This is exciting because this
is also only our fifth fifties movie on Weird House Cinema.
Oh okay, I would have thought more than that. But
let's see how many we we did the thing from
another World, we did um Fiend without a Face, we

(06:27):
did Not of this Earth, and we did the brain Eaters.
Is that all of them so far? That's it? You
got them all? And this makes five? Okay, when you
rank all those together, Where would you say Tarantula fits. Actually,
I don't know how you do and compare them. We
just when you rank them in terms of an absurd
good time? Where does Tarantula go in there? Oh, for
sheer fun, I'd say it's top of the pack. For quality,

(06:50):
I don't know, things probably top of the pack tarantula
thing or duking it out for top billing here I think, Oh,
I'd say definitely Thing is the best, if the best
for non i onic purposes. And though I think it's
clearly the worst of all of them, I really have
a soft spot for the brain eaters. That one's never
gonna leave my heart. All right, Well, let's get to

(07:10):
the elevator pitch. On this one. I'm just gonna go
with what's written on the poster, and it is all caps,
giant spider strikes crawling terror a hundred feet high? Is
it still crawling if it's a hundred feet high? Something
about the word crawling to me suggests proximity to the ground.
That's a good point. All right, Let's hear the Let's
hear the trailer. This is a great nineteen fifties trailer.

(07:35):
But what have circumstances were magnifying one of the size
and strength took it out of its primitive world and
turned it loose in our Then expect something that's fiercer,
more cruel, and deadly than anything that ever woked here.
Even science was stunned. The new atomic miracles should have
been mankind's greatest boon. Instead, when such power to cause

(07:59):
phenomenal growth gloop dangerously unstable, man was confused with this
most shocking blunder. The figgered out nutrient into a nightmare.
I'm wonder that transformed a tiny insect into a hundred
books spider that was now ravaging the panic stricken countryside.

(08:38):
All right, before we continue here, I'm just gonna advise
everyone out there who is interested in watching Tarantula, well,
you have a lot of options. I watched Tarantula on
a double featured disc from the Classic Sci Fi Ultimate
collection More People, The More People is on the same desk.
But I've seen that one before. This has been a while.
I rented this from Video Drome. That collection has some

(09:00):
nice titles in it. It's pretty cheap, but there's also
a standalone Universal Vault disc that you can rent or purchase.
Uh digitally most places as well. It does seem to
be available on Blu Ray in various formats as well,
So however you want your Tarantula, it can be provided.
I did a digital rental on Amazon and their transfer
looks pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, this one, this one on

(09:21):
the disc was really solid. In fact, speaking of looking
pretty good, uh so, Tarantula has a lot of the
same sort of script pathologies as as many other creature
features of the time. But the special effects in this movie,
I would say are excellent for the time period. I mean,
for nineteen fifty five. The superimposition of the giant spider

(09:44):
onto the desert backgrounds and everything. I think this is
out of the park. Yeah. My son walked in while
I was watching the finale and he immediately said he
was excited to check it out. He's like, I can
tell it's not real. So, yes, you can tell it's
not real. And definitely this style of giant monster, of
the style of using an actual creature such as a

(10:06):
spider or a lizard and filming it in such a
way that it looks big, this largely doesn't really work anymore.
But I think if you if you take the picture
in in its time, it still looks pretty good. Oh yeah, So,
I mean compared this to other movies from around the
same time that use the same techniques. Birdeye Gordon movies
are famous for the superimposing uh something onto a different

(10:28):
background to make it look huge. These look better than
most of the people who did this. But so, there
are two different ways of showing a giant spider in
this movie. One is this uh you know, photographic trick
where they're taking real footage of a real tarantula and
then just super imposing it over a background to make
it look huge. The other one is a puppet. And

(10:49):
I think the puppet in this movie is killer. It's
so good. Yeah, the puppet is really good, and and
I look forward to to talking about the man who
built the puppet. That's actually a fun story as well. Well.
But I guess if we're going to have to start
with the director here, one of the things that I
didn't realize until after I watched the movie is that
this is the creature from the Black Lagoon guy. Right, Yeah, Yeah,

(11:11):
this is Jack Arnold, who not only directed it, he
also has a story credit. He lived nineteen twelve through
uh noted fifties sci fi director for responsible for a
slew of films, so Creature from the Black Lagoon in
fifty four for sure, as well as Revenge of the
Creature in fifty five. He also did nineteen fifty three's
It Came from Outer Space. He has an uncredited um

(11:34):
directorial credit on IMDb for This Island Earth, but he
also directed The Incredible Shrinking Man in fifty seven, The
Space Children and fifty eight, and Monster on Campus in
fifty eight. Prior to these sci fi pictures, he did
a pair of dramas nineteen fifties with These Hands, which
sounds like a thriller but was produced by the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union. So I don't think it's a

(11:57):
I don't think it's like a pro do jal Allow
jallow kind of film. It's wait. That's the same the
union that has the commercial in the Star Wars Holiday Special,
or at least one of the famous tapes of it
where they're all singing the union song. It's the International
Lady Ladies Garment Workers Union. Do Do Do Do, do
the very thing. He also did a nineteen fifty three

(12:20):
film before all this, titled Girls Night Out, which indeed
seems to be a film noir thing, and during the
sixties he ventured into TV. He did a lot of
work on a lot of popular TV shows, rounding it
all out with a few episodes of The Love Boat,
you know. Putting together all of the Jack Arnold movies
I've seen now, including Tarantula here, the Black Lagoon movies,

(12:41):
it seems like he specializes in films where, if you
really stop to think about it, you kind of pity
the monster and and the humans are sort of the
bad guys. Yeah, yeah, definitely that's the case with Creature. Um,
we've i think we've talked about that at least on
episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind in the past.
That Yeah, it's going back and watching Creature from the

(13:02):
Black Agoon is kind of a weird experience because the
monster is fabulous, and he is the thing that you
get behind. He is the he is the character that
you sympathize with. And I'm not saying Jack Arnold meant
it that way. I don't think that's what's really intended,
but it does feel that way because in Creature, you know,
we've talked about this, I think on the show before,
like the humans go into his house, there. It's not

(13:24):
like he's attacking towns or something. Creatures just hanging out
in a pond somewhere. And then all these uh, these
the scientists and people with guns show up and they're like, well,
we're gonna catch this thing. And I guess you're supposed
to be on their side. I don't know. I will
say the difference is that having a creature in the
black logoon seems like a sustainable situation. You can just
give the creature some room and he will be fine.

(13:46):
The giant tarantula in this movie, I clearly this is
not sustainable. Like, clearly something needs to be done. We
can't just keep having this creature. But to spoil the
ending the way they deal with it in the end,
as they napalm it and then the spider is just
burning in the background. You see it's hairy legs on fire.
The hair is kind of singing, and they're like, well

(14:09):
the end a universal international picture, yeah, but also edible,
potentially edible, right that could they? I mean, ultimately they
wanted to solve issues about feeding a growing world. Well
now you have it, giant roasted to rachula, three hundred
tons of spider meat. Yeah, um on the subject with

(14:29):
Jack Arnold, though, I was looking into his filmography a bit,
and I was really intrigued by this nineteen seven film
that he directed titled The Monolith Monsters, which immediately went
to Michael Weldon's books to see if that he had
written anything about it, and I don't think he had.
But the film sounds curious. A meteorite lands near a

(14:50):
sleepy desert town, so you know, entirely unlike Tarantula, but
then it starts growing into skyscraper sized mon a liths
of stone, so it sounds pretty unique. And that the
threat is not alien at all, at least not in
an organic sense. It's like a chemical threat. It's just
unchecked rock growth. So it kind of sounds ahead of

(15:11):
its time, like this sounds like something we would maybe
watch in the nineteen seventies as opposed to in the
ninety seven. Interesting and one more note Jack Arnold as
an actor. He had a cameo in John Landis thriller
Into the Night. I believe he is a man walking
his dog in that. Oh well, you attached to picture
from The Monolith Monsters, And now that I can see it,

(15:33):
it's it makes more sense to me. They are these
uh giant like sort of shards of obsidian jutting up
out of the desert. But yeah, they're as big as buildings. Yeah, strange,
Like I can tell that this probably didn't work without
even it just this is this isn't maybe what the
drive in audience was looking for. They ultimately wanted a monster,

(15:53):
Like how do you even shoot this thing so that
it's holding a woman's unconscious body? Now, now that is
a job for a creative poster maker. What do you
I guess you have the crystals kind of forming a
hand and the ladies there and I don't know. Yeah,
yeah it could work. I'm sure a talented poster artist
good could figure it out. All right, let's get onto
the screenplay here. A screenplay was written by um two individuals.

(16:15):
There's Robert M. Fresco, who lived nine, also a writer
on the Monolith Monster in various TV shows, as well
as uncredited writing on ninety nine The Alligator People, which
should be of note to fans of Rocky Rickson. That's right,
if you're one of those hiding behind the trees with
moss forever, hearing the swamp birds screaming, or if this

(16:38):
One's actually less of her boast than some of his
songs on the Evil One. But I do love that
line when they see alligator persons in the bog and fog. Yeah,
it's it's something's really funny about alligator persons instead of
alligator people. Yes, but but I I and I don't
know if certain, but I assume he's referring to this film.
A lot of those songs do refer back to It's

(17:00):
a classic monster movies and so forth. All Right. The
other screenplay credit is Martin Berkeley, who lived nineteen o
four through ninety nine. Screenwriter active through the forties, fifties,
and sixties. He worked on screenplays for westerns like Green
Grass of Wyoming and Red Sundown, but also films like
Revenge of the Creature and The Deadly Mantis, which I

(17:20):
believe I've seen this one before. This is a giant
killer mantis. I'm not well, it is technically a giant
killer mantis, but a giant praying mantis film. Now, I wonder,
once you had written one Giant Bug screenplay, what was
it like writing the second and third Giant Bug screenplay?
Do you like? How are you? How are you coming

(17:40):
up with new angles on that. What does the giant
bug mean this time? Yeah, it's a it's an interesting question,
I think, one that's partially answered by Tarantula in that
in the way that Tarantula both uh certainly matches the
sort of pre existing format of giant animal movies, but
also bucks some of the ends as well discussed and

(18:01):
not like, most notably being this is not a giant
atomic monster creature, even though it's very much a product
of the of the atomic age and during a time
when so many atomic giant animals were rampaging through cinema.
That's true. They don't say it's directly atomic radiation, though
I do think there's a little bit of atomic magic implicated,

(18:22):
and it's there's a there's a whole sequence in the
middle of the movie with some of the most gorgeous
technobabble that you have ever encountered. We're gonna have to
spend some time on that, but I think they sort
of are trying to say that there's radioactive something in
the juice they're squirting into these animals, but it's hard
to tell. It's hard to decipher alright, Well, speaking of

(18:42):
the science, everyone please get out your periodic table of
classic Hollywood actors. Because this movie contains um Agar, um,
is it Agar or Agar? I'm gonna say Agar, John Agar,
John Agar, John Agar. In this film, he plays Dr
Matt Hastings. That's right. Today's John Agar role will be

(19:04):
played by John Agar, who is just h He's just
a country doctor with common sense, probably a strong right hook.
I don't think we ever see him throw one, but
you can imagine, uh, and apparently a permanent sense of
amusement at the concept of equal rights for women. Uh.
And he he really polished his jawline for this movie.
He is such such a perfect example of the fifties

(19:29):
creature feature lug hero. Yeah, if you haven't seen this film,
and you haven't seen John Agar in anything, you can,
you can still picture him in your mind right now.
He's exactly like you think he looks. He acts exactly
like you think he acts. Uh. He lived nine one
through two thousand and two. Longtime American actor who appeared
in films from eight through two thousand and one. Uh

(19:52):
and even I think a two thousand and five release
via like delayed release. But you can basically divide a
Gar's work into two categories. War in westerns and B movies,
and in the former category he acted alongside folks like
John Wayne and the Sands of theo Jima fort Apachi.
She wore a yellow ribbon all in the late nineteen forties.

(20:13):
But then in the B movie category he appeared in
a lot of quality Monster Mayhem flicks, like The Mole
People from the nineteen fifty six that was on the
same disc as this one. For me, that's a that's
a very fun like Hollow Earth type of film. The
Brain from Planet Arows from seven, Revenge of the Creature

(20:33):
from fifty five, and Hand of Death from sixty two.
I think we discussed doing the Brain from Planet Arouse
or Arose. However you say that, Uh, we ended up
doing Fiend Without a Face instead because we want to
do some kind of brain movie and that there's a
handful that looked pretty juicy. Yeah, we may have to
come back to that one because that has a really
fun looking brain monster in it. It kind of floats around.

(20:55):
So Agar did a lot of TV later in his career,
but the B movie association stuck. And I was reading
on on IMDb that in n two Famous Monsters of Filmland,
a fan magazine. They declared him dead. Uh they said,
you know, r I P. John Agar. But Agar was
not dead, And so he apparently made the rounds at

(21:16):
a lot of sci fi fan conventions back in the day,
signing these magazines about his death. That's good. He was
at one point married to Shirley Temple, and late in
life he had cameos in two films of note nine nineties,
Night Breed, the Clive Barker film, and John Carpenter's anthology

(21:37):
film Body Bags. This is the one where John Carpenter
himself sort of plays the crypt keeper. Uh so I
haven't seen Body Bags. I have seen Nightbreed. Nightbreed is
Clive Barker, and it's full of interesting various monsters. But
actually the thing that most sticks out to me and
about it is the character played by David Cronenberg. He

(21:58):
was he was an actor, just an actor in the movie,
playing the main character, psychotherapist but who also turns out
to be a serial killer who wears a creepy sock
over his head. Yeah. That's a really fun role and
what is ultimately a really fun film. I haven't watched
it in a while, but I remember being quite fond
of it back in the day. I remember enjoying the

(22:18):
book as well. But with Clive Barker, obviously, he's a
he was a big he was a big fan of
classic Hollywood and and all of that, so it makes
sense that he might bring John Agar in to do
a little cameo. But so anyway, the character John Agar
plays in this is sort of set against the scientist
characters who they're The scientists are off doing uh you know,

(22:40):
dangerous unholy experiments in their isolated laboratory in the desert.
Meanwhile John Agar is just he's he's ready to slap
some common sense up against them. So that's our malely
in the film. But we also have a lead female

(23:03):
character in the form of Stephanie Clayton better known as
Steve to everyone, and she was played by the beautiful
Mara corday So born nineteen thirty and as of this
recording is still still with us. Um. Yeah, she was
a model actress fifties cult icon. She later on she
was in the nineteen fifty eight Playboy magazine Centerfold. She

(23:27):
mostly did small acting jobs prior to Tarrantula, but this
is the film that kind of gave her a chance
to shine and kind of propelled her more into the limelight.
So she was more prominently featured in films after this point,
including the nineteen fifty seven Monster films, The Black Scorpion
and The Giant Claw, which is a giant goofy bird movie.

(23:51):
She met Clint Eastwood on the set of this film,
and we'll explain how that is possible in a bed.
But after meeting on the set of this film, they
reported remained friends for a very long time, and all
of her final screen credits are roles in Clint Eastwood
films The Gauntlet in seventy seven, Sudden Impact in eighty three,
Pink Cadillac in eighty nine, and The Rookie in nineteen nine.

(24:14):
In fact, in Sudden Impact, she's the waitress in the
scene where Dirty Harry coins the catchphrase go ahead, make
my day. I think she's being held at gunpoint or
something and he saves her. Oh interesting, Well, you know
what I think. Mark Corday is great in this movie.
She uh, she really brings a sense of fun and
amusement to the silliness here. Yeah, it's a it's a

(24:36):
fun performance. Um. She plays a quote unquote lady scientist
and It's kind of an interesting role for for the
time period. I was I was looking around about this
a little bit because you you look at some of
these nineteen fifties films and clack. In fact, if you
look at The Thing from Another World, Uh, it also
has a I don't know if she's quite a scientist

(24:56):
in it, but you still have a she's at least
what a secretary to a scientist. You have a very
strong female role in that film. I think the character
in The Thing from Another World is widely considered one
of the examples of the the the Howard Hawks leading
lady type character. Yeah. Yeah, And we talked about the
Hawks and um uh female role in that episode of

(25:17):
Weird House that we did. But I was reading a
bit about this from this is a blog post by
Bob Calhoun at Roger Ebert dot com titled Atomic Age
Feminists the Women of fifties sci Fi. And this is
pretty interesting because Calhoun pointed out the first of all
several great examples of female scientists characters or sort of
scientists adjacent characters in such films as The Daily Earth

(25:40):
Stood Still from fifty one, Thing from Another World fifty one,
Revenge of the Creature from fifty five. And then I
was looking around at the Classic Horror Film Board, and
I saw a thread where people were bringing up other examples,
like them rocket Ship x M, the Giant Claw from Hell,
it came the Beast from twenty thousand fathoms, uh, Pamela

(26:00):
Duncan's character and Attack of the Crab Monsters. So there's
a long list, and so Calhoun. In this he cites
feminist American art and film critic Carrie Ricky, pointing out
that much of this seems to come down to the
studio system, which during the thirties and forties had female
screenwriters create the female characters, and that this practice, or

(26:24):
its influence the influence of this practice at any rate,
may have carried over into the nineteen fifties to some extent.
Thus we have all these nuanced, professional female characters showing
up in monster movies and sci fi features. Um However,
he points out that the reverse seems to be true
as well. With the full collapse of the studio system,
you find fewer female scientists roles in films of this

(26:47):
caliber moving forward, and he specifically, of course points to
John Carpenter's remake of the Thing from another world, which
is we discussed in our in our episode about that
movie about about the original that you know, Carpenter's film
has no female characters. It's an entirely male film. Um
So it's um, it is interesting to look back at

(27:07):
all these pictures and see that, Yeah, this is kind
of the era of the B movie female scientist character
that is assertive and strong and and generally holds her
own with with male characters and counterparts. Yes, there's this
interesting mixture where these characters do show up. But of course,
like the funny thing is is how ridiculously sexist the

(27:28):
context still is so like, do you will have a
movie where, oh, you know, so the scientist character is
a woman, that's cool, but then she like has to
make coffee for everybody. That's all of these movies are
in this movie. Um, when she meets John Agar and
they're flirting, and like the first thing he says is like, oh,
lady scientists. Uh yeah, He's like, oh, you give a
woman the vote, what do you get, lady scientists? That's

(27:50):
like it's literally the line from the film. Yeah, there's
other stuff in here too, Like this is one part
where he's John Agar's character is a doctor and he's
delivering medicine to somebody he keeps. It's kind of a
neat or a clever plot device for this is he's
always been called away on jobs, so it kind of
gets him out of scenes when you need him the
action to move on. But he's dropping off medication for

(28:12):
somebody and the husband picks it up and he's like, well,
do you know women, she won't take it, but you
know she'll feel better. Annoying, it's on the shelf. And
I didn't even know that was a stereotype. Yeah, I've
never even heard that. I mean, well, but anyway. Mark
Horday is great in this, and she seems to like
John Agar makes a lady scientist joke. It just seems
to roll off her back. Also, when the first time

(28:33):
she meets um what's his name, Leo G. Carroll's scientist character,
he's like, oh, I didn't expect our new assistant to
look like you. He's just he's not doing a good
job creating a a friendly and productive workplace. But yeah,
so it's yeah, when you're talking about feminism in ninet
fifties monster movies, it's a mixed back, but it's a.

(28:53):
It makes for an interesting analysis, all right. Well, speaking
of Leo G. Carroll, Yes, he plays Professor Gerald Seamer.
So Carol we already talked a little bit about him.
Lived eighteen eighty six through nine seventy two British Hollywood actor,
best known for his roles in Hitchcock films like north
By Northwest from fifty nine, Strangers on a Train fifty one,
and Spellbound from forty five. He also played the character

(29:17):
Alexander Waverley on the series The Man from Uncle as
well as The Girl from Uncle. I believe he played
the same character in both of those shows. One I
guess it's a spin off of the other. He also
played Marley's ghost in the nineteen thirty eight adaptation of
A Christmas Carol. He was active from nineteen thirty four
through nineteen seventy. I don't think he did a lot
of films like this, uh oh. And he was also

(29:39):
in the original nineteen sixty one The Parent Trap. You
don't necessarily get the sense that Carol is unhappy to
be in this movie, but you do get the feeling
that you know, he's one of those actors who's clearly
kind of in a different League, and he's here giving
a more subtle performance than you would expect as the
mad scientist whose crea eating giant spiders. Right, Yeah, like

(30:02):
he doesn't. He certainly doesn't come off as you're you're
sort of cackling mad scientists. And part that's in the
writing too, Like he's ultimately you buy him more as
a guy who's trying to do the right thing. Maybe
he got a little sloppy may maybe he should have
had some better uh uh lab safety protocols in place,

(30:22):
But for the most part, he's not uh, he's not
you know, Lawn Cheney Jr. He's not uh, you know,
the the cackling madman. All right. Another interesting actor in
this we have this actor Nestor Paiva who lived nineteen
o five through nineteen sixty six, who plays Sheriff Jack Andrews,
who's not taken any crap off anybody, especially off of

(30:45):
John Agar. He's our cranky local sheriff. And yeah, Nestor here,
American actor of Portuguese descent, did a lot of Westerns,
including the TV Zoro Show from Disney back in the day,
but is most remembered as cap and Lucas in both
Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature.
He was also in The Mole People and his final
film was They Saved Hitler's Brain. We will get into

(31:10):
more detail about this as we go on, but this
is an unusual type of character, Sheriff Andrews. Here is
this Haysey Desert sheriff who really thinks that egg heads scientists,
really they know what they're doing and they're hard one
expertise should be respected, right right, We shouldn't go investigate
the mysterious lab. Are you crazy? No, don't mess with

(31:30):
those people. And you know what, Doc, you don't know
what you're doing. He's just really into science. Al right.
Speaking of science, there's another character that shows up that's
worth noting. This character Townsend. Who is Is he supposed
to be like Spider Expert? Is he a biologist? I
don't recall his credentials exactly. Oh yeah, he's the guy
who John Agar goes to visit at the Arizona Agricultural Institute,

(31:52):
who shows him a film strip about Tarantula's and shares
a lot of tarantial effects and in a very funny scene. Yeah,
it's it's a memory Will seen in this Uh, This
character Townsend was played by Raymond Bailey, who's of nineteen
o four. Bailey is best known by classic TV fans
as Milbourne Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies, but he was
also in Hitchcock's Vertico. But yeah, when you hear you're

(32:15):
here to Drysdale, Mr Drysdale, this is Mr Drysdale. I
didn't know that when I watched the movie, but now
that you say it, I totally see it. Heat he
he is like a snooty bank manager. Yeah, alright, we
mentioned Clint Eastwood earlier. Yes, Clint Eastwood is in this movie.
He plays uncredited. He plays the jet squadron leader who

(32:38):
shows up to napalm the Spider in the final moments
of the film. Uh, this is not a proper Clint
Eastwood movie, so we're not gonna get exhaustive on this.
But you know, Clint Eastwood legendary actor and director still
active today, not only alive, but active. This was only
his fourth screen appearance, along with some other uncredited roles
in films like Revenge of the Creature, Francis and the

(32:59):
Navy and Lady could Iva of Coventry, all released the
same year as tarantula. He was only twenty five years
old at the time. Can't really comment on his performance.
He just sort of sits in a cockpit and then
he's like releasing napalm. Now, yeah, he has a mask on,
so you really only see his eyes. But man, there's
no denying whose eyes those are. That's clean Eastwitt. All right.

(33:20):
Another uncredited actor of note, uh just playing deputized townsmen
is actor Being Russell, who lived through two thousand and three,
best known perhaps for playing Deputy Clym Foster on the
Western series Bonanza and Robert in The Magnificent Seven. But
he was also Kurt Russell's dad, and he owned the

(33:40):
Portland Mavericks at one point. Now here's this is another
interesting connection. I alluded to this earlier. But as we mentioned,
the tarantula, when we see it is often this actual
tarantula that's made to look big. But also we have
this tarantula puppet. And this was built by Wa Chang
who lived nineteen seventeen through two thousand in three of

(34:01):
Hawaii born Chinese American designer, sculptor and artist, responsible for
the triantula puppet on this film and later responsible for
key prop design on Star Trek the original series, including
the tricorder and the Communicator. Yeah. He also did some
costumes on Key Classic Track episodes. He apparently created the

(34:23):
Triples legendary, Yeah, legendary. He also worked on the original
Outer Limits, the original Planet of the Apes movie, the
TV series Land of the Lost. He did visual effects
in the nineteen six adaptation of H. G. Wells The
Time Machine, stop motion puppets on the Monster from Green
Hill from fifty seven and uh he was the adoptive
son of James Balding sloan on American etcher printmaker, uh,

(34:47):
theater theatrical designer and also a puppeteer. But yeah, this
was an interesting uh case here. I've looked up some
images of him showing him when creating various dragons and creatures.
I think he was so had some involvement in some
Disney productions with sort of modeling of creatures to be animated.
So quite an interesting story. Well, I say once again bravo.

(35:10):
On The Spider Puppet, I would say broadly, this movie
does not actually have any scary parts except for one.
There's one scene where the Spider Puppet kind of peers
through a window at Mara Corday and that, oh, that
one is actually creepy. Yeah, that that scene I found
was legitimately creepy. It too is also kind of a
classic trope of the time period, right the the female

(35:33):
character is changing or getting ready for bed and a
monster peers through the window. Though it's it's kind of
funny that in this scene she's she's about to take
her her nightgown off, you know, to get into bed,
and we only briefly see that she's she's wearing full
length pajamas underneath there. So I don't know what the
spider thought he was going to say, but that's right.

(35:54):
The tarantula is peeping in, though it seems clearly that
this is not a lusty peeping in. This is just
like king for fluid filled humans to drain, right, yes,
But also, you know, coming back to Steve Mars character,
you know, she's she's a smart lady. She knows there
is a rampaging spider on the loose, so we're sensible
garments to bed, you don't want to, don't wear anything

(36:16):
you don't want to take off across town in that's correct,
and she does get out of the situation. Yeah, uh, Finally,
on the music note, I'm gonna spend a lot of
time on this because it's my understanding that this was
just studio stock music we used on this. But the
two individuals that are uncredited are Henry Mancini, who lived
twenty four through and Hermann Stein, who lived nineteen fifteen

(36:36):
through two thousand and seven. Mancini notable for such scores
as The Pink Panther, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and six Romeo
and Juliet, and Stein he worked on a lot of
nineteen fifties sci fi films, including It Came from Outer Space,
Revenge of the Creature, This Island Earth, and many more.

(37:01):
All Right, is it time to talk about the plot.
Let's do it. Let's dive right in. Al So, the
film begins in the desert. Actually, one of the first
things I noticed about it was one of the opening
desert shots all the shows. These different plants, kind of
scrub plants out in the desert, and they're all kind
of equally spaced apart from each other, almost as if
they're trying to keep their distance. I don't know if

(37:22):
that was a detail chosen on purpose, but anyway, you
got the scrub plants, You've got rocks, sand wind, and
then a man in pajamas with monster makeup on his
face stumbles around until he dies. Oh man, this game's
full length pajama game is strong. Um. It makes me
think of how I remember hearing that supposedly on HBO's

(37:43):
Game of Thrones, there was like somebody from the studio
or from the network there that was there just to
remind the director. It's like, hey, you can have full
nudity in this scene if you want. I like to
think there was somebody on this picture that's like, hey,
by the way, if you want full length pajamas and
this shot, you got it. We got them on all sides.
It is ready to go. Oh they do them up

(38:04):
and down, so many pajamas. But this monster makeup looks
pretty good and it's a strong start to the film. Yes,
I would say the monster makeup looks good, though it
also it does not match up well with something that
they they end up attributing the monster makeup too. Yes,
because this individual is supposed to have acromegaly uh, the

(38:25):
the rare condition that causes excessive production of growth hormone
by the peteritary gland that results in large bones in
the face, feet, and hands. Right today, it's known as acromegaly,
and that that's the I'm not positive, but that's the
way I've always heard it pronounced. In this movie, they
call it acromegalia, And uh, from what I can tell,

(38:47):
this movie is not at all a good barometer of
what acromegaly actually looks like. Of course, acromegally does affect
to different body parts with you know, with abnormal growth,
you get changes to the facial features and so forth.
But this movie just straight up puts people in Frankenstein makeup,
which is not accurate. So don't get your ideas about
acromegaly from Tarantula. Yeah, I mean, I guess they were

(39:08):
sort of going for a rondo um hat and look
on these characters. He was, of course, was a was
an actor who appeared in a lot of genre pieces.
He died in forty six, so you know he'd been
he was dead by the time this came out, but
he was kind of a signature presence and a lot
of these old Hollywood horror films. Uh so maybe that

(39:29):
was sort of the inspiration here. Yeah, possibly the makeup.
Either way, the makeup takes takes this to fantastical extremes,
and I guess that makes sense because this is I
don't know, maybe we're supposed to understand that this is
not actually acromegaly. It is just some acromegaly resembling science
fiction condition caused by the the intake of this high

(39:51):
fictional nutrient. Yeah, but I can see where audiences would
have been rather shocked and surprised, because you know, you're
getting a giant spider in this film. That's definitely gonna happen.
And then suddenly there's this something else is going on.
You have some sort of you know, strange mutations and
deformities occurring. Just right off the bat. The first character
you meet in this film, uh Is, is severely disfigured.

(40:16):
People may be wondering, did I walk into the wrong movie?
I thought I was going to see a giant spider. Yeah,
but no, So you get this character. He collapses in
the desert, and then credits, and then we begin the
main plot. So the first thing we see is a
small aircraft that is landing at an airstrip in Arizona,
and outsteps John A. Gar apparently the pilot A pilot,

(40:37):
the pilot of this plane. But no, he's not a
professional pilot. He is a doctor. He starts talking to
the guy who works at the air strip and the
guy says, what's the score, doc, So I guess we
understand he's a doctor, and he responds, twins cutest things
you ever saw. And this initially really confused me because I,

(40:59):
erroneus assumed that he was reporting that he and his
wife had just had twins, and that does not make
sense within the rest of the movie. It wouldn't make
sense with the situation at all, because you know, John
Agar is going to be your leading man, uh and
a fifties creature feature hero always needs to be single
so he can have a romance with the leading lady.
But upon revisiting, I realized he's talking about delivering twins

(41:24):
for some people who are living out in the desert.
There's somebody else's twins, So I guess he does remote
house calls in his airplane. I guess. So. I mean,
I know that this has been the case in remote
places around the world, where you would have doctor's flown
into remote communities and so forth, But this picture kind
of makes it seem like he's just flying to somebody's house,

(41:45):
landing in in their their the desert front yard, and
then climbing out and going in, delivering some twins, maybe
just leaving the the engine running, coming back out, getting
in the plane, flying home. Yeah, it really does seem
to be suggesting that I don't know exactly how to
read this. Every little bit of a window we get
into his actual medical practice does not inspire confidence, right,

(42:08):
Like isn't his office in a hotel? Yeah? Yeah, so okay,
So he hops into his convertible and heads into town
and he lives in this this Arizona desert town. What's
the town called. It's called like Rock Desert or something. Something.
Only did that effect and I should know that even
though it's supposed to take place in Arizona, everything you
see is California that this film was. This film was

(42:30):
definitely filmed in California, So we're seeing the California desert
even though it's supposed to be the Arizona Desert. As
you already mentioned, Um drives around in a convertible with
the top down, no hat, no sunglasses, no Yeah, this
is a guy that lives and works in the desert,
and yet no no effort at all is put into
protecting himself from the sun that I just couldn't get

(42:53):
past that the whole movie. I'm like, put the top
up on that convertible. Can you grab a hat or
some shades or something. Yeah, But so you mentioned that
it's he seems to work out of a hotel. I
concluded the same thing. So he goes into town and
we casually meet several characters. Johnny Gargan is a doctor,
but he seems to use the lobby of a place
called the Palace Hotel as his office, like literally using

(43:17):
the desk worker at the hotel. Who's this funny older
guy named Josh as his secretary? Like like Josh like
takes phone calls for him, places phone calls for him,
listens in on the phone calls. Yeah, this this is
a guy. Josh was played by Hank Patterson, who later
went on to have a role on Green Acres. So
I think a lot of people, at least he used to.

(43:37):
I don't know how well versed modern viewers are in
Green Anchors, but a lot of people would watch the
film and be like, Hey, it's the guy from Green Anchors.
What do you call this type of stock character who's
like the the kind of funny, older, wrinkly guy with
kind of a wrinkly hound dog face who is the
butt of jokes. I don't know what you it seems

(43:58):
to be a type. Yeah, I don't know, but it
it's kind of nice that it it shows you in
a movie like this. They were thinking about, Okay, well,
well can we make this scene funny? We have to
have some sort of character interacting here between this character
and another. Let's let's get somebody handy in there. Do
a little bit, nothing, nothing too extreme, but just enough
humor to get us from one scene to the next.

(44:19):
Little did they know that the movie was going to
be plenty funny enough with all the science scenes. Okay,
but anyway, Dr Hastings here John Aygar. He gets a
call from the sheriff. Uh, it's you know, we need
you to come down to the police station to help
with something. There was a man found dead in the desert,
but he looks unusual and the sheriff this is again
Sheriff Jack Andrews played by Nestor Piva. He thinks there

(44:41):
is something about this man's face that, in one sense,
looks like a guy that they knew named Eric Jacobs,
but then there's something else about him that says, well,
maybe it ain't him, And so I think the audience
here is clearly supposed to conclude this was the guy
in pajamas that we saw before the credits, and we
learned that Eric Jacobs was a biologist who worked with
Professor Deemer, an old scientist who's doing research at a

(45:04):
secluded house out in the desert. And they want John
Agar's opinion on the body. But then while John Agar
is investigating, uh, Deemer himself arrives and he identifies the body.
He says that the cause of death was again that
condition acromegalia, and John Agar says, well, yeah, okay, so
it kind of looks like that. But also some people

(45:24):
saw him just a month ago and he didn't have
any signs of it then, and acromegalia cannot progress that fast,
so they argue about this. Deemer says it is zacromegalia,
and Agar says, there's never been a case of acromegalia
working like that, and then Deemer says, but the history
of medicine is the history of the unusual, which is

(45:45):
a fantastic rhetorical gambit, right, Like anybody who says, anything
seems implausible. You could just say, but isn't the world
very strange? There's no way to argue with it, right,
Like I can breathe in outer space and I can
digest lead blocks for nutrition, and you might say that's
not possible, and I say, is medicine not the history
of the unusual? Anyway? Deemer says, well, Eric began to

(46:08):
complain muscle pains four days ago. He says, he says,
these things happen as you grow older. And eventually Deemer
leaves and Agar is talking to the sheriff and he's like, well,
there's no way this is Zachromegalia, and the country sheriff
just forcefully rebukes him. He says, the quote is yeah,
young fellow, like you can't stack what he knows against

(46:30):
the professor. So it's and this is a repeated theme.
The sheriff in this movie is an egghead professor, super fan.
He's got all these lines that are along the lines.
You know. It's like, look, John, Agar, all you have
is rugged all American common sense, and that don't mean
nothing compared to the high falutint ivory Tower book Learning

(46:50):
of a reclusive professor with foreign accent. It's the exact
opposite of Fiend without a face, in which everyone was
super suspicious of the science facility and it's possible connections
to all the strange things that were occurring. But here
the Sheriff's not having any of that crap. Yeah, totally,
the sheriff. The sheriff has so much faith in the professor.

(47:12):
Uh and and John Agar actually like ribs him for it.
He's like, well, I guess there's no getting over the
wall of prestige. So anyway, we follow Professor Deemer. Now
he goes back to his lab. We see him checking
on his experiments, and he's got all these specimens. He's
got giant rats and giant rabbits and giant guinea pigs
and a giant tarantula in a glass tank. It's like

(47:35):
an aquarium tank, but I guess without water in it.
And we see him working on his notes, which include
like numbers of days since an injection of something. The
farther out from the injection, the bigger the animal gets.
And the tarantula is already too big, like it's already
her responsibly big. This is already like giant tortoise sized. Anyway,

(47:57):
while he's doing his experiments. Oops, there's another guy who
looks like Eric Jacobs did at the beginning, and he
comes in. He bashes Deemer on the head with something
he sets fired everything. He injects Deemer with the mystery serum. Uh.
This guy has identified as Paul, so I think this
was Deemer's other research assistant. That that there were the
three of them working in the house and two of

(48:17):
them got this condition. Oh and during the fighting, the
glass of the aquarium breaks and the tarantula escapes out
the open door while the humans are fighting. So Deemer
survives this, I think. I think somehow Paul Paul is
killed in the fight, and Deemer manages to put out
the fire, but his laboratory is ruined, and then he

(48:38):
heads out in the middle of the night to secretly
bury the other guy. This is the scene with the
hilarious monkey jump scare that I mentioned earlier, but it
also ends in a very cute and sweet way. After
Deemer catches the monkey in his arms, he's like, Coco,
you startled me, and clearly loves his monkey. He's like, oh,
your paws are burned. I'll help you. If he gets

(48:59):
some monk key bomb monkey bomb will go right on there. Uh.
So then we go back to more action with John
Agar and the sheriff. John Agar shows up back in
town to report. He's like, hey, I followed up on this.
I went to the medical librarian Phoenix, and I confirmed
there has never been a case in recorded history of
acromegalia developing in four days. And he says, I may
be a simple country doctor, but I know what I know.

(49:23):
And uh And again the sheriff is not having it.
He's like, are you trying to say the professor was
lying to us? You want me to charge him with
confusing a country doctor. He is ruthless and just dressing
down John Agar in these scenes. Yeah, but John agar
suspicions are not only not going down, they're mounting. He's
suspicious now, not just about the death. He's raising in

(49:45):
a big old eyebrow, at the whole operation. He says,
Jacobs and Deemer are two of the leading nutrient biologists
in the world. And he says, when there are two
guys like that they hold up in a remote desert mansion,
you know what that means. They're probably trying to do
secret research. Oh. And then we meet another character here
comes Joe Birch, the newspaperman who just wanders into the

(50:08):
into the office, and he's on the case. He wants
information and he's going to go investigate Deemer himself. We
get the impression that he is an irritating and tenacious
attack dog. Yeah. I looked up this actor and he
he appeared in a lot of things back then. I
think he was on the Andy Griff Show at some point. Um,
I couldn't pinpoint exactly what I recognized him from, but

(50:30):
he has that face that that smug um. This is
the face that's the smug and a little too assertive.
You know, he's he's taking too much pleasure in messing
with your business. And I feel like that's probably the
sort of character he played a lot. I don't know,
if you agree to me. His face has has slight

(50:50):
notes of Christopher Guest. Yeah maybe so yeah. Anyway, Okay,
so we just met another character. We're gonna meet yet
another character. And this is when Maracorda shows up, arrives
in town by bus. You've got a bunch of luggage,
and she goes into the hotel and meets Josh there,
oh old Josh, and she says, Hey, I'm looking to
get to the Deemer house. You know, how can I

(51:10):
get there? And he gives her this whole speech, basically,
well you can't get there from here. She She's like,
wouldn't it, couldn't you call me? Uh? Would you mind
calling me a cab? And he says, I wouldn't mind
it a bit, but it won't do no good. But anyway,
what do you know? John Agar walks in and the
moment he and Maracorda size each other up, you know,
there might as well be a saxophone lick on the soundtrack.

(51:33):
It's just love at first sight. They're immediately flirting and
John Agar is going to give her a ride to
the Deemer house. There's a reaction to this whole scene
where Josh the hotel guys he they leave and he
just leans back and says directly into the camera, it's
getting to be a fast world. But so we're with
John Agar Maro Corda. They introduced themselves to each other

(51:56):
while riding in the convertible. Uh, she says, oh. She
makes clear her name is Steve, and he goes, I
like Steve, and they they flirt and you know, he
wants to know, Hey, why are you going out to Deemers?
What's going on there? And she explains she's getting her
PhD in biology and she's going to study with Deemer
and Jacobs. Uh. And this is where John Agar says

(52:17):
the line I wrote it down. He says, I knew
it would happen. Give women the vote, and what do
you get lady scientists? And her retort as well students
so far. But so she explains she's going to live
at the house and cook for them, but also do
science in the lab. Yeah, it seems like they're asking
a lot like this is really should have been like
two or three different hires here, and they should have

(52:39):
just kept Steve for for just lab work type stuff.
And you know what, they maybe should have arranged for
transportation by join the town and their secluded um laboratory here. Well,
I think Deemer doesn't even know she's coming. It's she
only made arrangements with Jacobs, remember, and he died in
the desert. Oh, and so they also talked abo that.

(53:00):
John Agar is like, well, by the way, the guy
you're coming to meet here is dead, and she's like,
oh no, but anyway, when so they they're about to
arrive at the Deemer house, and what follows is an
absolutely extraordinary scene of nonsensical techno babble where Professor Deemer
is explaining his experiments. Tomorrow Corday and John Agar so
they arrive Deemer, the Deemer character is already in the

(53:23):
middle of an interview with Joe Birch, the newspaperman. Uh,
you know, he's he's explaining what happened to his lab.
He's got a monkey on his shoulders while he's doing it,
and Joe Birch wants to know more about what happened
to Jacobs. But Deemer is done. He's like, this interview
is over, and Joe Birch has a sidekick with him.
It's a cowboy photographer named Ridley, and he wants Ridley

(53:45):
to get a picture of them. He's like Pat the
monkey professor. Because so anyway, the newspaper guys leave and
then uh, Matt Hastings and Steve are left there with Deemer,
and Deemer of course is like, what who are you?
Before Steve can introduce her, say, Matt jumps in and says,
this is Stephanie Clayton. She goes by Steve. You know,
she's the graduate student who is going to come work

(54:07):
with you in your lab, or maybe not with you.
I think she's the one who's going to come work
with Professor Jacobs. You know. Unfortunately he turned into a
Frankenstein and exploded in the desert. Um, so I guess
she I guess she has to assist Leo G. Carroll instead. Yeah,
and then this is the scene where he's like, well,
you probably don't want to stay, but if you want to,
then fine we can use you. Yeah exactly, He's like,

(54:30):
I'm not sure you want to stay on seeing is
you know how my lab is on fire and everyone
is dead. And she's like, oh, I would love to
be of service. Um, so they begin the lab to oh.
This is also the scene where he's like, he says,
I didn't expect to see a biologist that looked like you.
I mean that as a compliment of course, Deemer Deamer.
It makes you wonder like, is this what happened to

(54:52):
the other two researchers that Frankenstein themselves? Like did they
get sick of Deemer making annoying comments at them? And
they're like, it's time to inject the new tree? And yes, anyway,
begin the lab tour, so uh Deemer explains, everything that

(55:14):
I have and care for is here. Um And so
they're looking around and John Agar starts looking down into
a containment box, which is one of those boxes like
in the credits of The Simpsons. You know, it's got
the gloves, the sealed gloves coming in from the outside
so you can manipulate stuff on the inside, but it
stays contained. This is a great lab scene, by the way,
that the whole set is great. There's there's just a

(55:36):
lot of fun gear. There are scenes even I think
at this point in later where they're like multiple Bunsen
burners going in the background, the various glass containers having
bubbling liquids. So there's a lot going on here. And
it's a it's it's a it's a neat set totally.
And they leave the beaker's burning when they're they leave
the house and the beakers are still burning. Yeah. I

(55:59):
think it's that kind of lappiness that that's what led
to a giant spider rampaging across the hills. Here. I
have to agree. Here, Okay, now here's where some of
the technobabble starts. John Iger, he looks at the beaker
he says, what's in the beaker? Deemer says a nutrient.
Steve says, you mean a synthetic How does that follow
from a nutrient? Deemer says completely. Non organic food concentrate

(56:24):
medicine has lengthened the lifespan and people live longer, but
the food supply remains fairly static. World population is increasing
at the rate of twenty five million a year, an
overcrowded world. That means not enough to eat. The disease
of hunger, like most diseases, well it spreads. There are
two billion people in the world today. In nineteen five,

(56:48):
there will be three billion. In the year two thousand,
there will be three billion, six hundred and twenty five million.
You're off by a few billion there um. And he
says the world may not be able to deuce enough
food to feed all these people. Now, perhaps you'll understand
what an inexpensive nutrient will mean. And John Agar, instead

(57:08):
of saying every everything you just said is wrong, he says, well,
not many of us look that far into the future, sir,
And Deemer says, our business is the future. No man
can do it on his own. Of course, you don't
pull it out of your hat like a magician's rabbit.
You build on what hundreds of others have learned before you. Okay.
John Agar then says, I thought synthesis was impossible without

(57:32):
a bonding agent to hold everything together. Deemer says, and
we use the simplest of all the atom Let me
show you. And then they motioned to a room that's
like sealed behind glass, but there's a table in there
with a bunch of vials on it. And then Matt,
looking through the glass at it these vials on the table, says,

(57:53):
that's an isotope, isn't it. Deemer says, a radio act
to isotope ammoniac. And then Matt says, and that's what
binds your solution. Deemer says, binds it and triggers it
using it. Eric's dreame in mind, maybe a reality before.
But then there's a phone call that interrupts whatever he

(58:15):
was going to say, interrupts this beautiful sequence of events.
And I was just thinking, by god, this like we
could do a whole episode on just trying to sort
out the weirdness of all the science babble he just said.
Now it is worth noting that it is Leo G.
Carroll saying all of the science babble, and so it
is at least stated in a very nice British accent,

(58:38):
which has makes it a lot more believable for all
the wrong reasons. I guess what they're all saying is
sort of equally like huh. But the John Agar lines
sound much stupider than the Deemer ones, Like when John
Agar says, that's an isotope, isn't it? It's just like
a table. Yeah. But if I understand the scheme here

(58:59):
that this, well, the scientific objective here is the population
is growing. There's not going to be enough food for everyone.
So what if we could just inject nutrients directly into
our body so we don't have to eat. I think
that is the idea they're saying. Now. Of course they
get all the population statistics wrong, and of course, you know,
at the time this movie was being made, I don't

(59:20):
have a lot of knowledge about this, but you know,
something in the mid century, I think, like the fifties
through especially, I think like the late sixties early seventies,
there was the the Third Agricultural Revolution going on, you know,
the the Green Revolution, which had a bunch of changes
in in crops that allowed for increased crop yields and
food production. Um. So it's interesting that this is simultaneous

(59:44):
with like real advances going on in the world, but
by completely different means, by completely different means than using
an isotope. Oh but anyway, so the phone call, it's
for John Agar. He's got to go do a house call.
But before he leaves, he gets deem or permission to
do an autopsy on Jacobs to see if it was
really quote acromegalia. And then so he's leaving and then

(01:00:07):
deemers talking to Steve and he's like, well, now I'll
show you to your quarters, which just made me think basically,
it's gonna be like, Steve, let me show you to
your glass aquarium tank where the one where you'll be staying.
The previous tenant left a few patches of silk webbing
and scrat corpses. We'll have to get those cleaned up.
But anyway, so we followed John Agar around. He does

(01:00:28):
the autopsy, he comes out to talk with the sheriff
and admits that his suspicions were wrong. He says, yep, yep,
the death was caused by acromegalia and this is where
and the Sheriff's like, you mean, the professor was right.
This scene, by the way, it takes place in front
of two stained glass windows, which I've read online that
at least one of these windows it was later used

(01:00:51):
in Psycho. Oh. Interesting. I have to say, a colorful
stained glass window like this in black and white, it
has a unique kind of feel to it, uh as
it does in Psycho. I agree. I don't recall when
it is in Psycho, but I can totally see that
it clicks for me. It seems to make sense. But so, yeah,
I guess they're in the medical examiner's office or something,
and um, yeah, so you know, the Sheriff's like, you mean,

(01:01:14):
the professor was right? And then he does another just
absolutely brutal, demoralizing dressing down of John Agar. Oh yeah,
this is where he says, next time, I'm going to
bring in a doctor from Phoenix. It's just just so brutal,
Like I feel like most in real life, how many
professionals would take this degree of of of dressing down
from uh the old crank. But but Agar just kind

(01:01:37):
of takes it, takes it in stride. Well, nothing bothers him.
So in the middle third of the movie. I'm gonna
skip more lightly over a few things here, but we
see Deemer and Steve working in the laboratory. They're getting
more explanations of of how the nutrient works, what's gone
wrong with previous experiments, and so forth. Uh, Steve. Oh,

(01:01:57):
there's a part where Steve has to leave for town
and she says the line is science is science, but
a girl must get her hair done. So she's gonna
go get her hair done, and also like thirty things
like you later run into her aunt and she has
like thirty thirty. She has a bunch of parcels she's
picked up, so I don't know, I mean, she did
just move to the area. I'm sure these are all

(01:02:18):
important purchases. Well, but also we're supposed to get the
impression that this town has like a hundred people in it.
What's the shopping district like in Rock Desert, Arizona or whatever?
This is? So John Agar and Steve meet up while
she's in town, and then they walk around sit on
benches and they flirt and they have a romantic afternoon
that ends with them going for a ride in the
desert and they have a have a nice hike and

(01:02:42):
sit under a rock formation to have a cigarette, when
suddenly there is a landslide that nearly crushes them and
they have to they have to get out of the way.
By the way, the whole time they're out in the desert,
here in the middle of the day, John Agar is
in full jacket and tie. Yes, with those enormous shoulders
on the that that that that jacket. I just was
weirded out by the jacket the whole time. I guess jacket. Yeah,

(01:03:06):
I guess it's the style of the day. But nobody
else's shoulders are that big by virtue of the garment alone, seemingly.
I don't know. Maybe agars shoulders are really that long,
but I doubt it. Well, So after there's a landslide,
Steve is like, I've had enough of the unknown for
one day. And she she's sort of pondering in the car.

(01:03:27):
She's like, that rock slide. Something must have caused it.
You can almost tell, like an earlier draft of the
script head or say, like it's almost as if there
was a giant spider up there or something. And this
is when John Agar says, you can't second guess the desert.
But we see we start to see Deemer presenting the
same symptoms as his colleagues from earlier. Uh you know

(01:03:48):
he oh. Uh. Steve shows John Agar around the lab
some more, and deemers like, you shouldn't have done that,
You should have you know, you're you're not allowed to
bring people in. And then meanwhile John Agar in the
sheriff go investigate a rancher's complaints that his horses and
cattle are being stripped of all flesh in the night,
and uh, it's leaving just piles of clean bones in

(01:04:09):
the grass. Later, I think the rancher himself is eaten mysteriously.
And they find that a car was thrown off the
highway as if it was picked up from above and
tossed thirty feet. But they also keep finding big strange
puddles of some sort of whitish substance. And at first
they're they're all like a little too unconcerned over this.

(01:04:31):
They're like, like, what are this? Why are there giant
puddles of white liquid? And they're like it's probably not related,
But then they eventually come back around to it. John
Agar tries to assess what is in the puddles of
goo by tasting it. He like he dips his fingers
and the goo and he like puts it in his
mouth and then he goes, it's not milk, not milk,

(01:04:56):
it's not cheese, and I don't know, you have to
have it tested. I think he concludes its insect venom.
But also in this middle section of the movie, we
start getting more and more shots of the actual tarantula,
Like we watched the tarantula attack a bunch of horses
on a ranch at night and then attack the rancher,
throw the car off the road, and so forth, and

(01:05:16):
man again, the special effects look pretty great. Yeah, yeah,
they do um and the spider comes off as a
real threat. It's it's kind of scary to why you don't,
you know, see people visibly digested by the spider and
so forth. But it's still pretty horrifying to see the
see it to come in and all the cut to
the I think the puppet spider pinchers and all as

(01:05:38):
it's actually supposed to be grabbing the individual, and then
they cut away and leave the grizzly details to your imagination,
as it should be in a film from this era. Yeah. Well,
eventually Steve gets concerned about Professor Deemer because of the
symptoms he's showing and uh and so John Aygar goes
to help. Uh. He he shows up there and Deemer

(01:05:59):
can hardly breathe. Then, so John Agar gives him some
kind of injection. I don't think it specified what it is,
but here it's finally time for Deemer to spill the beans.
He says that, Okay, he and Jacobs had been working
on this together quote since our days at oak Ridge.
I assume he's referring to oak Ridge, Tennessee, which was
the production site for the Manhattan Project during World War Two,

(01:06:21):
developing the atomic bomb. So this, along with the sort
of vague talk about quote an isotope or a radioactive isotope,
makes me think they're sort of getting some atomic age
stuff in here. But but they're they're just not very
clear on how it works. Anyway, Deemer says, you know, Jacobs,
he was an impatient old man, and even though the

(01:06:42):
nutrients sometimes failed on the animals they were testing it on,
he thought it still might work on humans. So one day,
while Deemer was out, Jacobs and the other guy, Paul Lundon,
they decided, well, you know, let's do it. Let's inject
ourselves with it, and like it keeps making the rabbits explode,
but you know, it just might work on humans. Let's
try it. Let's experiment on ourselves with this dangerous nutrient,

(01:07:06):
and that's apparently how it goes down. But you know,
I kept I I would look back on this and
I had questions that I'm sure the film, this is
not a film that I think was really trying to
play with any subtlety like this. But like when one
of the Frankenstein researchers injects Deemer, there's this sense of
like like now you're gonna die too. Now you're like

(01:07:27):
a vengeance almost. That made me question like, well, well,
who injected who did Deem or inject them because they
seem very vengeful towards him if they just injected themselves.
But um, the film doesn't actually push uh an audience
um interpretation in that direction at any point, So it's
probably just me overthinking it. Yeah, I know what you're

(01:07:48):
talking about with that scene that is weird when Lund
injects Deemer. I don't know exactly what to make of that.
It could be a product of like an earlier draft
of the script or something where maybe at one point,
Deemer's character was supposed to be more malicious, and then
they realized and worked a little better. If he was not,
I don't know, but at any rate, he's a Deemer

(01:08:08):
Certainly Frankenstein ngu pretty hard. At this point, Deemer says,
the isotope triggered our nutrient into a nightmare. That's a
quote Deemer. He also in the scene he gets very
emotional about his specimens. He's like walking through the lab
kind of saying, you should have seen them all before
the fire. They lived on nothing but our nutrient. A

(01:08:29):
rat eight times normal size, the guinea pig big as
a police dog, a tarantula lost all lost. Oh, and
John agar Is is interested in the tarantula. He's like,
what happened to it? And Deemer says it got burned,
but we know otherwise. And he passes out due to
grief about his precious tarantula. So they put him to bed. Uh.

(01:08:53):
John agar tell Steve that there is no hope whatsoever
for him, but gives her some pills and says to
give him to Deemer for pain, and then he says
he's got to go check on something because we know
what's going on. John John Agar spidy senses are tingling,
especially since he's seen that goo out in the ranch.
So this is where he goes to the Agricultural Institute

(01:09:14):
to get the goose samples tested. He wonders if it's
insect venom while he meets Mr Drysdale here at the lab,
and Drysdale tells him it's not insect venom. He says, quote,
it's from a species called a rack nidda. You mean
a spider a tarantula to be exact. But the scientist says,
I've never seen so much of it. He says, there's
more venom in this test tube than you'd find in

(01:09:36):
a hundred tarantulas. And then by simple math, John Agar concludes, well,
a tarantula that could secrete that much venom must be
a hundred times larger than a regular tarantula. But this
is just a sample, Like, this is just what he
fit into the tube, not the amount that was produced. Yeah,
this is just, you know, what he was able to

(01:09:56):
put in the tube, not not counting the other puddles
that were litter all over the place of the scene
of the murder. By the way, I hope that the
tarantula the giant tarantula. Also ate that plus sized rat
and that guinea pig the size of a police dog
if they escaped, because you know, otherwise, if it's skipping

(01:10:16):
those and going straight to humans, like, shame on, new tarantula,
at least eat the other plus sized animals first. They
never address what happened to the other animals that I
was thinking that after the movie was over. It's like
they burned the tarantula, but there could be a rampaging
guinea pig the size of a blue whale. Yeah, they
could be in a sequel, just rolling across the hills. Well, anyway,

(01:10:45):
Johnny Gar tells the scientist about all the puddles, and
the scientist is incredulous, but he and then he's like, anyway,
let's watch an educational film strip about tarantula's Uh so
we learned all kinds of things in the scene. First.
The really funny thing here is that apparently the scientists
begins by using the film strip to demonstrate that there
are no such things in nature as tarantulas that are

(01:11:08):
a hundred feet tall. So like he's like, you know,
see the largest tarantulas in South America, it's only a
foot in diameter with the legs stretched out the ones
in Arizona, or even smaller. So so you see, you know,
a tarantula the size of a blue whale is just
not to be found in nature. I found it interesting
that the video they watch does acknowledge the tarantula hawk wasp,

(01:11:31):
you know, the the wasp that that that that lay
their eggs inside of the tarantula. Uh, Because I was
thinking to myself, it's like, well, you know, kudos that
they acknowledge that that these wasps are really at the
top of the heap and not the tarantula, because I
felt like they might have been tempted to edit things
so that they just position the tarantula as more fierce

(01:11:52):
than it actually is. Well, let's see what they do say,
because we learn a lot of things from this film strip.
So we learned the following. Okay, are you ready, let's
do it. Tarantula's have eight legs. Correct, they can move
faster than you think. Depends on what you think. Yeah. Yeah.
They say this assures him of a long life, the
scientists disgustingly saying him of the tarantula. I don't know

(01:12:15):
why this assures him of a long life. Sometimes twenty
five years. Okay, don't I don't know that. Maybe I
don't have the facts the keyed up on that. Uh.
They say the spider wasp is the tarantula's deadliest enemy.
Strong case to be made for it. Okay. From here
we go to tarantula does not know the meaning of fear. Well, yes,

(01:12:36):
that's probably true. Uh, he'll back down a rattlesnake if
he has to. Well, we are given the cinematic evidence
of this. Uh. Quote their flesh eaters, these are John
Agar's words, and desert beetles are their usual diet. Okay,
we have more footages provided, so we buy this. Okay.

(01:12:58):
Their jaws are powerful enough to pierce a man's finger,
so they say it could be the case. They pre
digest their food by flooding the wound with a powerful
solvent so that the flesh can be sucked into the body.
And then John A. Car says that would account for
the bones um. But then finally the scientist says, fortunately,

(01:13:20):
the venom of a tarantula is no more dangerous to
a human than a hornet sting. And he tells John
Agar He's solemnly looks at him and says, we must
accept them as we do the rest of God's creatures.
What a strange thing to say. It's just like, I
know you don't like it, but you have to accept it.
They are part of nature. By the way, if anyone

(01:13:42):
out there is wondering what it might be like to
be eaten by a giant spider, we we have an
episode in the vault somewhere that we devoted to the
very question that one was fun Um. Yeah, So the
scientists like, look, you know, they're just part of God's plan. Uh,
you got to accept them. And he says each animal
as a function within its own world. And then John
Agar is like, yeah, but what if one got really big?

(01:14:05):
And then the scientist says, then, and this is a quote,
then expect something that's fiercer, more cruel, and deadly than
anything that ever walked the earth. Cut straight to giant
tarantula walking through the desert, knocking down telephone lines and
power cables. Yeah, and it is just upsettingly big at
this point. It's it's like it's big enough at this

(01:14:27):
point that you're it's how many people would it take
to feed this thing? It's how many horses, how many cattle?
It's just way too big. Somebody needs to do something
about the spider. So we see the spider out in
the in the desert in the middle of the night.
It eats a couple of cowboys who are sleeping out
under the stars. This is that classic trip that we've
talked about before when you have new characters suddenly introduced.

(01:14:49):
This late in the Monster movie. Oh it's not looking good.
They are food. Yeah, But John Agar gets in touch
with the sheriff and he's like, okay, time to arm
everyone called the state police meet me at the Deemer place,
and the sheriff reluctantly believes him. But but here's where
we get the attack on Maracorda in the Deemer house,
so that the tarantula creeps up on the house. Uh,

(01:15:12):
this is the scene where we see the tarantula peeking
in through the window. Yeah, and um it's it's a
creepy scene. That big tarantula pumpet with his big eyes.
Very effective, I thought. And this is just the beginning
of a full on attack on the house, which is
an exciting sequence with lots of cool effects and uh
special effects, big spider parts ramming in through the walls

(01:15:37):
and so forth. Yeah, it attacks the house. It bites
through the roof. It's fangs are coming into Deemer's room.
I think it. I think it eats Deemer owen Deemer
full pajamas by the way, glorious. Yeah, full pajamas with
the stripes and that. Yeah, he's going. Um. Steve escapes
instead of running into the basement, though she runs outside.
Luckily for her, John Agar is just then arrived being

(01:16:00):
to pick her up in his convertible, and the tarantula
chases the cars. It speeds down the highway, and I
love how they don't even talk about it. You know
that she gets in the car they drive away. She's
not like giant spider. That was weird, huh yeah. Um.
But the rendezvous with the police and then every the police,
everybody now sees the spider. So there's no more debate

(01:16:21):
about whether there's a giant spider. We're all on the
same page now, all of humankind must span together to
annihilate it. Uh. And so this part they get like more.
Corda and John Agar get into the police car and
ride off, and then we see two cops approaching the
spider with guns drawn. I was like, what okay, And
I guess they just needed to be doomed. But then
it gets even weirder when I see okay, no, they're

(01:16:43):
not just randomly walking at the spider pointing guns at it.
They were going to get John Agar's car. So the
premise of this scene is that this classic convertible is
worth at least two human lives. Well, I remember correctly,
it was a sports car. Like, this is a new car.
This is a nice car. They're like, it's our duty

(01:17:04):
as law enforcement officers to make sure the spider doesn't
eat this fine automobile. Yeah, but unfortunately the spider eats
them instead. Uh So, John Agar and Mark Corday ride
back with the cops and they're all on the radio like,
get us all the dynamite you can find, and get
napalm too. And we've seen the sheriff saying dog gone
and I wish I had some nitro. And they set

(01:17:27):
a big trap for the spider on the highway. They
lay out all this dynamite. They really use a lot
of dynamite, but it doesn't work. No, no, no. Also, okay,
here's a question that's come up in recent episodes. Why
is John Agar in charge here? Biggest shoulders. Once again,
this is what was the movie where we were talking

(01:17:48):
about this problem of movies where suddenly a random civilian
is allowed to be involved in police business, or even
in charge of police business. I guess just because they're
the hero. Oh, it shows up all the time. Yeah,
where it's someone's a photographer, but somehow they're in every
scene of the investigation, like they're suddenly co lead detective

(01:18:08):
or something. Yeah. So like basically John Agar's character gets
to call in an airstrike. Yes, I get why he's
John Agar. I guess, yeah, Oh it was an atragon.
Remember it was those those photographers, Yes, I do now, Yeah,
like all of the military leaders are listening to what
these sleazy photographers are telling them to do. You know.

(01:18:29):
I guess it comes down in an emergency situation, like
somebody needs to to take the lead and tell people
what to do and uh. And so it holds true
in any emergency situation, including giant spiders. Okay, but so
the dynamite trap doesn't work spiders coming toward town. I
guess they're only hope at this point is the air force.
And again, this is such a nineteen fifties movie because

(01:18:50):
it literally just ends with the military coming in and
destroying the monster and it works and that's it. Yeah,
So like the Clinting Eastwood flies in in a jet
with a few other jets. They dropped napalm on the
spider and then the spider catches on fire and it
actually looks very brutal. Like you said, they had some
kind of puppet that they set fire too. I felt

(01:19:12):
bad for the tarantula. And then that's just the end.
Just that's straight to the end title card Monsters on Fire.
Nobody has anything to say about it. The end a
universal international picture. Why did so many movies of this
period end exactly like this? I'm sure you know what
I'm talking about, Like, no additional character resolution, no day Newmont,

(01:19:34):
the monster is dead, there's no comment on it. Film
ends immediately. Yeah, they wrap it up in a nice
tight bow. They get the movie, uh, you know, in
under time. And I have to say, sometimes I kind
of missed this. I feel like modern films, especially, they're
always trying to play like for d chest with their endings,
and sometimes I just want to say, look, it's okay

(01:19:55):
if you just blow up the monster and in the movie,
you know, we literally like you see the monster splatter,
it's clearly dead. And then just the end, Yeah, it's
it's it's okay if like the military just shows up
and blows up the monster and we can just imagine
how these characters interacted thereafter. We don't need thirty more
minutes of the movie, okay. But to counter this, what

(01:20:17):
if it ended with a stinger, which is okay, you know, uh,
John Agar and Marcorda, They're like, well, we're in love now,
we're gonna have a happy life together. But then in
the background you see a giant guinea pigs stampedeing over
the mountains. Well, obviously I would love that, uh setting
up the sequel that never was um any of the

(01:20:38):
giant animals coming back, that would have been good or
the same. By the naming convention, though it would have
to be tarantula to col and guinea pig. Yeah yeah,
the guinea pig is it's still the size of a
police thought. And then because that's a that's the one
question you have to ask. So different animals grow different
in different ways. So and clearly we've already established the

(01:21:00):
nutrient affects people in different ways as well, Like it
doesn't seem to be making fifty foot tall humans. It's
just um, you know, killing humans over the course of
like four days. Meanwhile, the spider keeps growing and growing.
What happens to the guinea pig? Does I think they's
blowde Does it just stay the size of a police dog?
Or does it become enormous as well? Well? To side

(01:21:21):
a little bit of biology, I am pretty sure that
there are stricter size limits on arthropods than there are
on mammals. I think presumably you could actually get a
bigger guinea pig than you could get a big spider.
Because spider, what are the reasons? I know we've talked
about this before. I have something to do with respiration

(01:21:41):
that like arthur pods, like insects and spiders, they have
to uh like do gas exchange through their skin And
if you just get a certain amount of volume, you
can't do enough of that with the outside surface. Yeah.
And plus he goes without saying for for many for
most animals, you would be can asking this question about
you can't just scale it up because the things are

(01:22:02):
gonna happen, like the legs are going to just snap
underneath its weight. It's it's like that body size is
not meant to be scaled up to the size of
a skyscraper. It's just not going to support that creature anymore,
so it could potentially just fall apart. I think it
also affects stuff about body heat and cooling and all that.
So yeah, anyway, yeah, yeah, the square cube law comes

(01:22:23):
into play and so forth. But I guess what we're
trying to say is that this can't happen. This didn't
really happen Tarantula fictional film. We we are like Mr
Drysdale in the thing, saying, see, let me educate you
about how they're not there are not in fact whale
size spiders. Um. Fun kind of tie in for this movie.

(01:22:44):
So I watched this film the other day. In a
few days prior, I saw the new Jordan Peel movie
Nope Um over the weekend. And I'm not gonna share
any spoilers on Nope other than to say it's it's fun,
fun flick with a lot of surprises in it. But
uh Nope. Takes place in the California desert, with scenes

(01:23:05):
of some sort of a lurking threat being present and
also scenes of horses. Uh So, while again, while this
movie Tarantula was set in Arizona. It was filmed in California,
and it features what feel like some of the same
sorts of rolling hills and places as well as cattles
and cattle and horses. Um, so I was looking this up,
I was just like, I wonder how close the settings were. Well,

(01:23:27):
Tarantula was filmed in Lucerne Valley and Pivotal Nope, scenes
were filmed in Santa Clarita, and those are about a
hundred miles apart. So, um, you know, still same neck
of the state to at least a limited extent. Maybe
our local Californian listeners can chime in on the differences,
please do. All right, Well, that's that's Tarantula again. Nine

(01:23:51):
film and probably one of the probably one of the
more entertaining giant animal films of the era that you
could seek out. I agree this one is a lot
of fun. I think it's just the right combination of
um brisk pace, great absurdity, and uh genuinely good special
effects for the time. It's it's a lot of fun.

(01:24:11):
All right. Well, we'll hope you'll join us next time
with this this uh, these episodes Weird House Cinema they
published every Friday, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
podcast feed and normally where a science podcast with core
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set
most of that aside and just talk about a weird film. Uh.
Two websites of note for Weird House Cinema. There's some

(01:24:33):
mut music dot com, which is just a blog where
I'll do some blog posts about these episodes and include
things like the trailer and related video or audio if
it's applicable to the film that we're featuring. But also
weird House has a Letterboxed account that's U l e
T T E r b o x d. Our user
name there is weird House. It's a fun website. It's

(01:24:53):
really really I have more and more I'm using Letterboxed
to help research films. Uh. They have some wonderful interface options, like,
for instance, you can go to our list under weird House.
We have a list of all the episodes we've done,
and you can do things with like quick drop down.
You can see like which movies we've done from the
nineteen fifties, which movies we've done from the nineteen sixties, etcetera,

(01:25:14):
which we can separate them by genre and so forth.
So it's a really fun website that that I'm I'm
having I'm having a great time using and we're on there,
so if you're on there, follow us. We'll all have
a good time watching movies together. Huge thanks as always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic

(01:25:36):
for the future, just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to

(01:25:57):
your favorite shows.