This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Near the small town of River Falls, a bird spider that's grown to enormous proportions is discovered inside a mountain cave. It's supposedly killed by the authorities, and taken to a temporary holding spot in a high school gym in preparation for transportation elsewhere. Wouldn't you know it: the beast hears the strains of some groovy rock 'n' roll and comes back to life! Among the intrepid heroes who must destroy the monster for good are the local sheriff (Gene Roth) and know-it-all science teacher Art Kingman (Ed Kemmer).Considered by some to be one of director Bert I. Gordons' best "giant thing on the loose" sci-fi thrillers, "Earth vs the Spider" benefits from a fairly snappy pace, and special effects that aren't TOO, too bad. Even though his character should know that spiders are arachnids and not insects, Kemmer is a decent enough lead. Roth is an absolute hoot as the lawman who is understandably skeptical of the idea of a giant spider. Eugene Persson and June Kenney are reasonably engaging as the kids who get themselves into tons of trouble by heading back to the caves to retrieve a bracelet. Hal Torey is good as Perssons' dad, as are Jack Kosslyn as Mr. Fraser, June Jocelyn as Kenney's mom, and Hank Patterson as Hugo the janitor. The eight legged menace is appropriately creepy, and it's amusing that these filmmakers have the thing screaming like a banshee.One effective, unnerving touch is to see two dead bodies that are victims of the creature. And another is a tracking shot that shows some of the devastation wrought by our villain, ending on a crying child.After this, Mr. B.I.G. wouldn't make another special effects, size oriented picture for several years, until he made "Village of the Giants". The man sure knew how to promote himself: posters for his past work can be seen at a theatre.Seven out of 10.

Jack Flynn is attacked while driving home. His teenage daughter Carol and her boyfriend Mike go searching for him and find a giant spider in a cave. The Sheriff doesn't believe them. Their teacher Kingman is able to convince him to send a posse. Armed with DDT, they are able to kill the giant spider. They bring the spider back to town and store it in the high school gym. As the kids practice rock and roll, the spider revives and terrorizes the town. Meanwhile Carol and Mike go back to the cave to find her lost bracelet.It's a campy 50s creature feature. The giant spider is a fun visual. The acting is bad. The story is simplistic which actually helps. I certainly don't want too many explanations about giant spiders. That can't be any good. It's a B-movie with a few fun unintentional silliness.

i just love this little "b" movie from the 50's. At the start of the movie a father buys a birthday present for his daughter, and one the way down the road to give it to her,, a gigantic spider comes out of nowhere to send him off of the road,, the big spider confiscates the body,, when the daughter finds out that her father is missing, her and her boyfriend come across his vehicle off of the side of the road,, they head over to a cave, figuring maybe that he took shelter there, what they find there is a huge spider .. one the likes of which has really never been seen or discovered before,, along comes a high school teacher to help out with the investigation, they all must try to capture the spider and see what secrets that it holds,, the key to discovering what made the spider so big, this is a black and white film and very good, very funny in spots,, good music from the 50's to go along with it.

Really bad film. The acting is okay, but the plot is very thin.One of the teenagers looks to be forty. A giant tarantula lives in a cave. How did it get so big? No answer given. The special effects were very lame. The spider's web was just a rope net - crisscross square pattern - nothing like a spider's web. The spider kept making noises like a mountain lion. The spider kept changing sizes. One minute, it's larger than a two story house; then it's ten feet long. The corpses that had their juices sucked out by the spider resembled aliens - big white heads, huge almond-shaped eyes. Dumb. Spraying copious amounts of DDT into a cave, more than ten times the industrial strength, and nobody so much as rubs their nose. An unresolved scene where a crying,bloodied toddler walks past a car wreck in the wake of the spider's rampage. Unresolved, needlessly disturbing. The spider's shots were almost all live action shots of a real tarantula. The film never showed the spider killing anyone - all inferred. Cheap, unimaginitive production. The velveeta of cheesy films.