Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

Wow, this movie was lame! But what did I expect? Easily, the bright spot during the show was Svengoolie’s famous doodle riddle called Too Drawn Out in which he makes a few drawings which you have to guess the meanings of and come up with the answer, which has to be connected with the movie. Last night the three drawings were: a pirate saying something pirates typically say; pool balls with something around them to keep them in place before the break; and a couple of needles and a ball of yarn.

I got that right away! If you sound it out, it’s “arachnid” which is the class the spider belongs too (“Arrr!”, rack, and knit).

I’ve got a variation on it below. The twist is that you have to come up with a dad joke that’s connected to the movie. The answer comes later in this post.

This 1958 film was directed by Bert I. Gordon (BIG!) and starred Ed Kemmer as Professor Art Kingman; Eugene Persson as Mike Simpson; June Kenney as Carol Flynn; Gene Roth as Sheriff Cagle. It was originally titled just “The Spider” and for some reason it was changed to “Earth vs The Spider” even though the action occurred in only one small town.

The gist of the movie is that when Carol Flynn’s old man doesn’t come home one night, she and her boyfriend, Mike Simpson go out looking for him. All Mike does is try to come up with reasons not to keep looking and he’s the dumbest character in the movie. Carol has to keep prodding him and comes up with all the answers to what to do next as they hunt around in the cave where they finally find her dad’s desiccated corpse. She also has to find the gift from her father, which is a bracelet that her dad probably got at the local River Falls S.S. Kresge’s (which eventually became K-Mart).

That’s a little eerie because there was an S.S. Kresge’s (aka, the dime store) in my hometown of Mason City on Federal Avenue. And Mason City was the inspiration for Meredith Willson’s musical, The Music Man, in which the town was called River City.

Anyway, the local scientist, Professor Kingman, supposedly an expert on bugs, calls the spider an insect although it’s actually an arachnid. After the discovery that a giant screaming spider who evidently evolved vocal cords and sucked all the fluids out of Carol’s dad, Professor Kingman recommends DDT to kill it. And Svengoolie knew without prompting that DDT stands for Decidedly Dumb Theatrics.

Of course, it stands for Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, which by the time this film was released was known to be toxic to just about everything and everybody on planet earth and elsewhere in the galaxy. And it’s really not that effective against arachnids.

The teenagers in the film were played by actors who looked and sounded like they were in their 30s, but they sure could dance! I usually don’t say much about the acting in these movies, but it’s impossible not to notice how wooden the performances were. They always sounded like they were reading directly from the script (“And tomorrow’s weather will be partly cloudy with a chance of spiders”).

OK, I gotta wrap this up with the solution to my version of the doodle riddle. The joke is:

What spider comes out on a full moon? A wolf spider!

This was a so-so movie. The acting was pretty wooden. I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 2/5.