A plane carries South American coffee beans, and crash lands because of stowaways aboard. Not hijackers or terrorists...tarantulas. The furry eight-legged critters hiding in the coffee beans also have attraction for the oranges in the small California town, where the cargo plane goes down.

This MADE-FOR-TV fare is pretty tame. Plenty of tarantulas, and they do look harmful to your health. The towns folk worry about the roaming arachnids destroying the towns main industry as well as taking bites out of human flesh along the way. The story meanders a bit and you could even say that the creepy crawlers are more lively than some of the actors. And that isn't saying much. The kills are limp and lame; there are some comical situations. So don't fear, just chuckle and have fun with this one.

The cast includes: Claude Akins, Pat Hingle, Charles Frank, Deborah Winters, Charles Siebert, Howard Hessseman, Penelope Windust and Bert Remsen.

This merely okay 70's made-for-TV killer animal fright feature centers on a horde of lethal poisonous tarantulas who run amok and attack folks in the heretofore sleepy little California hamlet of Finleyville after a cargo plane containing the deadly critters crashlands in a nearby field. It's up to take-charge two-fisted fire chief Claude Akins, diligent doctor Pat Hingle, and cranky mayor Bert Remsen to stop the evil arachnids before things get too out of hand. The story has the potential to deliver a suitably creepy nature-turns-nasty yarn, but alas Stuart Hagmann's pedestrian direction, a by-the-numbers script co-written by "The Candy Snatchers" director Guerdon Trueblood, sluggish pacing, infrequent and blandly staged spider attack scenes (although I have to give the film a couple of points for killing off a little boy),and a silly subplot concerning the town's orange crop doom this one to mediocrity. However, the sturdy cast do their best with the generic material (Tom Atkins and Howard Hesseman are especially engaging as the two cargo plane pilots),both Robert Morrison's crisp photography and Mundell Lowe's funky jazzy score are up to snuff, and the last twenty-five minutes with a bunch of people trapped in a warehouse infested with the dangerous buggers makes for a genuinely gripping and nerve-wracking set piece. All in all, this one sizes up as a strictly passable, but altogether rather blah and unexceptional timewaster.

I have to admit, I was surprised by this movie. I bought it as part of a 2 DVD set with "Ants" for $5. Needless to say, I was expecting a "so bad it's good" movie along the lines of "Rockula". Instead, I found an interesting, if unspectacular... thriller? Horror movie? I really don't know what this is. It's not terribly scary, and the only really tense moments come at opposite ends of the film. Nevertheless, this is a good movie. It has a solid script, fairly god acting, (usually) and great music from Mundell Lowe. That's not to say it doesn't have it's flaws. The "cute kid" of the movie is less than competent, and I'm being nice. It also feels like the director doesn't use his full potential during the entire movie. During the climax, we see that he is a genuinely good director, capable of injecting tension into a scene, but just seems to be coasting through most of the movie. Hopefully, his other movies draw on that potential.