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Before I get to last night's tribute to arachnids on the big screen at the Mahoning, the picture of Wes, Alex, and I at the top of this post was generated using AI. Alex made it and sent it to Wes and I to commemorate our work as Team Spider to put the photo op together on the stage outside of the concession building. Apparently, the robots think I'm far more attractive than I really am.
We went a little crazy with the spiders, but it was a lot of fun setting it up on Wednesday night.
The first movie of the night was a digital presentation of the 1955 sci-fi monster classic Tarantula. I don't remember ever seeing this movie before last night, but it was a fun flick.
Tarantula also happens to be the first feature film performance of Clint Eastwood. He's only in the film for a few seconds, and his face is covered by an aviation oxygen mask, but it's him.
There was a nice introduction by actor Stuart Pankin after the intermission between the two films. He played Sheriff Lloyd Parsons in Arachnophobia and has had a long career with memorable roles in The Dirt Bike Kid, Fatal Attraction, Love At Stake, Mannequin 2, Congo, and Striptease, but his biggest role was probably when he voiced the main character, Earl Sinclair, in the ABC series Dinosaurs.
Arachnophobia was shown on 35mm as the second half of the double feature. This movie premiered when I was ten years old, and I saw it for the first time when my grandfather and I rented it after it was released on home video. It's a very cool film with a cozy vibe that you don't often see in horror movies, and it had the opposite of its intended effect on me as a child. Instead of giving me a fear of spiders, it made me grow to appreciate them. This reaction is entirely due to one line that Julian Sands (as Dr. James Atherton) says to Jeff Daniels (who stars as Dr. Ross Jennings) during a phone call about halfway through the film:
"Did you know, doctor, that on every suburban acre, there are at least 50 to 60 thousand spiders, and that each spider eats about 100 insects per year. That means at least five million insects are consumed per acre annually. Think about it, doctor. Perhaps man might find the planet uninhabitable without spiders."
That line really stuck with me. I was never really scared of spiders or insects, but I'm not too keen on the idea of a swarm of anything, so the fact that spiders keep the insect population in check this effectively is pretty awesome. To this day, I won't kill a spider when I find one.
One of the other things that stuck with me about this film was the Jimmy Buffet song Don't Bug Me which plays over the end credits and is sung from the prospective of the spider.
