Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo
Tags: suspenseful

Plot synopsis:
In Guatemala, two reckless fortune-hunting pilots bribe officials in order to fly a load of coffee beans from South America into the United States. To increase their profits, they take aboard three passengers whom they agree to smuggle into the U.S.
Problems arise when sacks of the beans containing deadly tarantulas are loaded into the cargo bay. During the flight, the poisonous arachnids irritated by the plane’s vibration and high altitude escape from the sacks during a fierce thunderstorm. As the plane wobbles under the torrential rains, the sacks split open spilling the beans and the noxious spiders. The three illegal immigrants, also in the hold are trapped in the cargo hold with the spiders. They vainly attempt to hold off the spiders with their shoes or whatever swat-material they can find. The lethal spiders eventually overcome all three.
Meanwhile, in the cockpit, the pilots work to overcome a developing mechanical problem that endangers the aircraft. They realize they must make an emergency landing as they pass over the orange-producing town of Finleyville, California. Unbeknownst to the pilots, the arachnids have escaped and begin to swarm the cockpit, attacking the pilots. The plane crash-lands near Finleyville.
The city’s emergency response system moves to aid the downed aircraft and pilots. A fire breaks out at the crash site and the deadly tarantulas scurry from the location toward a nearby orange grove. The fire is brought under control and the pilots and passengers are pulled from the airplane. Those not killed begin to exhibit strange symptoms. The town’s physician, Dr. Hodgins (Pat Hingle), is baffled until a local citizen who has been bitten, suddenly drops to the ground.
Cindy Beck (Deborah Winters) and her brother Matthew (Matthew Laborteaux) investigate the site but fail to see the spiders. Cindy’s fiance (Charles Frank) aids with the investigation.
A family of aviators, the Beck family attempts to solve the puzzle of why the plane crashed. In the meantime, the tarantulas continue their attacks, and more people are brought into Dr. Hodgins’ clinic. The doctor finally figures it out, but by this time, the spiders have spread out. The city’s mayor is fearful that any news of the problem infesting the city’s oranges will bring the township financial ruin.
Bert Springer (Claude Akins), one of the city’s responsible citizens, helps the Beck family investigate. Cindy’s brother is bitten and incapacitated by the spider and dies. Bert organizes the town citizens, and they risk their lives trying to save the town as the food-seeking spiders converge on the orange packaging plant.
The plan to get rid of the spiders involves exposing the deadly arachnids to the buzzing sounds of their enemy: bees. Using a recording of bees buzzing, the tarantulas are rendered motionless with the bee sounds. This allows everyone to collect the spiders in jars. During the process, the electrical system switches off, and Cindy finds herself suddenly surrounded by the deadly spiders.
At the last minute, the electricity is switched back on, Cindy is saved, and the remainder of spiders are eliminated.

Review: Needless to say, I was expecting a "so bad it's good" movie along the lines of "Rockula".
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.
A plane carrying a payload of Ecuadorian coffee beans bound for the US, plunges into a field in the struggling town of Finleyville.
It takes the tenacity of local GP (Hingle) and occupation unknown jack-of-all trades (Frank) and his girlfriend (Winters) to determine that the mysterious deaths are attributed to a particularly toxic breed of Tarantulas that have stowed away on the doomed flight.
Director Haggman applies a very matter-of-fact treatment to this above average thriller, with great attention to detail and a well paced continuity that builds to a satisfying climax.A capable cast of familiar faces portray likable characters, who band together to solve their own problems and save the town from socioeconomic devastation, proving that necessity is the mother of all invention.
Frank is an affable leading man well supported by durable character actors like Akins, Hingle and Remsen in sizeable supporting roles.
It's just a pity that the rather vapid climax wasn't more rousing, as the impetus was there throughout the movie for a satisfying resolution.There's an absence of smoke and mirrors to this small screen production that rejects the temptation to sensationalise the subject matter, focusing instead on the logical and convincing storytelling that saw this minor matinée nominated for two Emmy awards.
Overall, while there's the obvious constraints of a television scale, and a curiously inapt jazz soundtrack bookends, this remains a taut, mature, well conceived little critter of a spider movie, and well worth a look..
Like some bad influence from Irwin Allen, the spiders, which were all over the small town, end up in the warehouse with  the produce, the town's main source of income and major export.
I must admit the scenes with the spiders deliver the goods and the scenes inside the dark warehouse work well.
I do feel more scary scenes involving spiders attacking the cast would have added more tension.
Too much "talk" and not enough spider action !im glad I bought this film to add to my "creature flix" collection but I certainly would not recommend unless you are a hardcore fan of these kinda B movies.
this movie isn't' total crap,but it's not great either.but you cant really expect much from these types of movies.there's almost no suspense and not very much excitement in this movie.it just sort of plods along to the end.it's entertaining,if nothing else.i mean,you get some horrid dialogue,sometimes delivered just as horridly.the acting isn't great,and some of the characters are as dumb as could be.i guess it's sort of in the category of so bad it's good.i thought the spiders were pretty good actors,at least.i've watched quite a few of these movies and this one is no better or worse than any other one of this type.i find this type of movie a good way to waste 90 minutes or so.besides,none of these movies come close to being the worst movie i have seen,so that's something..
Some animals just lend themselves to horror movies, and as movies such as Tarantula, Kingdom of the Spiders and Arachnophobia have proved; big spiders are one of them.
Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo was made for television, so it's probably unfair to expect great things from it; and while the film does have its moments, I really wouldn't add it to the list of films that prove spiders are prime candidates for having horror films made about them.
The plot is pretty simplistic, which isn't really surprising considering the television origins and basically focuses on a bunch of tarantulas from South America being released in a town in California.
Unbeknown to the crew, these particular beans have become infested with huge spiders that kill some of the crew and cause the plane to crash in the aforementioned Californian town.
It's not long before the spiders have got off the plane and begin killing local residents; causing the authorities to take action.Most horror films about spiders have the antagonists with something about them - perhaps they're genetically modified, a new type of spider, absolutely huge or maybe there's just thousands of them - this film doesn't bother with all that, all we get is just a bunch of pretty average looking spiders, and it's really not all that menacing - I constantly wondered why the lead characters didn't just put on a big pair of boots and go round stomping on them all.
The conclusion to the film includes an interesting method of getting rid of the spiders - I have no idea whether or not it would work in real life, but one thing is for sure - a big pair of boots would have worked better and wouldn't have involved so much messing about.
Released to TV 1977 and directed by Stuart Hagmann, "Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo" stars Deborah Winters, Charles Frank (her fiancé) and Claude Akins as citizens of a small orange-producing town in Southern California who have to deal with an invasion of deadly banana spiders, which are unleashed when a cargo plane from Ecuador crash lands in the fields.
Howard Hesseman & Tom Atkins appear in the opening act as pilots of the doomed plane.
Cutie Noelle North is also on hand.I'm sure the filmmakers used tarantulas in replace of the similar-looking banana Spider (aka phoneutria or armed spiders), but they're close enough and, besides, this was the pre-CGI era and the producers had no other choice.In any case, the first hour or so is surprisingly good, considering this is a TV-budgeted nature-runs-amok flick.
The movie works as a 70's period piece, showcasing a nice cross-selection of the demographics & styles of any Southern California town of that era.
Also, there's a nigh-shocking death scene considering this was made in the mid-70s, which I wasn't expecting in a TV flick.Unfortunately, the last act that revolves around extinguishing the spiders at an orange factory is decidedly dull compared to the first two acts.
Two would-be coffee exporters / human traffickers (Tom Atkins and Howard Hesseman) run into trouble when they discover some unexpected stowaways on their cargo plane.
Once stateside, horror ensues in the small town of Meadowmere, California, when the tarantula passengers fan out on their mission of tiny-fanged destruction.
As made-for-TV movies go, TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO isn't bad, though the cheeeze-factor is quite high.
"Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo" is a critter feature that offers no scares and little thrills.
When a batch of Guatemalan tarantulas finds themselves in a sleepy little American town, we have a crisis on our hands!
While the acting and sets are good, the story moves at a snail's pace and the stars of the show, the tarantulas, aren't used in any creative or inventive way.
We always see the tarantulas simply crawling on the ground, slowly making it's way in the general direction of the would-be victims.
By using mostly static tarantulas (which are spiders that are easily recognizable and commonly known to be harmless) the scares simply don't happen.
A long portion of the introduction is wasted on the setup where we meet characters that are simply killed off a few minutes later.
Easy mistakes make the whole production look amateurish, particularly when you realize what the "real crisis" is.Overall "Tarantulas: the Deadly Cargo" is dull and audiences won't be scared or excited to watch it.
Although there are a few jokes at its expense that can be made, even as a "so bad it's good" kind of film it's not terribly entertaining.
This movie is so crap, there is no suspense whatsoever, actors seem to perform a repetition, and even the spiders are insipid.
The idea was not so bad one could have made a good movie, even a TV movie, unfortunately it is far from being the case.
Californian oranges, Ecuadorian coffee beans and BIG hairy spiders!.
Possibly one of the best and most suspenseful made-for-TV creature-feature flicks accomplished during the 70's decade, "The Deadly Cargo" nearly equals the menacing atmosphere of classic and more famous spider films like "Kingdom of the Spiders" and "Arachnophobia".
The cargo is infested with "Banana Spiders"; the deadliest kind of tarantulas in the world.
With the plane severely damaged by the storm and the pilot wounded, it crashes down in the fields surrounding the orange-producing & exporting town of Finleyville.
The spiders escape, all hell breaks loose and pretty soon the entire town lives in a state of hysteria.
Spiders, coffee, and oranges what a diet.
A bunch of nasty poisonous variety of tarantula come up from Ecuador in a plane
tarantulas do their dirty work on the plane and it comes in a ghost ship, just
Akins has to figure out a way to kill the bugs without destroying the oranges
I don't know if the director tried to make this movie look like a "real" footage or something but it has a feeling of raw that makes the movie effective for some moments.But overall this movie is very bad.
The acting is atrocious but it's good for it's B-movie standard.
Tom Atkins(Horror film veteran) and Howard Hesseman play two rogue cargo plane pilots who are transporting coffee beans and three illegals from South America to the U.S., who also unknowingly carry stowaways: a group of Ecuadorian killer tarantulas hidden among the coffee bean sacks, who infest a town in California after the plane then crash lands following a storm.
The local inhabitants(led by Claude Akins, Pat Hingle, among others) try to kill these spiders before more deaths occur, and prevent them from infecting their Orange crop at the processing plant...
TV movie isn't bad, but is still far too contrived and predictable..
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.
A plane carries South American coffee beans, and crash lands because of stowaways aboard.
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.
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..
"We're not talking about oranges, we're talking about people." Low budget boring rubbish about killer tarantulas who have a genetic fear of wasp's!.
Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo starts in Ecuador in South America where two partners Fred (Howard Hesseman) & Buddy (Tom Atkins) are about to fly off to San Francisco with a cargo bay full of coffee beans that they intend to sell for a huge profit, unfortunately they fail to realise that lots of deadly tarantulas have gotten on board...
As Fred & Buddy head for San Francisco their plane develops a technical problem which forces them to land in the small Californian town of Finley Ville, however before they get the opportunity Buddy is bitten by a tarantula & the plane crashes in a field.
Fire Chief Bert Springer (Claude Akins), Sheriff Beasley (Sandy McPeak) & the town's mayor Jack Douglas (Bert Remsen) are on the scene in no time.
Within minutes Frank (Edwin Owens) has become the tarantulas first victim, shortly after Gloria (Penelope Windust) has become the second & Dr. Hodgins (Pat Hingle) soon realises what's happening.
However Finley Ville is an orange producing town & unless the oranges go out on time the town will be financially crippled, but can they send out oranges infested with deadly tarantulas?
Plus any chemical treatment to them will destroy the unique flavour...Directed by Stuart Hagmann Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is a pretty obscure & hard to find made-for-TV film & to be brutally honest that's a bit of a blessing as it's rather crap.
The script by John Groves & Guerdon Trueblood is painfully slow as it's over half an hour of boring exposition before the tarantulas even start to leave the plane, it's dull as there are very few attack scenes & it concentrates on the deeply uninteresting drama surrounding the oranges more than the fact that these tarantulas are killing people & is stupid as it seems to take itself far too seriously & features a silly climax where a guy holds a cage full of wasp's up to a microphone to scare the tarantulas into a comatose state.
As I've already said Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is a really slow film but I think it needs saying again, for a film that lasts over 90 minutes not very much happens.
Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is a very unfocused & uneven film that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, is it a horror?
The only good thing I can say about it is that tarantulas are cool, it has some reasonably nice location shooting & while it's dull I suppose it's sort of watchable & it's just a shame it doesn't deliver much in the way of entertainment as it definitely had potential.Director Hagmann does nothing to liven the dull proceedings up, there is no style or visual flair & he fails to create any excitement, atmosphere or tension which is a real killer as far as the film goes.
The tarantulas themselves just crawl across things very slowly & we get shot after shot like this which becomes boring as they never do anything else & it's hard to feel scared by something so slow.
The acting was OK as well but that sentimental ending is embarrassing to watch.Trantulas: The Deadly Cargo is pretty crap stuff all the way, it has no excitement, it's slow, it's dull & since Arachnophobia (1990) is ten times better & much more widely available there is no need whatsoever to be wasting your time on this.
For die-hard killer spider film fans only, if such people exist..
I only gave this movie a shot because i am a fan of Claude Atkins.
It has the properties of an 50s sci-fi/horror film, only with a modern twist, the spiders are normal size!
A plane carrying coffee beans (and killer tarantulas) crashes and spiders escape from the crash site, wreaking havoc on the towns people.
The death scenes are pretty good, the giant bites from the tarantulas, but the corny part is, the spiders are afraid of wasps?
I also liked the little kid who first found the spiders, but he sadly dies.
Sadly, the beans are infested with an army of big, furry spiders (which none of the dazed laborers seem to notice as they are shoveling the beans into bags!) When the spiders affect the plane, forcing it to crash into the outskirts of a small California town, the locals find themselves battling for their lives and livelihoods as the spiders kill off anyone who's in the path of their trek to a nearby orange packaging plant.
All of the town's officials, including fire chief Akins, mayor Remson, sheriff McPeak and doctor Hingle convene to find out how best to combat them.
Leading the way is local airstrip owner Frank who, with his pilot girlfriend Winters, does the most to figure out what is wrong and how best to deal with it.
However, what really makes this one ridiculous is the fact that HUGE spiders seem to crawl around unnoticed (not to mention travel great distances in a short amount of time) and also that virtually every action sequence is handled in the most inept way possible.
The movie is no good, but it remains entertaining on a humorous level.
On the way to San Francisco, their plane develops engine trouble and goes down in a field near Finleyville.
Unfortunately for the people of this small town, the coffee is infested with killer tarantulas.
And now they're loose.Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is another in the long line of nature vs.
Claude Akins and Howard Hesseman (using some sort of crazy accent) are probably the best known members of the cast.
But, I suppose my biggest problem with Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is that it's just not fun.
As bad as that movie is, at least it's fun!
Finally, there's a scene near the end of the movie where the characters are scooping up the spiders by the bucket-full.
There weren't anywhere near that many spiders on the plane when it left Ecuador.
In the beginning, the movie shows a few stowaway spiders getting on the plane  not enough for an army.
Besides, there wouldn't have been room for coffee on the plane for all the spiders.