Tarantula (Movie Monsters Series)

Rating:
Summary: Making the world safe from a giant tarantula
Review: The Movie Monsters Series adapts the screenplays of classic black & white horror movies as books for young readers (the series was edited by Dr. Howard Schroeder in the Department of Elementary Education at Mankato State). In the case of "Tarantula" Carl R. Green and William R. Sanford work from the screenplay of Garrett Fort. "Tarantula" is presented as an example of a "What if...?" movie that finds a giant spider loose in the Arizona desert. It is also another take on the old maxim, which dates from the Tower of Babel to Frankenstein, that there are some things man was not meant to tamper with.

The mad scientist in question is Professor Deemer, who has the noble goal of providing more food for the world. Towards that end he has using his own atomic pile to change nutrients into "super food," which has produced a giant prairie dog, rooster and tarantula (the movie did pick the best of the three to be the monster). However, Deemer has also been experimenting on human with deadly results having to do with acromegaly, where a gland goes haywire and your face, chest and hands start growing out of control. The professor falls victim to his own evil designs, but that is nothing compared to the fact that his tarantula has escaped from the laboratory and is roaming the countryside undetected and eating cattle.

On the one hand, this book reduces the thrill of a giant spider terrorizing the countryside to a few black and white photographs from the film, but it does capture the "scientific" intrigue that makes it all fun. Certainly this is not a substitute for the film itself, which was arguably the best of the giant monster insect/spider movies of the 1950s, but it does a nice job of adapting the script into juvenile novel form. Despite the fact there are a lot of photographs in this book, it is not a photo novel, but a legitimate novelization of the script. To quote the opening of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show": "I knew Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel when tarantula took to the hills."