Well, it would have been more accurately titled A Small Town vs. the Spider, but you gotta fill the seats, right? So if your story lacks a little, you exaggerate the title, I guess.

I'll outline the plot for you because the details are not important: A man is killed by a giant spider. His daughter, Carol, and her sort-of-boyfriend, Mike, search for him and discover said spider. They alert the police. The spider is killed (so they think) and kept in the high school gym. During an ultra-lame after-hours dance party rehearsal in the school, the spider wakes from its coma, terrorizes the town, and goes back home. Carol and Mike stupidly return to the cave to find her lost bracelet. Meanwhile, the town blows up the cave's entrance to seal the spider off from the world. Now it's a race for them to bore back into the cave and rescue the idiots before the spider gets to them.

I said the details aren't important to this film, and that's good because none of them make sense. The spider simply slaps its victims in the face to kill them (though they are later sucked dry, which does provide a couple grisly corpses). When the police investigate the cave, they completely ignore all of the numerous skeletons, focusing only on the corpse of Carol's father, I guess because the others aren't important to the plot. At one point in the cave, the sheriff begins firing a rifle (not even a shotgun) at a flying bat just because it's there. Also, the spider is at times so badly superimposed over the background that you can see straight through portions of its body. That's probably good though; the bad effects are the only fun part of this movie.

At this point in the review, it should not surprise you to learn that none of the characters seem to have any memory. The movie doesn't care about the characters, so they do whatever it takes to get us to each next pointless event. Carol hardly grieves her father's death, for instance, and she and Mike seem to see no danger in returning to the cave. In short, few events bear any importance on what comes later -- again, unless the plot decides it needs them.

Now, I love cheesy giant monster flicks as much as the next guy. Even if it crashes hard, don't we all love watching the crash? This one fails, though, because it wrecks at a speed of 2 m.p.h. There is virtually no characterization, no one's actions take place for a real reason, the spider attack is unexciting, and the outcome is as standard as they come. I realized during the writing of this review that the spider acts exactly like bad giant creature films, including the very film it's in. The prospect (the spider: the idea for the film) draws us in (the cops: the studios). They render it lifeless (stunning the spider: creating a film that takes no risks). It is loosed on the world and attacks us (the spider terrorizing us: the film wasting our time). It goes home (the spider to the cave: the film to the studio's archives), and we close it off from the world (blowing up the cave entrance: rejecting the film), and it is forgotten, hopefully forever.