Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74574 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-07-11
• Rating: Unrated
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 100 minutes

Customer Reviews

Rare made-for-TV movie finally on DVD!
"Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo" is a 1977 made-for-TV movie which has been out of print on VHS for many years, and now is available on a licensed Canadian DVD (if not in stock on Amazon, it can easily be bought on ebay). It has very good picture quality, and was not taken from a VHS or poor analog source by the looks of it.

The movie itself is, well, pretty bad. I say this mostly because of the ridiculous plot and "facts" that are brought up in the movie. I've owned a Rose Hair Tarantula for some 15 years, and of course love watching any spider or tarantula movies. I remember seeing Deadly Cargo when I was a kid on TV, and spent years trying to track it down on VHS. This DVD looks much better than the VHS copy I managed to get a year or so ago.

SPOILER:

The "expert" in the movie reveals that this mix of large Mexican orange/red nee and desert tarantulas aren't tarantulas.. but are the deadly brown recluse spiders instead! Yep, because while there are actually no tarantulas whose bites are deadly to humans, they are big and therefore scarier, than the small brown recluse spiders. Gotta love those 70's made for TV movies!

If you're looking for a "good" killer tarantula film, I'd recommend KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS starring William Shatner. While it's obvious some animals were hurt during the making of the movie, it's well above this movie. And for killer spider movies, ARACHNAPHOBIA is the way to go.

Remember, spiders and tarantulas are our friends!

Sure it's a cheap T.V. movie, but at 10 years old it sacred the ........
This is yet another of those late night movies that I watched growing up(with every light that I could turned on and feet firmly on the couch) and when I found this one for a dollar I grabed it up. I must say that it's not as good as I thought it was, but I had fun watching it again and yes I kept my feet on the couch.

A Multitude Of Tiny Fangs To Invenomate You...
Our story opens w/ two guys in Ecuador trying to get a cargo-plane full of coffee back to the states. These two would-be coffee bean barons are played by Howard Hesseman (Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP) and Tom Atkins (The Fog, Halloween 3, Maniac Cop, Night Of The Creeps). They end up smuggling 3 men out of the country in exchange for cash to pay off the Ecuadorian military. What the pair doesn't know is that they've also taken on a host of other tiny, deadly stow-aways! This leads to death and destruction when the venomous beasties bite everyone on board. The plane crashes in the vicinity of a small american town. The "deadly cargo" is unleashed, and panic ensues when the local yay-hoos start biting the dust. Claude Akins (The Curse, "The Night Stalker", Monster In The Closet) is in charge of the fire dept. and Pat Hingle (Commissioner Gordon from Tim Burton's Batman movies) is the town doctor. Together, they must find a way to stop the onslaught of thousands of fuzzy feet! TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO is another 70s made-for-tv-movie that remains watchable to me, but then I'm a sucker for killer bug movies! While not as good as say, ARACHNOPHOBIA, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS, CREEPY CRAWLERS, or PHASE 4 (the original 70s version), it is far superior to doglogs like THE SWARM any day! So, if you enjoy bugs that kill and the humans who must survive them, then T:TDC will certainly satisfy...