Also known as Death Kisses and Shudder, this gender and species swapped cover version of Willard is all about Susan Bradley, a little girl who can control spiders, which she does to kill her mother - well, she was gonna kill daddy - before taking out anyone else who displeases her. Susan really loves her spiders - to the point that one scene almost suggests that she loves them biblically. Oh 1975, what a magical time you were to be alive.

The big issue is Walter, Susan's creepy uncle and a dirty cop. He has evidence that his niece has killed at least two people, but he covers it up and even kills to protect her, all so he can get the chance to aardvark with this little arachnophile. Guess what? She's not having it. Oh yeah - Walter was also sleeping with her mom and helping her plan to murder his own brother. Whew!

You kind of have to love a movie where a little girl kills an entire VW worth of teenagers at the drive-in. This movie checks almost all the boxes for our site: murderous children and animals gone wild. If only there was an acid sequence, a Satanic ritual and George Eastman dressed as a big hairy tarantula.

Writer and producer Daniel Cady would go on from this to write and produce several adult films, such as Soft Places, Reflections and Tomboy under the name William Dancer. He also produced the regional shocker Dream No Evil.

Director Chris Munger would also direct Black Starlet and The Year of the Communes, a documentary narrated by Rod Steiger.

Mortician's daughter Susan Bradley likes to play with spiders, much to the disgust of her adulterous mother Martha (Beverly Eddins),who is having an affair with Susan's uncle Walter (Eric Mason),the local sheriff. When Susan overhears the cheating couple plotting to kill her father, she releases a tarantula into her mother's bedroom during the night, scaring the woman to death.

Years later, Susan (now played by Suzanna Ling) is still obsessed with spiders, keeping a collection of the hairy horrors in the basement of her father's funeral home. After a group of school bullies start to make her life a misery, Susan once again uses her eight-legged friends to settle the score, and finally gets even with her pervy Uncle Walter.

Scaring a victim to death with spiders isn't the most reliable way to commit a murder—not everyone is arachnophobic, the critters might run away from rather than towards the intended victim, or they might simply get squished—but as unlikely as it might seem, the plan works like a dream for Susan, making this a very silly film indeed. This might not be a problem, but director Chris Munger's handling of the action is so uninspired that the whole thing proves rather dull as well as daft.

As a card-carrying arachnophobe, I should have been on the edge of my seat every time the spiders are unleashed; instead, I was merely bored. Kudos to the actors who let the tarantulas crawl over their face and hands, but it really wasn't worth the effort. For a much more enjoyable '70s spider feature, watch Kingdom of the Spiders—it's got William Shatner in it, for starters

Susan, the young daughter of a hard-working mortician, has a strange passion for giant spiders, more particularly tarantulas, and engages her hairy friends to get rid of unpleasant persons in her life, like her own mother who plotted to kill her father anyway. By the time she's an attractive teenager, her passion turned into an obsession and it becomes all the more easier to find victims for the "kiss" of her tarantulas. This is a fairy enjoyable spider-feature, especially in case you like 70's drive-in horror. It's quite creepy, too! As long as you've got a bunch of spiders, you don't really need any other form of special effects as these icky critters provide the film with more than enough genuine frights. Unfortunately, there's very little coherence in the script and all the main events seem be juxtaposed without much connection between them. Also, as the story develops, the Susan-character shows more an more resemblance with Stephen King's "Carrie". She gets emotionally unstable, uncertain about herself, seemly all alone against the rest of the world and – of course – disposing of unique powers. Much like the 1978 movie "Jennifer" was a Carrie rip-off with snakes, "Kiss of the Tarantula" is a well-disguised Carrie rip-off with...duh...tarantulas! But then and completely unexpected, the story takes another few twists that don't involve tarantulas at all, and "Kiss of the Tarantula" once again becomes a one-of-a-kind 70's shocker. The ending is downright fantastic! This movie may not be flawless but it sure is creative.