Part of Long Night of Spiders

To be able to counter the looming food crisis due to a rapidly growing world population, a scientist thinks outside the box and develops a rapid-growth serum. A fire in the lab ends his experiment, but one spider escapes and evolves into a colossal behemoth. For his big-bug classic, director Jack Arnold puts all his eggs, as it were, in a delightful basket of time-honored sci-fi tropes and the primal terror of the titular tarantula, which stomps through the expanse of the Arizona desert via masterful special effects. (mk)