Bill Rebane will be re-editing The Giant Spider Invasion and shooting new scenes for its 50th anniversary

Back in 1975, director Bill Rebane brought the world The Giant Spider Invasion, an independent sci-fi action horror film that managed to get network play on both ABC and CBS, was mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and made somewhere in the range of 15 to 22 million dollars on a budget of $300,000. The rights to the film went up for public auction around seven months ago – but that auction must not have gone in a satisfactory way, because Rebane still appears to have the rights, and in fact, he has announced via the Green Bay Press Gazette that he’s celebrating the 50th anniversary of the film by re-editing it and shooting new scenes!

Directed by Rebane from a script by Richard L. Huff and Robert Easton, The Giant Spider Invasion has the following synopsis: After a black hole strikes, it opens up another dimension in a rural Wisconsin town, and soon there is an invasion of gigantic arachnids who crave human flesh. NASA scientists Dr. Vance and Dr. Jenny Langer try their best to save humanity as a romance blooms between them. Meanwhile, local Dan Kester squabbles with his wife, Ev, and has a dalliance with local bartender Helga. Steve Brodie, Barbara Hale, Robert Easton, Leslie Parrish, Alan Hale, Bill Williams, Kevin Brodie, Dianne Lee Hart, Tain Bodkin, Paul Bentzen, J. Stewart Taylor, Christiana Schmidtmer, and William W. Gillett, Jr. star.

Rebane told the Green Bay Press Gazette, “Whenever I watched the movie over the last 50 years, I saw so many little flaws, cringing moments. Those are the things that I’m trying to take out right now.” For the new scenes, actor Dan Davies has been cast as “a local newscaster who reports on the spiders from outer space that are wreaking havoc in rural Wisconsin.” David said he thinks of his newscaster character “as Will Ferrell’s Anchorman on steroids.” The newscaster will start out sincere, but his reports will get increasingly weird and campy as the movie goes along.

The write-up notes that “the production of The Giant Spider Invasion was chaotic and ‘”‘stressful as hell,’ according to Rebane in an interview in 2019. At the time, he said that there wasn’t even supposed to be a giant spider, just millions of tarantula-sized creatures. But Jaws was out and making big cash at the box office, so the distributer of the movie asked Rebane to have a humongous spider. Rebane hired a local guy to make one using a Volkswagen Bug as its core.” Knowing the special effects weren’t impressive, the director “decided to lean into camp and humor to give the movie some zing.”

Rebane and his team aim to make the new segments being filmed for The Giant Spider Invasion look period-accurate, so they can be blended in with the old footage and not be too distracting. They’ll be preserving the integrity and characters of the original version of the movie while enhancing the story. The new version of the film will be released sometime in 2026.

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