I was chatting on line with a girl from Australia when I absentmindedly reached into a bag of potato chips on the floor beside my chair and the whole subject of giant spiders came up.

Unbeknownst to me, while she was bemoaning the fact that you can't get Halloween decorations in Australia because since it's considered an American holiday, the Aussies don't celebrate Halloween, a brown spider the size of my thumbnail had crawled into the bag. But when I pulled out some chips that were stuck together with webs like some bizarre mobile and then looked down to see that spider sitting on top of a barbecue-flavored potato chip as if it were on some macabre throne, I freaked.

She thought it was funny as hell when I described what happened. And since she said I was over reacting because it was such a tiny spider, I shouldn't have been surprised by the picture she sent a few minutes later.

It was a photo of a jar she was holding in one hand. There was nothing particularly strange about that, other than the fact that inside the jar was a monster.

Actually, it was only an Australian Wolf spider – a hatchling, yet – she had seen crawling on a fence. Yet despite the fact it was a baby, it still had a body the size of a quarter and a leg spread that would cover the palm of my hand. And even though it was just a picture, it made me want to run for a can of Raid.

But she was off and running, describing the even worse things that roam the land down under with ghoulish delight. She told me about the Huntsman, a spider the size of a tarantula that likes to hide behind pictures on the wall, the Funnel Web, a spider so aggressive it'll chase you before killing you with a single bite and the Bird Eating spider, a huge nightmare on eight springy legs that can leap in the air and catch birds in flight.

As she went on I began to imagine the whole Australian landscape as something out of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" where Harry and his friend Ron have to flee for their lives in a demented flying car to keep from being eaten by a whole forest filled with giant arachnids.

And that made me remember all the terrors I'd seen on the late, late show or worse, from the back seat of my dad's '57 Ford at the old Torrance Drive In. It seems that film makers back then realized one simple truth. If bugs and spiders are creepy enough in real life, when scaled up to gigantic proportions they make excellent horror movie monsters.

It would be fair, in fact, to say that at one time the giant bug was the darling of the drive in movie. Back in the 1950s every insect in your garden could grow large enough to eat your house. There were giant praying mantises, giant mutant bees, giant grasshoppers, giant ants, giant spiders, giant moths and giant caterpillars. There were women who turned into wasps and guys running around with fly heads. It was enough to make all the townsfolk who chased Frankenstein's monster throw down their pitchforks and run for an exterminator.

Unlike the spider in the jar on my computer screen, all these critters had been transformed into monsters by SCIENCE, which everyone in the 50s knew had challenged God and gone amok. Mostly, it was the result of that worst self-created nightmare, RADIATION that was the culprit. Following in the wake of the atomic bomb, it was the common belief that radiation could not only kill you, but it could transform almost anything into a mutant monster. Doubtlessly this weak concept was the result of some dime-a-dozen hack scriptwriter desperate to come up with some salable screen scares that didn't involve the long-dead classic monsters of the 30s and 40s. He must have read an article about the mutating aspects associated with radioactivity and blown it out of proportion, leading an army of other sleazy hacks into a frenzy of pseudo-scientific nonsense.

But who cares? Just because these nightmares were short of just plain silly, it didn't mean they didn't have everyone cringing. They were frightening. They were disgusting. They were...well...BUGS! And the films about them swarmed over the screens like ants in a kitchen sink in August.

Once you dismiss the totally dreadful -- like the slow moving giant bees (or were they wasps?) of "Monster from Green Hell," (a film so bad you'd have to create a new universe to rate a single star) or the rubber-glider, Tokyo chomping "Mothra," perhaps the best and worst of these giant bug flicks starred two brothers who were destined to become television's brightest stars. These were James Arness -- who played Matt Dillon on "Gunsmoke," and Peter Graves, who, in the later 1960s, made all the "Mission: Impossible" schemes work.

As a young actor, Graves was no stranger to sleazy sci-fi. He'd already been in Roger Corman's "It Conquered the World" (1956), about an invader from Venus that looked exactly like an inverted ice cream cone, and "Killers from Space," (1954), about bug-eyed alien guys right out of the Ed Wood school of low budget, so he obviously had no shame in 1957 about doing "Beginning of the End". This was about a bunch of grasshoppers that eat the giant food scientist Graves has been growing with the help of an occasional Plutonium jolt. The grasshoppers grow to roughly the size of leer jets and then eat Chicago before clever Graves can figure out how to get rid of them.

I mean, where's an exterminator when you need one?

The special effects in "Beginning of the End" were so bad they were just plain embarrassing. The blue screen technique was so shoddy that you could see through the grasshoppers and when they ran up and down a photo of a building (presumably climbing it) they often wandered into the sky. This was even worse than the hurky-jerky movement of the giant caterpillars from the Salton Sea in "The Monster that Challenged the World" (1957) caused by the fact that it was pulled along on a dolly that was actually exposed in one frame. Just goes to show that you don't get much in the way of special effects for twenty bucks.

On the other hand, Arness, who played the hulking carrot-creature in Howard Hawk's "The Thing", (1951) was the star of the absolute best big-bug thriller of the black and white era, "Them!" This 1957 film tells the story of a colony of radioactive mutant New Mexico ants that become quite a pest problem once they've grown to the size of station wagons. Even though Arness, an FBI agent and James Whitmore, a local Sheriff manage to wipe out the New Mexico colony, the queen escapes and establishes a new one in the sewers beneath Los Angeles. You might say that Arness's film is the antithesis of Graves's, because "Them!" is everything "Beginning of the End" isn't. A Halloween film-festival must, "Them!" definitely wins the Best of Bug category for any era.

Arness, in fact, did for ants what Charleton Heston couldn't in the big budget but slow moving "The Naked Jungle" in 1954. Based on the classic short story, "Leinegin Versus the Ants," the film tells the tale of a hardnosed plantation owner trying to fight back an invasion of veracious South American army ants. The actual fight – which accounts for the last 20 minutes or so of the film – is pretty good. But the rest is pure 50s melodrama that hits with the impact of a spoiled picnic and moves so slowly that they should have called it "Leinegin Versus the Snails."