Word: tarantula
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...asked Professor Quaeritor what attracted him to the study of such a fierce group. He pulled a petrified tarantula from his back pocket--"My lucky charm," he explained. "Well, chiefly it's their marital system. You see," he chuckled, "the brother in the Jivarro tribe has with his sister the jus primae noctis, as it were. Enforced incest, a droll habit, you know...
Tied to a balloon or bobbing down a canal in a bottle, the little magazine slips each month into Communist East Germany from the Western zone of Berlin. The cover of the contraband Tarantel (tarantula) proclaims that it is "priceless," but for East Germans caught chuckling over the magazine's sledgehammer humor, the price can be a term in a Red prison. Despite its problems of distribution and retribution, Tarantel is a big success among East Germans. Reason: the butt of humor for Tarantel is East Germany's Communist government...
...then the mood is unfailingly hypnotic. Such qualities, along with the fact that the film is beautifully photographed and composed, should make it a very special sensation for moviegoers who like an occasional exotic tidbit-in this case, something that often has the horrible fascination of a candied tarantula...
...summer torrent building up into a wall of water, the blossoming of cactus flowers. The splicing and re-splicing gives the film such a rapid gait that within a few minutes a wild pig chases a bobcat up a hundred foot saguaro, a poisonous wasp vanquishes an equally deadly tarantula, and red hawk devours a rattlesnake. The most callous little boy will lie awake until three a.m. after viewing these battles...
...kill and conk, conk and kill. George Moore once snorted that in War and Peace Tolstoy tried to outdo Nature, and would wake up at night screaming: "I forgot High Mass! I forgot a yacht race!" The authors of The Bat must have similarly wailed: "We left out a tarantula! We forgot a trapdoor...