OLD FEARS

A boring, muddled horror meÉlange. Alcoholic ad writer Mick Winters returns home to Tanapah, Oklahoma, and is downing some lonely beers in a roadhouse when he meets childhood buddy Jerry Meyers. Recalling old terrors in a dark country culvert, they decide to return to the culvert--where they're attacked by something black and horrible which lacerates Mick's back and kills Jerry. Soon beautiful, widowed young osteopath Cheryl Stanton is sewing up Mick's wounds--while two men disappear, a frightened boy dies of suffocation under his bed, and Jerry's autopsy reveals both vast mutilation and ""insect venom."" Could there be a giant fear-spider loose? Well, the alcoholic town editor who interviews Mick is crunched by his own huge black press; and at the climax the tongue in the black coal pit renders up the missing men plus a third figure who stands for the fear-victim of all the onlookers who are firing rifles at the tongue. Sub-banal pulp.