Spider Baby
by Jack Hill
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DVD details
Actor: Beverly Washburn, Carol Ohmart, Jill Banner, Lon Chaney Jr., Quinn K. RedekerDirector: Jack Hill
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Special Edition, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 81 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-09-14
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Image Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Spider Baby
DVD Review: Kiss of the Spider Girl
Summary: 3 Stars
This horror camp comedy has slowly earned its cult status over the four decades since its release. It is aka: THE MADDEST STORY EVER TOLD, THE LIVER EATERS, and CANNIBAL ORGY. Jack Hill wrote, directed and edited it. He filmed it in 12 days. He was a former production assistant for Roger Corman, and he learned how to keep America's Drive In screens busy. Over his career, he directed 21 films, and most of them had their debuts over the shiny hoods of automobiles, flickering madly, competing for teenager's attention span. His later films included COFFY and SWITCHBLADE SISTERS.
The film opened using comic credits, with Lon Chaney Jr., the film's one major star, singing the title song. The song was later released on 45, the flip side of Bobby Pickett's MONSTER HOLIDAY. This movie, although not a serious candidate to compete for horror status when rubbing shoulders with the AI Edgar Allen Poe classic, mostly starring Vincent Price, or with the British Hammer lush color gore fests that were the remakes of all the old American Universal classics. But never the less, it has managed to carve out its own quiet niche. It never takes itself too seriously, and yet never reduces itself to burlesque and pratfalls like the TV shows THE ADAMS FAMILY, and THE MUNSTERS that were popular at the time. It became a crude schematic for future films done about a "crazy family"; films like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS.
Bad movies are a genre unto themselves. This movie shared something significant with several Ed Wood features. Wood gave the aging Bela Lugosi some screen time before his death. In this film, Jack Hill gave the aging Lon Chaney Jr., who actually had starred with Lugosi in several Universal 40's horror classics, his farewell role. Chaney, who was an alcoholic, stayed dry for the two weeks of the shoot. Despite everything, he managed to deliver a rather nuanced and poignant performance; implying that he never really was given much of a chance to show what he could do as a dramatic actor. I remember him as Big Sam in THE DEFIANT ONES. He showed some dramatic promise in that one.
The plot centered around a fictitious medical problem, a genetic brain malady called the "Merrye Syndrome". Just before puberty, at about age ten, the family members would begin to regress their emotional age. At some point they would lose language, and develop a taste for human flesh. Several of the older family members were kept in a pit in the basement, where the odd dead body was tossed as a delicacy. Chaney as Bruno, the family chauffer, was the guardian of the last three children, and the family secret.
The old comedy veteran, Mantan Moreland, had a brief scene as a Messenger. He was dispatched early, and fed to the family in the basement. The plot thickened with the arrival of two cousins, their lawyer, and his secretary; more fodder for the fiends. I did like the dinner scene, where the strangers were fed roast cat, dry grass salad, boiled fungus, and bug stew. Carol Ohmart played cousin Emily, and she was able to do a gratuitous strip tease scene, and then parade around in black lingerie for a time.
In 1964, I thought this movie was silly, and not very scary. Today, upon reflection, I see it as prototypical in its creativity, that it had some clever writing, was fairly dark and humorous, and there was above average acting in it.
Description of Spider Baby
Re-titled Spider Baby in 1968 after the original title Cannibal Orgy, Jack Hill's black and white proto horror-comedy influenced numerous films, especially those featuring boxed or bagged body parts, like Phantasm's yellow-bleeding finger and Blue Velvet's ear found in the meadow. Spider Baby is about an inbred family cursed with Merrye's Disease, which transforms even sweet children, Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn), Virginia (Jill Banner), and Ralph (Sid Haig) into murderous cannibals. Virginia steals the opening scene, during which she plays "spider," cutting the ear off a messenger who is sent to their decrepit Victorian mansion to deliver news of the house's confiscation. Caretaker Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.) futilely chides Virginia in preparation for a visit from their oblivious, snooty cousin, Emily Howe (Carol Ohmart) and her husband, Peter Howe (Quinn Redeker), who plan to take the home. As more people pile into the house for a meeting, including lawyer Schlocker (Karl Schnazer) and his innocent assistant, Ann (Mary Mitchell), the kids cut loose, hacking everyone up and feeding them to their uncles locked in the basement. Jack Hill, whose films range from horror (Switchblade Sisters) to Blaxploitation (Coffy, Foxy Brown), made sure in Spider Baby to balance comedy with spook so its cannibalistic themes scare but don't absolutely disgust. A brilliant dinner party scene, in which the Merryes serve roasted cat and garden bugs, passing on the meat because they "don't eat dead things," is one of the tensest and funniest cannibal film scenes ever made, up there with Fuad Ramses' Egyptian feast in Roger Corman's Blood Feast. This special edition DVD includes interesting featurettes that detail the making of the movie and the whereabouts of the real mansion, though the best part of Spider Baby is pondering how bizarre this film must have seemed to the 1960s youth. ?Trinie DaltonBestsellers in DVD
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