Spider Baby dvd movie.|
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List Price: $14.99 Features • Black & White • DVD-Video • Letterboxed • Special Edition • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 1964 DVD Release : 14 September, 1999 |
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Spider Baby description 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 Dalton |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Loads of fun. |
| Spider Baby (Jack Hill, 1964)
Jack Hill and his old pal Sid Haig (Haig, as an actor, and Hill, as a director/writer, both got their respective starts in Hill's The Host) reunite for yet another incredibly silly film, this one involving an inbred family whose children grow normally until they reach the age of ten, at which time they begin a slow descent into psychotic cannibalism. The last three surviving children of the clan, Virginia (Jill Banner), Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn), and Ralph (Haig), are watched over by their late father's longtime chauffeur, Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.). Everything's going along swimmingly, with the exception of the occasional deliveryman (Mantan Moreland, long known as Birmingham Brown in the Charlie Chan flicks) getting offed by Elizabeth, until the last surviving relatives and their lawyer descend on the house to try and get the girls into school (and claim the family inheritance, naturally). They insist on spending the night in the house. Mayhem ensues. Now, Spider Baby is not deathless cinema by any standards, but that said, it's an absolute joy to watch. Sid Haig is almost hypnotic. The two girls play the mixture of nubile innocence and murderous rage with a surprisingly nuanced air for such a basement-budget flick. The characters are, for the most part, well-rounded, and there's enough variety in them that they don't resemble a walking buffet, as the camp counselors in so many slasher films do, for example. It's kind of a revelation to find out that even bad horror comedies from the sixties are better-written and more fun than most modern not-scary horror flicks. (Also: how weird is it that so many people involved with this movie died in 1973? THE CURSE OF SPIDER BABY!) Looking forward to the remake, which will most likely be as disappointing as "remake" implies, but I still have some hope. *** |
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