Spider Baby Blu-ray Review

• 24th Jun 2013

Spider Baby, or to go under it’s original title Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told was made in 1964 but did not get a release until 1968 (in the US at any rate. It would be many years before it was released elsewhere). The main reason for this was that the producers ran out of money and became embroiled in a legal tussle for the intervening years. This is not to say that the film would have reached classic status, it was always destined to be a low budget drive-in support film and would disappear into obscurity. However, it is ripe for attaining classic cult status and brings in many elements that make it justifiably so. After all who can resist Chaney singing the rock and roll madcap title song, ‘Cannibal Orgy’ (the re-release title of the film at some drive-ins) with its ‘Monster Mash’ type of appeal and such lines as: “Frankenstein, Dracula and even the Mummy, they all end up in someone’s tummy”?

The commences with a bookend story with the rich Peter Howe telling the story of how he acquired his wealth from the in-bred family who suffer from a family in-breeding disease that causes people to regress to a 10-year-old. Cannibalistic tendencies are also prevalent. The film then opens with the protracted opening with a motorcycle courier searching for and arriving at the Merrye House with a letter telling the owners of the Merrye family that guests will be arriving to decide on the future of the house and the family. When the courier arrives he is met by Virginia Merrye (Jill Banner) who does seem more than a little crazy, traps the man in a window, covers him in her homemade web net and dispatches him by ‘stinging’ him with two knives. Banner’s interpretation of Virginia is actually an inspired piece of acting as she distorts her movements as though her predatory spider (why do spiders always look like they are ready to pounce?). Later a lawyer and his secretary and distant cousin Peter Howe and his girlfriend meet at the house and are surprised by the two visibly mentally disturbed sisters and the more severely mentally incoherent Ralph (played by director Jack Hill regular, Sid Haig), all cared for by the family chauffeur (Chaney) who has looked after the children since the death of their father (who lies as a skeleton in the bedroom upstairs).

There are in-jokes aplenty here such as during an infamous dinner sequence one of the guests talks about being a horror fan: Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolf Man and all that, the classic Universal pictures. Of course Chaney had appeared in all these guises in his career and was now in his twilight years after years of kicking about in some dreadful B movies. In one of the brighter comic puns to his guests and with a certain amount of pathos as he would have delivered as Larry Talbot aka The Wolf Man (1941) he warns the guests that “there’s going to be a full moon tonight.” This dinner sequence is effective with the spooky family spooking the guests by serving cooked cat, grass (as a salad), poisonous mushrooms and a particular delicacy of Virginia’s, a bug sauce – all the while the family claiming to being vegetarian.

Spider Baby is like a campy mix between The Munsters or The Addams Family with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre with some crazy ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ mixed in. Director and writer Jack Hill brings some of that quirky style from the Roger Cormon films with him where Hill had cut his teeth as a writer. The extras on the disc are also very comprehensive and informative and will hopefully raise the film from the obscurity it does not deserve. It includes a couple of half hour documentaries about the film, one of which is a panel discussion with the surviving members of the cast. Others include a fascinating documentary about Ronald Stein, the music composer for this film and a slew of Cormon features, including an interesting talk of Chaney’s voice singing for the title theme, the usual extras including the trailer and a fascinating revisit by Hill to the house where Spider Baby was filmed.

Chris Hick