A few years ago, I bought a used book titled Incredibly Strange Films, which collected interviews with directors of exploitation cinema and detailed plot outlines of movies featuring drug use, gore, and sexuality. One of the movies in the book was Spider Baby, so named for one of the characters in the movie: a young girl who is obsessed with spiders and likes to "play spider" by capturing and tying up her victims before stabbing them to death. I finally got to see this cult film and it is as bizarre as I thought it would be.
Spider Baby was directed by Jack Hill, a prolific filmmaker who also directed the Pam Grier vehicles Foxy Brown and Coffy, as well as the classic "women in prison" exploitation movies The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. This guy was no amateur and, despite the film's exploitative and ridiculous content, it has good production value and is actually very funny and entertaining.
Spider Baby is about the Merrye family, who suffer from a rare genetic disorder in which the victim begins to regress to a state of "pre-human savagery and cannibalism" as he or she ages. The Merrye patriarch is dead, leaving behind the three Merrye children: haughty Elizabeth, spider-obsessed Virginia, and childlike Ralph (played by horror veteran Sid Haig). All three are in various stages of regression. Their caretaker is the loyal family chauffeur, Bruno (played by Lon Chaney Jr.).Bruno and the children's simple life of collecting bugs and murdering random mailmen is interrupted by a visit from some distant cousins of the Merrye family who have come to see if they can get a piece of the Merrye estate. Obviously, things don't end too well for the visitors. The movie climaxes during a darkly comic dinner scene in which roasted cat, mixed weeds, and slimy insects are served to the disbelieving guests.
Spider Baby is a gothic horror-comedy that is both inventive and silly. It manages to be in turns disturbing and cheesy. In other words, a perfect cult exploitation movie.
4 out of 5 stars
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