Director Gilberto Martinez Solares cast Lon Chaney Jr, clearly past his prime, as a dual mummy/wolfman which, of course, were the two characters that Chaney played most often in the 40′s Universal horror cycle.  Chaney is only briefly glimpsed as a mummy, and a rather well fed one at that.  The make-up job is something akin to a glob of silly putty.  The Professor, tired of Casimiro’s rotten blood, decides to steal the mummy for experimentation. The Doc and his assistant put the ancient Egyptian into a big Son Of Frankenstein (1939) contraption.  Briefly, a slumbering Chaney takes the place of Karloff’s monster on the table.  Lo and behold, the bandages come off and, underneath all of that, this mummy is dressed from head to toe in black just like Larry Talbot.  With the next full moon, our revived Pharaoh transforms into a Bud Westmore-like phlegmatic canine with a pronounced feathered Farrah Fawcett hairdo.  For a broad comedy there are some bloody (for its time) moments.  This Larry Talbot gorges on victims aplenty (which, I suppose, is why he looks even fatter in black fur than he does in white bandages). Among the victims are two women, something never seen in a Universal pic!  Larry dances around Casimiro a few times (just like he danced around Lou twelve years earlier) before aping out like King Kong to Valera’s Fay Wray.  The big, bad. pointy-eared Tex Avery lady killer climbs atop his building with babe in arms.  Yes, this is an amorous wolfman and, again, the movie gives us something Universal would never have resorted to (implications of bestiality, that is).

La casa del terror is only available in the Spanish language version, not that it matters.  The minimal plot is easily decipherable, if one actually desires to decipher it.  Yes, La casa del terror is a dreadful movie, but it’s unintentionally bizarre in its borrowing from virtually everything to produce a quirky, redeemable mess.  It’s certainly passable enough with a plate of cheap, store-bought cardboard pizza.

Not so with Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964), which incorporates footage from Casa that producer/director Jerry Warren mixed with The Aztec Mummy (1957-directed by Rafael Portillo) and added footage.  Warren bought the rights to the two films and, as he was apt to do, spliced them together with his own footage to produce an even more incoherent mess without once crediting Solares or Portello (making Warren a sort of prototype for more than a few contemporary indie filmmakers).  Warren’s footage looks like it was shot on a two dollar 8mm camera (my family had a better home movie camera back in the 1960s).  Ed Wood‘s films were, at least, decently photographed. What little one can make out in the “new” footage doesn’t help. Oddly, deciphering the foreign language film is an easier task than deciphering the English language atrocity. There is endless footage of a hypnotized woman in a pyramid and an aztec mummy that is the result of exchanged body fluids with the “other” mummy.  Or something like that.

It’s often joked that sex is like pizza: even when it’s bad, it’s good.  Not so with anything Jerry Warren put his hands on.  My advice with the latter movie is buy the 75 cent cardboard pizza and throw the DVD out with the irredeemable trash.

FEATURING: Catherine Demongeot, Phillipe Noiret, Vittorio Caprioli, Carla Marlier, Annie Fratellini, Yvonne Clech, Antoine Roblot, Jacques Dufilho, Hubert Deschamps

PLOT: Young Zazie goes to Paris and stays with her exotic dancer uncle; the only thing she

wants to see is the Metro, but the workers are on strike, so she explores the city instead.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It might make the List thanks to its insane, anarchic soul. A minor character casually kills a waiter by firing a woman’s high-heeled shoe at him, and a parrot transforms into a dog when it’s sprayed with seltzer water; something of this sort happens in just about every detail-packed frame of the film.  Zazie’s transvestite uncle proclaims the film’s manifesto: “All Paris is a dream, Zazie is a reverie, and all this is a reverie within a dream…”

COMMENTS: Raymond Queneau’s 1959 comic novel “Zazie dans le Metro” was a surprise sensation in France; with its wordplay, neologisms and nonsense passages, it earned the author comparisons to a French James Joyce.  When Louis Malle decided to adapt it, he wanted to fracture the language of film in the same way that Queneau twisted words.  Malle used a constant barrage of editing and camera tricks as his main strategy for achieving this goal: speeding up and slowing down the film (sometimes within the same shot), having people unexpectedly pop into and out of the frame, and using rear projection effects and tricks of perspective.  There’s a shot where Zazie’s uncle talks to her as she sits on his right, and then the camera seamlessly swings around to show her now seated on his left; in another bit, one speaker in a conversation inexplicably appears in blackface in a reaction shot lasting under a second.  These editing pranks fit perfectly with the movie’s absurd scenarios: this is a film where the protagonists climb the Eiffel Tower and find a sea captain and a shivering polar bear at the top.  As she wanders about Paris, Zazie encounters a strange cast of characters, starting with her uncle (an artiste who dances in drag) and his wife Albertine (who has a mysterious power to hypnotize men with her beauty), and eventually including a dirty old man, an amorous widow with white and lavender hair, a parrot (who complains about the other characters’ yakking) and the aforementioned polar bear, among other eccentric denizens of Paris (the city is virtually a character itself).  Zazie almost has the form of a satire on 1960 Parisians, but it doesn’t work that way, because the outsider—the little tomboy from the provinces—is actually nastier than the adults she torments.  She has a foul mouth (by 1960 standards) and a habit of kicking her elders in the shin or tossing lit bombs at them; she’s inherently sadistic, and wants to grow up to be a teacher so she can torment France’s future brats: “I’ll make ‘em eat chalk!  Jab compasses in their rear!”  In the context of the film—a child’s dream of the big city—Zazie still emerges as a likable ancestor of Bart Simpson, a prankster whose job it is to destabilize an already crazy world.  One facet of Zazie that may mildly disturb modern American viewers is the film’s attitude toward childhood sexuality.  Ten year-old Zazie’s curiosity about sex is mostly charming: she wonders what a “hormossexual” is, and brags about being a woman already.  But there are darker undercurrents.  She’s stalked by a pervert from the Humbert Humbert school, who butters her up by buying her blue jeans; over a lunch of fries and mussels she frightens him with a tale of how her mother buried a hatchet in her father’s head, and got off scot-free.  This strand of the tale doesn’t exactly come off as wholesome family entertainment, but it is surprising how innocent Malle manages to make it; from the freewheeling, slapstick tone of the film, we realize that no harm can come to Zazie.  This “disturbing” scene is followed by an extended chase that plays like nothing so much as a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon.  In true slapstick tradition, Zazie climaxes with a pie-fight; true to its own off-center style, the “pies” are actually plates of spaghetti with sausages on top.  Malle may have attempted to “fracture” contemporary cinema with this comedy, but what  he ends up fashioning isn’t so much revolutionary as reactionary.  The camera tricks he uses hearken back to the earliest days of cinema, when every film was an experimental film; the comedy routines are in the tradition of vaudevillians like Charlie Chaplin (an avowed Zazie fan) and Buster Keaton, mixed with the anarchy of 1941′s mad musical Hellzapoppin’ (an explicit influence).  Thank goodness the Metro was closed during the story, because courtesy of Queneau and Malle, Zazie takes a much wilder ride above ground.

Though a cult hit in France, Zazie was all but forgotten in the rest of the world.  The Criterion Collection rescues it from obscurity with the usual top-notch transfer and collection of extras including contemporaneous interviews with Queneau, Malle, and a shy Catherine Demongeot and her parents, as well as reflections by screenwriter Jean-Paul Rappeneau, art director William Klein, and the mini-documentary Le Paris de Zazie.  Criterion issued Zazie as a companion piece to Malle’s other excursion into weirdness, Black Moon (1975), released on the same day.  Both films feature young female protagonists who don’t fully understand the absurd adult sexual world.  Compared to Black Moon, Zazie is less weird, less dark, and (I think) a lot more entertaining to watch.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To Americans, Zazie seemed to go too far—to be almost demonic in its inventiveness, like a joke that gets so complicated you can’t time your laughs comfortably… some critics have suggested that for Americans this comedy sets off some kind of freakish, fantastic anxiety.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

DIRECTED BY: Roger Corman

FEATURING: Jonathan Haze, Mel Welles, Jackie Joseph, Dick Miller, Jack Nicholson, Charles B. Griffith

PLOT:  Mild-mannered delivery boy Seymour breeds a new plant in an attempt to impress

his boss and the sexy cashier at his flower shop; the talking mutant Venus flytrap grows to extraordinary size, but only so long as it is fed a constant supply of blood and bodies.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not weird enough, though it certainly marches to the beat of its own drummer.  Filmed in two days from a quickie script by Roger Corman scribe Charles B. Griffith written on the fly to take advantage of some leftover storefront sets, Horrors was seat-of-the-pants filmmaking.  Aided by an inspired cast, the inherent quirkiness of the Faustian plant food fable shines through.  Often called the best movie ever shot in 48 hours, The Little Shop of Horrors is a fast, fun ride that every cinephile should check out at least once; it’s a triumph of imagination, dedication, and sheer luck over budgetary constraints.  It’s too bad it’s not a little bit weirder.

COMMENTS: “I’ve eaten in flower shops all over the world, and I’ve noticed that the places that have the most weird and unusual plants do the best business.”  That’s the sort of universe Little Shop of Horrors takes place in, one where minor characters stand by casually chomping on salted gardenias and handing out plot advice to the principals.  Set in a mythical Skid Row, “the part of town everybody knows about but nobody wants to see—where the tragedies are deeper, the ecstasies wilder and the crime rate consistently higher than anywhere else,” this is black comedy circa 1960.  Not only is murder made a joke, but more scandalous taboos like sadomasochism and prostitution are part of the fabric of daily life on Skid Row.  Man-eating plant aside, the movie’s greatest charm is the cast of crazy supporting characters that pop in and out of the story: the floral gastronome, Seymour’s hypochondriac mom, an unlucky woman whose relatives are constantly dying, two flat-affect flatfeet (broad spoofs of the duo from “Dragnet”), a pair of bouncy high school cheerleaders, a hooker who persistently tries to pick up a hypnotized trick, and a sadistic dentist and his masochistic patient (the latter played by Nicholson).  The main players are good as well: Jackie Joseph is an acceptably ditzy and breathy love interest, and Jonathan Haze plays nebbish Seymour like Jerry Lewis under a successful regimen of epilepsy medication to control his spasms and vocal contortions.  But it’s otherwise unheralded Mel Welles as exasperated florist Gravis Mushnik who actually carries the picture.  He’s a Jewish immigrant stereotype with a gift for casually mangling the English language; even the signs he hangs on the shop wall reflect that special Mushnik linguistic twist (“we don’t letting you spend so much,” one brags, in a typical Mushnik “finger of speech”).  He can be mercenary and curt, but of all the characters the audience identifies the most with him and his befuddlement at the nutcases surrounding him.  The entire company of Corman stock players seem to be peaking at the same time; the dialogue is punchy: witty lines delivered with near-perfect timing.  Corman’s direction is typically competent and unobtrusive, allowing the script and the actors to shine through.  You may have guessed already that the emphasis in this horror/comedy is heavily on the funny side of the spectrum, but there is something spooky and nightmarish about the plant moaning “feed me!” with the selfish persistence of a newborn child.  And a dark cloud of fate hangs over the film; as likable and seemingly harmless as he may be, Seymour is doomed from the first time he gives in to the plant’s demands so that he can preserve his shot a botanical fame.  Working outside the Hollywood system, the film isn’t required to give the hero an easy, happy out, and it doesn’t.  Wicked but not at all crass, Little Shop is a fascinating look at how seedy topics could be handled with wit and grace in a more innocent age.

Notoriously cheap Corman never wasted the fifty bucks required to renew the copyrights on his quickie features, so like most of his 1960s work, Little Shop of Horrors fell into the public domain.  It can be watched or downloaded from the Internet Archive.  Today, DVDs are sold with Jack Nicholson’s name and face taking up the majority of space on the box cover, even though he’s only in the film for about two minutes (his name appears fourteenth out of the fifteen actors’ names in the opening credits).  Corman and Griffith tried to repeat the formula of Horrors the very next year with The Creature from the Haunted Sea, another whirlwind horror/comedy packed with quirky characters.  The abysmal failure of Haunted Sea demonstrates just how much luck was involved in the success of Little Shop; everyone involved just happened to be clicking on all cylinders the week they made it.  Frank Oz‘ 1986 musical remake, while very different in style, is also offbeat and worth a look.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There is a genuinely bizarre sense of humour to the film… [it] has a silliness that verges on surrealism…”–Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review (DVD)

For the first (and best) sequel to Horror of Dracula, Fisher and the writing team (which included an uncredited Anthony Hinds, Jimmy Sangster, Peter Bryan, and Edward Pearcy) chose a disciple of Dracula, in the person of Baron Meinster (David Peel), as the antagonist rather than the Count himself.  The Baron is blond, pretty, manipulative, charming, and genuinely menacing.  Luckily, Peel fits the bill, although by general consensus he is no Christopher Lee.  Still, he is refreshingly different.  Such a choice allowed the production imaginative freedom and innovation.  The resulting film is inordinately elegant,  poetic and seething with atmosphere.

Marianne (Yvonne Monlaur) is on her way to start a job at a girl’s school when she is stranded at a local inn.  The Baroness Meinster arrives and offers to put Marianne up for the night at her castle.  The locals , well aware of the Baroness’ motives, attempt to to keep Marianne from accepting the invitation, to no avail.   Marianne is introduced to the Baroness’ imperious maid, Greta (Freda Jackson), and discovers that the Baroness’ son, the Baron Meinster, is a shackled prisoner in the castle.  The Baroness’ plan to feed Marianne to her son is upset when her guest releases the Baron from his chains of bondage.

Marianne flees the castle, confused and frightened, unaware that she has set a vampire free.  Peter Cushing‘s  Van Helsing, ever the father figure, discovers  her in the woods, takes her to the school, and, after hearing Mariann’s story, knows that his crusade to rid the world of vampires is far from finished.

Jackson, as Greta, is one of several acting delights here.  She cackles and theatrically waxes poetic.  She hams it up in several scenes, most notably one in which she assists a vampire’s attempt to resurrect himself directly through the soil.  Equally good is Martita Hunt (best known for her role as Miss Havisham in David Lean’s Great Expectations-1946) who becomes her son’s Oedipal victim.  Miles Malleson also does a charming turn in the role of the alcoholic Dr. Tobler.  Cushing, as usual, conveys self-assured, icy precision in a part that  he seems  born to play.  Peel’s Baron puts the bite on Helsing and, in a blood-red, thrilling scene, the Doctor plants a burning iron to his own throat to cauterize the wound.  Cushing masters the scene in his inimitable way.

However, Monlaur, as Marianne, is merely decorative and, consequently, bland, which is a serious defect in the film.  Another glaring flaw is in the some slipshod writing (the result of too many hands in the pot, no doubt).  A compelling, eerie henchman character appears and is ingloriously dropped.  Van Helsing’s appearance is far too convenient and contrived.  A cheesy flying bat is a major distraction.  Despite  the flaws, however, Fisher’s enthusiastic direction is contagious; aided , in no small part, by lavish art direction and camera work.  The finale, at a windmill, is sumptuous and visually exciting.

Unfortunately, there would only be one more good film in the series; Fisher’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness.  After that, the series was pretty much turned over to the hacks and it did not take long at all for the rot to set in.

“I love images that make me dream, but I don’t like someone dreaming for me.” –Georges Franjou

DIRECTED BY: Georges Franjou

FEATURING: Edith Scob, Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli

PLOT:  The face of the daughter of a brilliant plastic surgeon is horrifically scarred in an automobile accident.  The doctor makes her pretend to be dead until she can be cured; she floats about his Gothic mansion wearing an expressionless face mask, accompanied by the howling of the dogs her father keeps in pens to perform skin grafting experiments on.  When several pretty young girls go missing, the police and the girl’s fiancé start to suspect the doctor.


BACKGROUND:

• Eyes Without a Face was adapted for film by the famous screenwriting team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also co-wrote Les Diaboliques (1954) and Vertigo (1958), from a novel by Jean Redon.
• Director Georges Franjou has stated that he was told to avoid blood (so as not to upset the French censors), animal cruelty (so as not to upset the English censors), and mad scientists (to avoid offending the German censors). Remarkably, all three of these elements appear in the final product, but the film did not run into censorship problems.
• The film did poorly on its initial release, partly because the surgical scene was so shocking and gruesome for its day.  It was released in the US, in a dubbed and slightly edited version, as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, paired on a double bill with the strange but now nearly-forgotten exploitation flick The Manster.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The mask itself, the heart of the film.  There are several other worthy candidates, including the haunting final scene with Christiane surrounded by freed birds. Also noteworthy is the facial transplant scene, which is in some ways the centerpiece of this film (and comes almost exactly at the midpoint).  An anesthetized woman’s face is peeled off like the skin of a grape, in surprisingly graphic detail.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: At least until the very final scene, Eyes Without a Face is not

Original trailer for Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face)

obviously weird at all–in fact, much of Franjou’s accomplishment is in making the fabulous, far-fetched story seems coldly clinical and real.  But what gives the movie it’s staying power and makes it get under your skin is the strength of the simple images, particularly Christiane’s blank mask, which hides everything: both the horrors of her past, now written on her face in scar tissue, and her current motivations.  The imagery seems to reach far beyond the confines of the story and speak to something deeper–but what?  For this reason, the most common critical adjective used in conjunction with the film has been “poetic,” and the director Franjou is most often compared to is Jean Cocteau.

COMMENTS:  Eyes without a Face is a sinister variation on the Frankenstein theme that marked a new direction in horror films.  Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, who robs dead bodies from their graves to create monsters, Dr. Génessier is himself a sort of monster, one who robs the living of their bodies and sends them to their grave.  Fifteen years after World War II, filmmakers finally seemed to be ready to forego supernatural themes and deal directly with the horrors that one man could inflict upon his fellows.  1960 was the year not only of Les Yeux Sans Visage, but also of Peeping Tom and Psycho, movies whose villains were mere mortals, like us, and more uncomfortably terrifying because of their humanity.

One thing that sets Eyes without a Face apart from those movies, however, is the fact that the killer is not given the comfortable excuse of insanity.  Dr. Génessier kills women, not because he is a madman who isn’t responsible his actions, but out of love for his daughter, and also out of guilt.  There is a powerful moral ambiguity, and a moral terror, in the evil actions of the main characters: we can understand why the doctor would sacrifice others to save his daughter, and why the suffering girl would be too weak-willed to resist his plan.  And, we can’t be completely sure we wouldn’t choose the same path in their situation.

Eyes without a Face, although critically panned on release, influenced future horror films profoundly.  It directly inspired a generally undistinguished branch of transplant movies (with titles like The Awful Dr. Orloff and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) where mad doctors hunt living victims (always beautiful girls) and use them as fodder for their experiments.  More indirectly, Christiane’s face mask, which makes it impossible to read her expressions, became the model for of the “faceless killer” of future slasher films.  John Carpenter acknowledged that Michael Meyers’ blank white mask in Halloween was inspired by Christiane’s faceless visage.  And of course, Michael Meyers quickly degenerated into slash-happy Jason Vorhees and his hockey mask.

Christiane’s mask is the key to Eyes without a Face‘s power.  What makes her facade unsettling is not imagining what might be under it—we eventually get a glimpse at her maimed face anyway—but the fact that we cannot read her expression, and so we have no clue what she’s thinking or what she’s capable of.  When she picks up a surgical scalpel and stares at the camera, with neither a smile nor a scowl visible, we have no way of gauging what might come next.  And even when she is briefly freed from her porcelain prison by the skin graft, she still appears blank.  Her face has no flexibility; she can hardly smile without risking damage to the still healing tissue.  Her new face does not satisfy her, either: she feels that she is looking at someone else when she peers in the mirror.  She thinks she is peering at someone “who comes from the Beyond.”

What makes Eyes without a Face weird is that it cries out for a symbolic or allegorical reading, but doesn’t actually suggest one.  Many have tried to link the film to the horrors of Nazi medical experimentation; this is a theme that automatically pervades any European horror film of the period involving mad doctors, whether the author intended it to or not.  Franjou’s quote—”I love images that make me dream, but I don’t like someone dreaming for me”—suggests that the author’s intending “meaning” for the film was authentically Surrealist.  That is to say, he deliberately limits himself to putting powerful, evocative images on the screen and letting them play against each other, without a didactic meaning attached to each.  If these images resolve themselves into a meaning, great; if not, their power has not been abridged.

Still, there’s one allegorical reading of Eyes without a Face that seems screamingly obvious, although it’s one that has seldom been mentioned.  That reading is the feminist one.  The most important image in the film is the mask: a mask is something we wear to hide our true nature, our personality, from others.  Christiane’s mask is blank: when she wears it, she projects no personality.  Her motive for wearing the mask is to hide her ugliness.  Her quest is the quest for beauty; until Christiane can regain her beauty, she will not be able to land her man, Jacques.  Regaining Jacques’ love is the thing she desperately wants to achieve; restoring her face is only a means to that end.  The quest for beauty—the traditional tool for women to gain status and value in society—has left the tragically unmarriageable Christiane a prisoner in her own home, afraid, and ashamed, to reveal her true identity to the world.

Contrast the character of Louise, who has had her lost beauty actually restored by Dr. Génessier.  The result of winning this goal is that she becomes the doctor’s willing slave, gladly committing horrible atrocities in his name and for his purposes.  In successfully completing her quest for beauty, she has only succeeded in destroying her own individuality and being absorbed into a man’s identity.

When Christiane realizes this, she rejects the way Louise has chosen, in the most direct way imaginable: by embedding a scalpel in her jugular.  Then, having abandoned the futile and self-defeating quest for beauty and her aspiration for marriage as the only means of completing herself, Christiane is free to make her own uncertain way in the world.  She frees the dogs and doves, her fellow creatures imprisoned in the dark manor, and sets off into the dark woods to find her own way.

I am fairly certain that any feminist allegory hidden in this narrative is by accident, exactly as Franjou intended.  And there are a few difficulties with the above interpretation, the most important being that Christiane does not abandon her mask once she frees herself.  If the above is correct, then the last shot of the movie should have been an image of the porcelain mask abandoned on the forest floor as Christiane makes her way into the world, unencumbered by restrictive social notions that force her to hide who she truly is.

Perhaps I should simply follow Franjou’s advice, and allow the images to dream for themselves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It has some queasy scenes, but unclear progression and plodding direction give this an old-fashioned air.” -Variety (contemporaneous)

“If Jean Cocteau had been tapped to direct a Universal horror movie, it might have looked like this.” -Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club (DVD)

“…thanks to veteran cinematographer Eugene Schüfftan, Franjou infused [the] pulp plotline with a brooding lyricism that had rarely been [seen] since the Expressionist heyday… Sharp as a scalpel, soft as a caress, this is a weird masterwork.” -David Parkinson, Empire (DVD)

IMDB ENTRY: Yeux Sans Visage, Les

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Criterion Collection: Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franjou

DVD INFO: As usual, The Criterion Collection has put out an excellent DVD (buy), although sadly there is no commentary track.  Generous extras include clips of Franjou discussing his work on a French television show and previously unseen stills.  Most importantly, the DVD contains Franjou’s 20 minute documentary, Le Sang des bêtes [Blood of the Beasts] (1949), a highly recommended, unflinching look inside Paris slaughterhouses that still has the power to shock while remaining strangely beautiful.

DIRECTED BY: Fritz Böttger

FEATURING: Alex D’Arcy & buxom German exhibitionists

PLOT:  A plane carrying team of eight dancing girls, along with one male and one female manager, crash into the ocean en route to Singapore.  There they find a cabin with the body of a man hanging in a giant spiderweb.  The lone male is bitten by a spider and turns into a spider-human hybrid, who then briefly terrorizes the girls at a party to celebrate their impending rescue after two men row ashore.

BACKGROUND:

• With some brief nudity included, this German/Yugoslavian co-production was originally released in the US as a sexploitation feature under the title It’s Hot in Paradise.  After the nudity was clipped out, the movie was re-released under the present title and marketed as a horror film.
• The movie was featured in the tenth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (show 1011).
• Horrors of Spider Island is believed to be in the public domain.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The puppet-like evil spider, with it’s large, shiny, almost cute eyes and clawed hands.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Horrors of Spider Island takes place in an

4 minute clip from the film, including spider attack, courtesy of Something Weird video

alternate universe that’s nothing like our own.  The poor dubbing, including a mangled deep south accent, immediately takes us out of reality and makes suspension of disbelief impossible.  The plot is thin as a wire, made to hang chauvinistic male fantasies on, and often seems to be improvised on the spur of the moment.  Horrors of Spider Island already seems like a half-remembered bad dream, even as you’re still watching it.

COMMENTS:  Horrors of Spider Island is a movie that falls into the “so-bad-it’s-weird” category.  It’s quite obvious that the film was made with little skill or passion, with the sole intention of making a quick buck off of flashes of voluptuous women in their underwear.  Such films often become accidentally weird or surreal in snatches, as the producers rush to put attention-grabbing scenes on screen with little care for logic or continuity.  Horrors of Spider Island manages to sustain a consistently tawdry and strange atmosphere through its entire running time.  Even the slow parts, and there are many, have an “off” tone to them that makes them bearable to those tuned in to their weird wavelength.  

 Mainstream movie reviewers consider this type of fare beneath notice, and the more fannish reviews tend to consist of long recitations of the storyline, complete with snide asides regarding this or that obvious plot hole, continuity error, or inane piece of dialogue. (Reviewers’ favorite observation is to wonder how Gary instantly pegs the long-handled hammer he finds lying on the island as “for the purpose of excavating some sort of metal–most probably, uranium”). 

I prefer to let the viewer discover Horrors‘ specific flaws for themselves, should they so wish.  Rather than describing specific scenes, obvious flubs and inane dialogue, I’ll restrict myself to mentioning some of the recurring, interwoven features that keep the fever dream vibe going throughout the film:

• Bad Dubbing.  As previously mentioned, poorly dubbed voiceover acting blocks any possibility of suspension of disbelief.  Lip movements don’t match the words on the soundtrack, and the lines that are delivered are flat and uninspired (besides being kind of stupid).
• Chauvinism.  Exploring the male fantasy of being the only Y-chromosome bearer on an island full of women is one thing, but Horrors of Spider Island is so dismissive of females (at one point a sailor opines, “What are dancers? Hot goods for cold nights”) that the misogyny becomes a parody.  Gary instantly becomes the polygamous king of the island, ordering the women to do chores and fetch him cold drinks.  No excuse is spared to strip the dancers down to their underwear, whether because it’s too hot at night to sleep in those heavy cotton dresses or because the girls want to put on a bikini party for the boys to thank them for rescuing them.  Women are abducted and immediately make-out with their captors.  Women pull guns on male interlopers and they laugh it off, as if their skin would be impervious to girl bullets.  In Horrors, the patriarchy is a hilariously arrogant institution.
• Bizarre pacing/plot choices.  The initial audition of the dancers goes on for ten full minutes, with the director taking care to make sure they never look for the same thing twice: one girl is asked to show her legs, then hired, one dances the ballet for a few minutes and is passed over, and one simply starts stripping without being asked (and is hired).  In the middle of the film, everyone simply forgets about the threat of the spider-man for awhile to follow the new plot-line of the two workers landing on the island and trying to make time with the ladies.  You never know what’s going to happen next on Spider Island.
• Strip-joint jazz soundtrack.  The combo that provides the frequent background music is fairly talented, developing interesting melodies and exotic rhythms suited to the tropical setting.  The flagrantly sensual sax and leering riffs from a muted trumpet, however, inevitably conjure up clichéd images of swaying hips and twirling tassels half hidden behind a haze of cigar smoke.  The accompaniment helps create an aura of sleaziness that partially compensates for the lack of skin or explicit sin, and is more competent than anything else in the movie.  During tense scenes, an electronic drone is added to the mix.

Add to this continuous strange background noise blatant continuity errors (the audition takes place in Los Angeles, but the plane carrying the troupe takes off from New York City) and sprinkle with the occasional bizarre image (the corpse hanging awkwardly in the web, the evil spider puppet, and the spider-man that looks like a wolfman being chased into quicksand by flare-wielding islanders) and you have a genuinely weird movie that rises above its exploitation roots.  Horrors of Spider Island is less a “they don’t make ‘em this way anymore!” movie than it is an “if it hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed they ever made ‘em this way” movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Here the fantastic and the soft porn unite in an absence of scenery, building or mise-en-scene and the result is to leave us with unforgettable images.  Involuntarily The Horrors of Spider Island is a Dadaist film.” -Ado Kyrou, quoted in Tohill & Tombs, Immoral Tales

“…Horrors of Spider Island is a classic example of z-grade filmmaking, a film so hilariously inept in every way that it achieves that special, indefinable level of otherness that causes some celluloid mistakes to become enjoyably entertaining…” -A Wasted Life

“…nothing else [producer Wolf C. Hartwig] made can match Horrors of Spider Island and its companion-piece, The Head, for sheer weirdness…. with the were-spider and its little hand-puppet monkey-bug friends on the one hand, and all the lifted skirts and shimmying hips on the other, Horrors of Spider Island would have easily scored enough points to qualify it as a minor classic of trash, but its creators weren’t satisfied with those things alone. Their hearts overflowing with generosity, they also gave us some simply beautiful not-even-trying dialogue and a storyline of such all-encompassing inanity that even I had not seen the like of it in a good, long while.” -100 Wasted Hours

IMDB ENTRY: Toter hing im Netz Ein Toter hing im Netz, Ein (1960)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST: Watch Public Domain Print of Horrors of Spider Island at the Internet Archive

Episode 1011 – Horrors of Spider Island MST3K Episode Guide

DVD INFO:  Because Horrors of Spider Island is in the public domain, it can be found in many competing versions.  The version distributed by Image Entertainment version (buy) (from a Something Weird restored print) is the best, and includes three arachnid-themed burlesque shorts.  The film can also be found in the Sci-Fi Classics 50 Movie Pack (along with such mockable dreck as Santa Claus vs. the Martians and Mesa of Lost Women) (buy) and on several other multi-DVD sets.  Of course, there is also the “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ version to be considered–it’s on Volume 11 along with Ring of Terror, The Indestructible Man and Tormented (buy) (both the uncut version and the commentary version are in set).