AKA Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told

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DIRECTED BY: Dustin Ferguson

FEATURING: Noel Jason Scott, Skylar Fast, Emma Keifer, Jennifer Moriarity, Peter Stickles, Cody J. Briscoe

PLOT: A family of three young adults suffer from “Merrye syndrome,” which causes them to slowly regress to a childlike (but homicidal) state; their kindly caretaker tries to protect them from scheming relatives seeking to seize their ancestral homestead.

COMMENTS: Despite what laypeople might assume, it is rarely a fun exercise to review a bad movie. There are, of course, exceptions. Movies that are bad, but unintentionally entertaining, can be eviscerated and celebrated in the same breath. It can be cathartic to unload on Hollywood product cynically dumped into theaters just to make a few bucks off unwitting dupes by people who should care more about their craft —these provide excellent excuses to flex your mordant prose muscles. And there are a small number of movies for which calling out their antisocial elements—be they misogynist, sadistic, exploitative, ignorant, or bigoted—feels like a public service. But most bad movies, unfortunately, were made with love by decent people doing the best with what they had to work with; these flicks inspire disappointment, not indignation. And disappointment rarely results in prose that’s a delight for either reader or writer.

But the issuance of a remake of a weird movie classic  like Spider Baby is newsworthy. And although the project feels wholly unnecessary, people are likely to be at least a little curious. Seeing the name of original director Jack Hill on the marquee as executive producer is encouraging; surely he would not leave his baby in the hands of ne’er-do-well filmmakers? Unfortunately, the new Baby goes wrong in just about every way imaginable; so much so that any analysis reads less like a meaningful critique and more like a particularly grisly cinematic autopsy report.

Ferguson has added entirely new scenes, and yet the new version somehow runs almost ten minutes shorter than the original. The film is padded with little home-movie style clips (a tribute to House of 1,000 Corpses, a movie this actually resembles more than its source) and many more senseless murders—as if a greater quantity of perfunctory killings could make up for the carefully orchestrated, individualizes fates that befell the original’s scant three victims. The four top credited actors are Beverly Washburn (Elizabeth in the original), Ron (great-grandson of Lon) Chaney, Robert Mukes, and Brinke Stevens. Each of them spent at most an afternoon on the project, filming meaningless death, flashback, or wraparound scenes. Stevens doesn’t even speak. The actual principals are no match for the originals. Nor is the camerawork, the setting (sunny Cali mansion instead of old dark country house), the continuity, the humor, or, really, anything. A few of the performances aren’t completely embarrassing (Moriarity is best), the credit sequence is well done, and the score is good (if used far to liberally, in an attempt to manufacture a spooky atmosphere not happening onscreen). But it’s like a community theater enactment a beloved classic, with no real individual take to offer. Great scenes are omitted, inconsequential ones are substituted. All that you really need to do is to compare the two renditions of the famous “playing spider with Uncle Peter” scenes. The original is a masterpiece of suspense worthy of Hitchcock, playful and subtle, conveying themes of bondage, incest, and sadism through the context of a villainess with the unknowable, morally ambiguous mind of a child. Even though some of the dialogue is lifted verbatim for the remake, this re-enactment is more like watching candid security footage from the VIP room of a B&D-themed strip club. Ferguson establishes no relationship (much less chemistry) between the characters, starts the scene in medias res, and ends it in sleaziest res.

Of course, there will be some generous and charitable folks who think that this younger sibling is not such a bad egg, and good for them, I guess. But my recommendation is to avoid; the fact that, despite the cult tie-in, this movie has almost no distribution, marketing, or reviews from sources besides us bolsters that warning. It would be all terribly depressing, but the bright side is that this microbudget remake helps us to appreciate the miraculous accomplishment of Hill’s original so much more. Hill may have been working in schlock, but he was a master schlock craftsman, able to wring memorable performances out of mediocre talent and genuine suspense out of thin, musty air.

On Pod 366, we incorrectly speculated that the advertised “BONUS black and white feature” was a copy of the original film. It is, in fact, merely a monochrome rendering of the remake. There are a lot of interviews and behind-the-scenes footage on the disc, however.