"Spider Baby" - 31 days of horror

October 31, 1:45 PMSalt Lake City Movie Events ExaminerDavey Morrison

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Lasky-Monka

Spider Baby

Directed by Jack Hill

From the opening credits, with little cartoons, bizarre music, and a narrator loudly proclaiming (among other things) this to be "The Maddest Story Ever Told," you might get a sense that, well, it probably will be. And you'd be right.

The film's alternate titles include Cannibal Orgy and Attack of the Liver Eaters, which, along with the main title and subtitle, help sum up the absolutely demented mood of the film (if not necessarily its actual plot--or what plot there is). Spider Baby tells the story of three siblings in the Merrye family (two girls, Elizabeth and Virginia, and one boy, Ralph, who resembles the spawn of Harpo Marx and Satan), cursed with a disease that makes them regress into savagery and, apparently, eating/pretending to be spiders. Lon Chaney Jr. plays the uncle of the three zany kids, who just wants them to make a good impression on the guests--it's a hilariously daft performance. Nothing makes much sense, it's certainly not supposed to, and it's one of the creepiest and most hilarious and bizarre movies I've ever seen. I love it. The low-budget, black-and-white independent aesthetic is reminiscent of Carnival of Souls, and Romero's Night of the Living Dead that would follow a few years later. The kooky, funny, horrific, and totally illogical storytelling foretells Lynch's Eraserhead (he had to have watched Spider Baby a few times before making his feature debut), and Jack Hill's masterpiece of madness deserves to be seen and loved every bit as much. This movie rocks.

****

Spider Baby is available for free on Netflix Watch Now.