News
Late to the Party: ‘Spider Baby’ (1967)
It’s October! That marvelous month of the macabre and mayhem. With a wealth of horror movies to catch up on, I decided to go for something a little retro and that has a lot of retaining influences. With Kelly’s last LTTP post on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I thought it would be fun to follow up with another tale of cannibal clans, madness, and backwoods terror; Jack Hill’s Spider Baby or The Maddest Story Ever Told!
And what a story of madness it is.
Image via Wikipedia
The film starts off with a musical cartoon montage about the ‘maddest story ever told’ to set the mood. Then, a man with a book on rare diseases discusses “Merrye Syndrome.” A genetic disorder which causes a degeneration of the inflicted’s physical and mental state, causing them to become childish sociopaths. The last three known Merryes are Ralph, Virginia, and Elizabeth. Ralph is a mute but excitable manchild (played by none other than Sid Haig!). Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) is the more restrained and bullied sibling. And Virginia (Jill Banner) is a violent womanchild obsessed with bugs and spiders. The titular Spider Baby ‘trapping’ a deliveryman in her web before brutally stabbing him to death. Using a pair of knives as her pincers. The guardian of the trio and the estate is their chauffeur Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.), a kindly old man who just wants to keep the poor remnants of the Merrye family afloat and sane. But when distantly related Merrye family members arrive to claim the estate, it will turn into the most fearsome family reunion ever!
Watching the film, it’s interesting to see it as the ‘missing link’ of sorts between the ghosts and ghouls of the early 60’s to the more visceral and brutal human killers of the 70’s and onward. Despite being a more grindhouse style film, there’s a lot of heart to these madmen. Bruno sees the trio of siblings as kids, despite their age, size, and homicidal tendencies. He made a vow to watch over the Merrye clan to the family patriarch, and he intends to keep that oath. Ralph, Elizabeth, and Virginia are sympathetic in that their lot is of no fault to their own, but due to a cruel genetic disease. Virginia also keeping a collection of pet tarantulas such as Barney and Winifred.
Image via Youtube
All three stand out in their own ways. Ralph is playful and funny (The scene of Sid Haig having to wear an ill fitting schoolboy suit to dinner is as hysterical as it is weird) but still a giant of a man. Elizabeth and Virginia are like any bickering sisters, though with a proclivity for blades. And unlike most stories of psychopathic families, we get a lot of perspective from the cannibal clan themselves, something not oft done even in modern horror.
While not necessarily a frightening movie, it really sets the mood. The black and white tones making the dark and forbidding Merrye estate all the more suffocating and eerie. With a subdued pace, it can feel almost like a character study at times. Like an exploitation version of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Even doing something most films of its time never did, in becoming meta about the horror genre. In a tense but delightful scene around dinner, the visiting Merryes decide to spend the night at the estate despite Bruno’s warnings against the idea. Peter and Ann joking about the place being haunted and their love of horror movies with vampires and werewolves when Bruno notes that there’s a full moon that night before panning to the deranged trio of siblings.
Image via Youtube
A delightfully deranged tale of 60’s style madness and murder, for anyone interested in digging deeper into the roots of these kinds of horror tropes, Spider Baby is worth a visit to the Merrye family…
Join us next week when James Jay Edwards goes the greatest show to ever visit Earth with Killer Klowns From Outer Space!
Feature Image Courtesy Chris Fischer
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Movies
‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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Movies
‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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