Spider Baby or: the Maddest Story Ever Told (1967)
If lovers of loony toon cult cinema can summon up a measure of patience, this bonkers, shoestring, made-in-12-days goofball horror movie delivers the guilty pleasures you'd expect from it.
A fair warning, though.......some of it's just a dumb slog to get through and even at a brief 80 minutes, it feels a little too long.
We're off to visit the reclusive Merrye family, living in an off-the-beaten-track mansion and all of them afflicted with a hereditary family disease.
From puberty on, the not so merry Merryes begin to suffer mental age regression, brain rot, utter madness and by the time they reach adulthood, they've devolved into gibbering psychotic cannibals. Not quite the Brady Bunch, these folks....
But for years they've been tenderly looked after and thankfully kept isolated from the world by their faithful chauffer and all-around caregiver, Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr. in a thoughtful empathetic portrayal. )
Then, as 1980's and 90's trailers would often declare.....everything was about to change.....
Distant relatives and their lawyer (suitably named Shlocker) arrive to claim their legal rights to the Merrye house and also decide what's to become of the remaining Merrye children......and it doesn't take long before these poor suckers find out what a horror show they've stumbled into.
Teen girls Virginia and Elizabeth (Jill Banner and Beverly Washburn, are lethally cuckoo, with Virginia thinking she's a spider and slicing up innocent victims who wander on to the property. Their imbecilic older brother Ralph (Sid Haig) has regressed into a three year old with a healthy adult sex drive and given to slaughtering small animals to serve up for dinner.
For more madness, down in the basement live the three remaining adult Merryes, reduced to mutated, wailing cannibals. Naturally they get to feast on whatever's left of the unlucky visitors who come knockin' at the door (including veteran black comic actor of the 1940's Mantan Moreland)
We can only assume writer-director Jack Hill intended a sick-humor horror movie, along the lines of Roger Corman's 'Bucket of Blood' and 'Little Shop of Horrors'. He mostly succeeds, but halfway through the film, it slows down to a crawl, with a third of its running time devoted to the schlocky Shlocker searching the house for who knows what.
The cast certainly has a whole lot of fun overplaying to the eye-bulging maximum. (It's Chaney Jr., the film's only beacon of sanity, who comes up with the most logical solution to assure himself and his beloved Merryes a measure of peace.....)
Dedicated curators and admirers of screwball pulp cinema will want to check this out. As for everyone else.......well, now you know what you're in for.....so don't say we didn't warn you.....
2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).
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