Spider Baby

Mantan Moreland, who was cast in Hollywood flicks in the Thirties as a "Step ’n Fetchit" stereotype in films that would simply not cut it in today’s era of Woke (to put it mildly), looks in at a window after driving his motorbike (if I remember correctly) out to the godforsaken, dust-choked, hardscrabble back hills of sunny L.A. Suddenly, the window—like a giant glass jaw—clamps down on the luckless Moreland. A mysterious and quite clearly insane and very bad actress–cum–Sixties teenybopper comes forward, twin butcher knives in each hand. She crosses her arms in a gesture calculated to call to mind the mandibles of a giant spider. She says:

"I caught a big fat bug right in my spider web, and now the spider gets to give the bug a big sting. Sting! Sting! Sting! Sting! Sting!"

Spider Baby is a cinematic tale starring Lon Chaney Jr. and his obviously booze-ravaged visage. Also starring Sid "Captain Spaulding" Haig—the late and great one of House of a Thousand Corpses and other Rob Zombie infamies. We also get Mantan "King of the Zombies" Moreland in a bit role right up front as a Black messenger dude in an old-fashioned chauffeur outfit, who gets killed by being jammed in a window by a young woman—Virginia (Jill Banner)—holding a butcher knife in both hands, who happens to think she's a spider. (Well, I mean, if you identify as a spider and all, who am I to judge? An early pioneer in the furry community, perhaps.)

Hence the title.

Mantan’s ear gets severed in proto-splatter splendor.

Next, we meet the sister—a young blonde gal, Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn)—and the film uses their hair color as a way to distinguish the insane from the even more insane, in much the same way David Lynch would a couple of decades later. Chaney is the guardian of these two rather mentally unstable kids (one thinks she's a spider, the other is just consumed with homicidal hate; both, however, have perky, winning dispositions). He gets a message—I guess from the luckless Moreland—about a lawyer named Shlocker (actor Karl Schanzer, who looks like a certain Austrian painter bloke), and his secretary Emily (Carol Ohmart) and Peter and Ann (Quin Redeker and Mary Mitchell) a couple of cousins, or something coming down to claim the property as part of an inheritance scheme. Never did get the full skinny on it. (Also, don’t really care.)

The secretary dances around in front of a mirror wearing black fishnets and garters—real Victoria’s Secret boudoir chic—and she’s eagerly watched by the obviously inbred Sid Haig, who hangs upside down like a bat and rides the dumbwaiter. On the whole, I suppose a dumbwaiter does deserve a dumb movie, and vice versa.

Haig is a mute gross-out, exhibiting none of the Captain Spaulding charm but every bit of the Spaulding grotesquerie. I’m struggling to really piece together much of what I watched in hindsight here, which does usually mean the picture stank as high and heavy as the musty funk from a bald-headed psycho inbred killer who rides a dumbwaiter and lives with his two crazy sister-wives and an assuredly soused Lon Chaney Jr.

At any rate, everyone psychos out and goes walking around a Dark Shadows Collinwood–by–way–of–sunny–California house with candles lighting their path. Down in a pit or trapdoor oubliette or whatnot is an aunt and uncle. I was certain the “decayed, psychotic family line” angle was hinting at inbreeding, and the whole “semi-savage relatives” buried beneath the floorboards thing was some sort of metaphor for the repressed desires of the Id, as well as incest, and other sort-of Freudian psychobabble interpretations. Or maybe it was just a trite, hackneyed plot device. Who knows? Either way, there is really not a lot going on here to chew on. One of the folks living in the pit—an uncle or whatnot—has a weird, sort of furry wolf mask on. Or maybe I was just hallucinating. They’ve both regressed to an animal state. (Don’t they all?)

There is a dinner of the mad and macabre that may remind you of Poe’s tale “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” I can’t really remember much of what happened there, except Sid Haig grabbed a huge hunk of something and ate it with his fingers in a manner most bestial and uncouth. But really, what the hell else did you expect, huh? Less than ten years later, Tobe Hooper would revisit this theme of the mad family dinner in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Chaney originally turned down Spider Baby due to his manager insisting the actor—who had hit the skids and was nosediving into B pictures as robustly bad as Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein (which, to be fair, he didn’t do until 1971)—deserved better pay. He finally took it out of desperation and ended up in this ugly little turkey.

Maybe the whole movie was one big damn spider’s web, trapping over-the-hill, lush has-been actors (albeit great ones) in its hairy mandibles. I’m sure I wouldn’t know. I’m still trying to get the awful theme music out of my head. Think "Monster Mash," but Lon Chaney instead of Bobby “Boris” Pickett.

Ain’t nobody dancin’ to that, Victoria’s Secret notwithstanding.

Spider Baby (1967) | RETRO HORROR MOVIE | Lon Chaney Jr. - Carol Ohmart - Quinn K. Redeker

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