Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.
So far we’ve encountered the lame (Kickboxer 4), the cheesy (Howling III) and the downright silly (Bolero), but none of the entries to date truly lives up to the moniker Unwatchable. I’m talking cinematic atrocities here, people – no holds barred, claw your own eyes out and pray for death bad. Horrors of Spider Island makes a pretty good run at achieving such status, but falters in the stretch run.
A 1960 German production shot in what was then Yugoslavia (perhaps you know it by the original title Toter hing im Netz, Ein – literally A Corpse Hangs in the Web), Spider Island has little use for the conventions of the horror movie. You know, like scary things happening. The opening music has such a jaunty, cocktail hour vibe you’d think one of the Thin Man movies is starting. The first ten minutes are taken up with a rather free-form audition process as a string of hopeful lasses are paraded through the office of a sleazeball putting together “a dancing troupe tour to Singapore.” Some of the girls are asked to dance, some just stand around, and one takes her clothes off without any prompting. (She’s hired on the spot.)
From the interminable stock footage of airplanes, city skylines and ocean waves that follows, I deduce that the plane carrying the troupe members and their overseer Gary crashes en route to Singapore. The survivors – consisting of Gary and seven screechy women – float to safety on a raft, finding themselves on an unappealing heap of stones covered in scraggly vegetation and featuring the world’s smallest waterfall. Ah, but deep in the woods there is a cabin, and inside the cabin there is – well, there is a dead man hanging in a giant web.
This should be cause for concern, but as a group, the women of Spider Island are far too horny to worry about such trifles. You can certainly understand why they’d be driven mad with passion for the shirtless, barrel-chested Gary, but he only has eyes for good girl Georgia. Well, at first anyway. Once the women start shedding their clothes (accompanied by appropriate bump-n-grind music on the soundtrack) and getting into catfights, it’s more than a red-blooded man can resist. How can he be expected to fend off all these lovelies? When Georgia catches him in a clinch with busty Babs, he rushes off into the woods, howling “This damn heat! I don’t know what I’m doing anymore!” As it turns out, he should have stuck with whatever he was doing, because minutes later he has been attacked by a giant spider-puppet thing, whose bite has transformed him into some sort of, I guess you’d call it, SPIDER-MAN.
I fear this all may sound sort of entertaining, but what with the unsightly visuals, atrocious dubbing (I began to suspect some sort of What’s Up, Tiger Lily? prank) and granny-with-a-walker pacing, I assure you it is not. That is, not until two new arrivals wash ashore. They are Bobby and Joe, assistants to the professor (the dude strung up in the spider web) returning with supplies. Joe is a straightlaced sort, but Bobby is a whiskey-swillin’ sex machine on the make! An island full of scantily clad women is just what the doctor ordered, and Bobby just can’t wait to plow his way through all of ’em. He’s such a loathsome boob, it’s a shame his demise by spider-bite happens offscreen.
Horrors of Spider Island is saved from unwatchability by a groovy bikini dance interlude and the exciting conclusion wherein the girls, armed with torches, chase the spider-man into a pit of quicksand. I’ve said it before, but I'll say it again - you just don’t hear much about quicksand anymore. It was something I used to spend a lot of time worrying about, and all for naught. So far, anyway.
Previously on Unwatchable:
92. I Accuse My Parents
93. Howling III: The Marsupials
94. Invasion of the Neptune Men
95. Marci X
96. Track of the Moon Beast