Cheap Spider Baby (DVD) (Jack Hill) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Spider Baby

Catch This One! You'll Eat It Up...
How does one describe SPIDER BABY? Well, take "The Addams Family", add "The People Under the Stairs", toss in "Arsenic And Old Lace", blend in a tablespoon of the attitude of "Little Shop Of Horrors" with just a pinch of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and stir violently. That comes about as close as I can get to describing it. Jack Hill has created a macabre masterpiece, full of frights and fun from beginning to end! The Merrye family have "Merrye Syndrome", a rotting of the brain, caused by generations of inbreeding. The kids Virginia (Jill Banner), Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn), and Ralph (Sid Haig) are real cut-ups! They've been isolated in a big, secluded house on a hill, watched over by Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.) for their entire lives. Now teenagers, things are about to change. A pair of distant relatives (played by Quinn Redeker and Carol Ohmart) have come, with sleazy lawyer in tow, to take control and institutionalize the children. Unfortunately for these invaders, they don't know just how crazy the kids really are. They are also ignorant of the fact that these siblings are cannibals! If they had known, they would never have spent the night! SPIDER BABY relies on a cool story, great acting, dark humor, and creepiness to overcome it's microscopic budget (just think of all those mega-budget stinkers over the years). It's an ensemble effort that pays off. Buy it now...

---

Wonderful lost cult film finally gets its due
I had read about this film for years and never really bothered to track down a copy. I hate to say it now, but based on some of Jack Hill's other work (e.g. Blood Bath) I was expecting something more along the lines of, say, House of the Black Death, or an Al Adamson movie. Nothing could be further from the truth; all the praise heaped on it below is totally accurate. The story/screenplay is fresh, funny, and completely bizarre, evoking earlier AND later movies/TV shows like Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Addams Family, but really very unlike any of them. The cast is uniformly terrific (unlike most low-budget schlock of this era); it's actually hard to single out anyone, although Lon Chaney, icy/hot Carol Ohmart, Quinn Redeker, and Jill Banner (in her first acting role) are especially impressive. And if you (like myself) have reservations about most "horror comedies," relax: this isn't the broad, dated, farcical humor of, for example, roughly contemporary Roger Corman flicks; Spider Baby is played straight, with the humor (and the horror) allowed to arise from the situation, as in all the best comedy. You don't want to know any plot details, just buy this movie; having finally seen Spider Baby, it's leaped instantly into my top ten must-see list. This is one "cult classic" that really deserves its reputation.
The Image DVD does this film a long-delayed justice. The quality of the source print is fantastic, crisp and detailed, with very good contrast and tonal scale, and only the slightest traces of wear (some very minor speckling and a few blemished frames here and there). I agree with another reviewer that the rediscovered "lost" footage IS vital to the movie and should be reincorporated into any future reissue. The audio commentary by Jack Hill, while a little more laid back than, say, Tom Weaver on the Universal discs, is quite interesting and informative. I'm amused that he and several of the principals involved can't seem to understand why their film has such a fervent cult. And after hearing all the comments from Hill and the actors (in footage from the cast and crew reunion) about how much they all believed in the movie, it's heartbreaking to know that it immediately got sucked into litigation and sat essentially unreleased and "lost" for so many years. I could go on and on, but all you need to know is: if you're any kind of cult, horror, exploitation movie freak, see Spider Baby! And remember, it's not nice to hate.

---

Excellent
I was lucky enough to catch this on a big screen at the Cleveland Cinematheque a while ago. SPIDER BABY is an ominous study of hereditary evil that's not afraid to elicit laughter
along with its frights. Wonderfully warped in every way.