Jack Hill’s Spider Baby is a deeply weird comedy-horror film. Ahead of its time in a very real sense, it was filmed over a week or so in 1964 and not released until 1968.
By that time, its star, Lon Chaney, Jr., had been dead for two years, a victim of liver failure. The fact that he had been ill for years, suffering from alcoholism, hadn’t prevented the venerable actor from talk-singing the movie’s title song, a charming little ditty subtitled The Maddest Story Ever Told.
Chaney plays Bruno, the chauffeur/guardian of the Merrye family, who are afflicted by a disease called “Merrye’s Syndrome,” a chronic condition that causes them to degenerate mentally and physically, beginning at around the time they hit puberty.
The children are hardly a “merry” bunch: Ralph (Sid Haig) looks like a leftover from Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932); Virginia (Jill Banner) is fascinated by spiders to the extent that she moves like one; and Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) seems childlike, but harbours a kind of feral brutality hidden just beneath the surface.
The first victim of the family an ill-fated postman (played by Mantan Moreland) who ends up with his ear sliced off and his body fed to – well, whatever lurks in the basement.
Moreland, who was attempting a career comeback in the sixties, lasts all of five minutes, but as he’s in the opening scene (which happens to be quite gruesome), his screen time is highly memorable.
Bruno looks after the bizarre brood, is tolerant of their eccentricities and covers up their indiscretions, until Peter (Quinn Redeker) and Emily (Carol Ohmart) – distant relatives of the Merryes – arrive to ascertain if they have a legal right to take possession of the property.
An interesting dinner party takes place in which all of the family members are present, along with an attorney named Schlocker (Karl Schanzer) and his young, attractive assistant, Ann (Mary Mitchel).
Ralph has just killed a cat, which is served as part of the dinner, along with a salad made of weeds, some mushrooms and a few deceased insects.
Things get stranger and stranger; Ralph travels through the house by using a dumbwaiter and gets quite aroused by the two good-looking women visiting the rundown place.
Unable to speak, he manages to say a lot with his leers.
Bruno makes the mistake of leaving the house to run an errand, and the “children” seize upon the opportunity to instigate some very violent “play:” Schlocker is murdered, his corpse thrown into the basement (where some sort of inbred relations eat him for dinner).
Ralph sexually attacks Emily, apparently causing her to have a rather abrupt personality change in which she becomes just as violent as the rest of the Merrye clan. Finally, Bruno returns and discovers that everything he has tried to hold together is falling apart.
Unable to deal with the fact that the secrets regarding the family will be revealed to the world, he blows up the house with a fistful of dynamite.
All may or may not be over, however, as Peter’s young daughter seems to have a fascination with spiders . . .
The film ends with the most dreaded words in B-movies: “The End . . . or is it?”
Spider Baby has a diseased, sickly atmosphere that anticipates David Lynch’s Eraserhead, with Alfred Taylor’s black-and-white cinematography contributing images of death and decay that are still disturbing today. Hill – a Corman protégé who had been among the many directors (Francis Ford Coppola and Monte Hellman among them) contributing to The Terror (1963) – pulled out all the stops he could get past the censors for this independent production.
Shot in late summer of 1964, the film seems to have been cursed. Its producers went bankrupt, which was why it didn’t see the light of day until 1968. When it was finally released, it went unnoticed. The distributor changed the title to The Liver Eaters (an especially sick joke considering that Chaney had died of liver disease in the interim), and it still didn’t catch on.
It wasn’t until years later, when perhaps the public had become more attuned to Hill’s vision – and when midnight shows and bootleg videos entered the marketplace – that Spider Baby finally found an audience.
It’s a shame it hadn’t happened sooner, because Chaney’s performance in the film ranks with his very best. Reportedly “on the wagon” during the shooting, Chaney portrays Bruno as a likeable but misguided character, the ultimate “enabler” who indulges every whim and fantasy of his weird wards.
This, of course, leads to disaster, but when Bruno finally sees the error of his ways, he atones in the only way he knows how: he destroys everything and everyone, including himself.
When Chaney turns to look at the camera before setting off the dynamite, the look on his face is a winsome, reflective one. Perhaps Chaney knew he was dying at that point; in any case, he just seems to shrug it off as of no consequence.
Hill never really lived up to the promise of Spider Baby; he became an exploitation director with an erratic career, producing everything from blaxploitation films (Coffy) to R-rated T&A fare (The Swinging Cheerleaders).
But if he never makes another film, he made his mark with Spider Baby.
Bruno
Lon Chaney Jr.
Emily
Carol Ohmart
Peter
Quinn K. Redeker
Elizabeth
Beverly Washburn
Virginia
Jill Banner
Ralph
Sid Haig
Ann
Mary Mitchel
Schlocker
Karl Schanzer
Messenger
Mantan Moreland
Director
Jack Hill
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