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Or, to give things another turn of the screw, how much funnier would the movie have been if they had played the material straight? You just have to tweak a genre very slightly to make it a satire, and you just have to tweak a satire very slightly to turn it back into something shocking. It’s odd that a film that seems to stand at the start of so much was actually a parody of earlier films (the great tradition of Universal horror is directly invoked over the dinner table). But also think of the sit-down dinner in Craven’s The Last House on the Left, which is where the “bad family” give themselves away because of their atrocious table manners. Of course The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was coming up. Nothing more immediately highlights the disruption or inversion of convention and normalcy than a dinner with crazies. There’s a great tradition of these grotesque dining scenes, beginning with The Old Dark House. This is the dark side of “unconditional love.” Meanwhile, it is the more “normal” people who are cast as intruders who have to be gotten rid of. I think Hill is on to something in his commentary where he says that one of the things that makes the film so popular is the idea that no matter how sick and depraved the family members are, they still love one another and look out for each other. As Joe Dante remarks, “it was a very elusive movie.” It’s certainly cult material, but never had much of a cult, at least until recently. I think because it didn’t have much of a theatrical run and basically disappeared for a long time. A movie that you would expect to find in the canons of cult film, and yet it makes it onto very few such lists. That said, he’s very good here in a completely ridiculous part. It wouldn’t be right for Lon Chaney (by this time he had dropped the Jr.) to get through a movie without turning on the waterworks. Does that make a difference? Is it harder to take seriously? This is California and those are palm trees. A gothic nightmare, with the old family house standing in for the castle. But it isn’t Southern or New England/Lovecraftian gothic. He can’t read his lines properly. The timing is way off. It looks like it’s going to be a rough ride as Quinn Redeker’s Peter introduces the story. It’s also worth it just to hear Lon Chaney Jr sing the film’s bizarre opening theme.*. Spider Baby is a classic worthy of any horror fan’s library or, at the very least, a quick view online just to say that you’ve seen it. Between the sexy women in scant clothing, murderous, incestuous degenerates thriving in the California countryside, the implied violence and depravity within the hearts of young adults and children and, of course, the ending that always let the imagination run wild as to the true nature of the curse of Merrye Syndrome… it was definitely unique for its time. Like I said, you have to look past some of the cheaper, low end B movie issues that the film suffers from, as well as the fact that it was shot in 1964 at a time, when even showing blood or the act of murder itself was still very taboo and unacceptable in the mainstream.
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With a ravenous, crazed patriarch sequestered beneath the home and a quickly unraveling tale of insanity and horror being laid out for the audience, I feel that Spider Baby would have been a bit more like the Rob Zombie classic had it been filmed and released a decade or so later. There, they find themselves pitted against a family of crazed, inbred cannibals who will do anything to protect their home and legacy from outsiders. You follow an unsuspecting group of people traveling to a remote and decaying home in the desert for their own wants and desires. Meanwhile, it is uncanny how many elements of Spider Baby really shine through in House of 1,000 Corpses shot nearly forty years later, once again starring Sid Haig as a demented murderer. The Merrye Family (Elizabeth, Ralph, and Virginia) with Bruno.