The League of Wednesdays: SPIDER BABY (1968)

Having just seen, loved, and written about Girly (1970), I must delve into its American cousin, Jack Hill's de-lovely Spider Baby (1968), for Stacie Ponder's Ye Olde Film Club Day over at the definitive Final Girl. 

And if you needed a reason to love Spider Baby, think of its homicidal purity in contrast with, say, the new Addams Family musical, which I've read disturbing things about via the NY Times' Ben Brantley:

"Gomez (Mr. Lane) and Morticia (Ms. Neuwirth), the heads of the family, discover to their alarm that Wednesday (Krysta Rodriguez, left), their 18-year-old daughter, has fallen in love with Lucas Beineke (Wesley Taylor), a young man from a middle-class all-American home. What’s more, Wednesday has invited Lucas and his parents — Mal (Terrence Mann) and Alice (Carolee Carmello) — for dinner, and insists that the family try to act “normal” for the night."

A Wednesday all grown up and asking her parents to act "normal'" and not embarrass her in front of her bland boyfriend? Why bother making the play at all? Nothing's worse than when a genuinely macabre family gets watered down and sanitized to appease Times Square tourists or doltish beau Blandings. Imagine a Spider Baby remake starring Michael Cera in the same situation as Quin Redecker (above) --tied down and at the mercy of a nubile nymphet with two butcher knives. Cera would squirm and make lame excuses and try to talk his way out of the situation, just like a big...fat... bug... caught in a spider web.  Redecker still squirms, but he's a swell fella, with some real class and a thorough handle on adman Bob Dobbesism.

Spider Baby has a come a long way and endured many setbacks en route to its current cult status as the living segue between the Capra-directed Here Comes the Groom (where Bing, like a cool-cool-cool of the evening Lon Chaney Jr.,, nurtures two hardscrabble Frenc war orphans, one of whom is a dead ringer for Beverly Washuburn), Grey Gardens (like that film it shows how bourgeois politeness usually conceals great depravity, and Philadelphia Story, where Tracy and Dinah's 'con' isn't so sophisticated that the average lawyer or reporter wouldn't realize they're 'performing' to mask some scheme. None of them think it would be murder, of course. Or the 'Spider Game'. That's where the film earns its wings, so to speak, just not angel's wing. It earns bat wings.

It was barely screened at all when originally released because no one wanted black and white films at the drive-in anymore, all of a sudden. It resurfaced later on blurry video where it became a slow-burn cult favorite but even then it was the kind of film you had to dig for. At least I had to dig in 1990 when I'd watch it every night around three AM, drunk on bourbon and ginger ale - it was on a 6-hour tape I made, betwixt Mesa of Lost Women and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill --all culled from a Seattle cult video and used record store I found when "living" in Seattle. Together the three films on that video formed for me an inner sacred space of the devouring Kali goddess cinematic energy, a womb where death and life were all in the hands of batshit insane dark haired spider ladies and drag racer lesbians, and they set the groundwork for my appreciation of Camille Paglia's 'chthonic' vision when I read her Sexual Personae a few years later. Prurience, punishment and drunken self-loathing all came together for me watching this film, transmuting into to 127 proof gold of the absolving Kali.

No one can climb into the lap of a tied-down uncle (Redecker) or mix girly baby doll sexuality and creepy murderousness like Jill Banner (above). Though Beverly Washburn as her sister Elizabeth has her own great charm, and they have a great rapport, murderous nymphetitude gets no better, not even in Don't Deliver us From Evil or Jean Rollin's vast oeuvre. Cordelia's the one still smart enough to sense the approaching danger, and her 'act' of demure sophistication (her curtseying and socialite hostess bridge club phony grins, while Virignia's thing is the "spider game" and presumably is the titutlar baby; their rival bickering is forgotten when the sanctity of their home is threatened in favor of a well-armed murderous solidarity. As usual with these film dionee, the brother is a wild child simpleton (Sid Haig), the patriarch confined to his bed in his upstairs master bedroom (and long dead, or seemingly so), and Bruno is the best kind of doting dad to step in as guardian, eternally gentle and decent with his homicidal charges.

We all love Chaney's farewell monologue with the children gathered around, as he comes up with the solution to their unwanted house guest problem, a solution which will mean the death of them all-- and a gleam of sadness comes into his eye and how that line "we didn't have all that much time left anyway," seeming to sum up the entirety of his personal career rises and falls and awareness of his own mortality, alcoholism, and bogey man obsolescence, all flashing at once the way it does when one steps into battle, or a suicide spiral; to access that melancholy and ravaged relief takes huge courage, everything in poor Lon's life, from his childhood sleeping in the vaudeville trunk of his thousand-faced dad to his own career-igniting turn as Lenny in Of Mice and Men and later his Universal horror cult status as The Wolfman, all the way down to fucking up his live TV Frankenstein by drunkenly thinking it was just another rehearsal--it all comes pouring out so beautifully, you can't help but well up, especially if you're watching your love life fall apart through a haze of weed and whiskey while the Seattle rain staccatos your flat apartment roof and your soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend dresses to go out to some dumb hippie potlatch you're far too wasted to attend, if you were invited. It's his "Home... I have no home" speech (i.e. what won Martin Landau the Oscar that was really Bela's) and he does it so well he never has to vary from being mellow and glowing, happy that all their woes will soon come to an end, and these cute children will be spared the cannibalistic final act. It's a single scene on a film that's otherwise a macabre horror comedy, yet it fits and elevates the whole thing. It was already a pretty good time, but this monologue transmutes the film into greatness, and Chaney's entire wrecked life into an unqualified triumph.

As with GIRLY, described in my last post, SPIDER BABY seems to merge with my psyche as if it had been made just for me... zeroed in but not in a sort of overkill give the people what they want kind of way but a perfectly-realized, just gory and strange enough but never to the point of post-modern narrative disruption way. It lies on the historical time line between my love for those old Bela Lugosi Monogram and PRC poverty row horrors and the art film Corman-school mix of post-beat wit and Corman trained mastery of on-the-fly shock, schlock, and drive-in pacing. Nowhere are there the tedious elements that usually mar old dark house and murderous family films: no snarky reporters, imbecilic cops, doting old ladies or suspicious tire salesmen and yet there are all sorts of groovy meta links to the gonzo films of the past in the casting: Monogram mainstay Mantan Moreland opens the film as an unlucky telegram Sam; Carol Ohmart, the archetypal broad in Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1957) and Corman's The Creature from the Haunted Sea, is great at making greed and contempt super sexy; Sid Haig, the Jack Hill and later Rob Zombie perennial, brings weird savage naive pathos. Why, the whole thing just stinks with atmosphere! (that's a quote from the sun-dappled but roughly similar and underrated Boogeyman Will Get You (1943).

I can't find my copy of the old version DVD but I ordered the director's cut direct at his Spider Baby Online site. I'm hoping director-writer-producer Jack Hill gets all the profit so he can get rich and make more movies. Stop meditating and start scarifying/exploitating again, Jack! You've got a great eye, ear and wit, so use it, por favor--and Stacie Ponder, you are the Mother Queen of all horror and strange film bloggin's. Yours was the first "blog" I read and related to, years and years ago! You showed monsters, raconteur wit, and perceptive film history-savvy writing could be fused! You fused 'em and Broadway's Addams Family with its tourist-streamlined wanting to be normal Wednesday, you can taste the Spider sting of our ambivalence!

Head Under Heels: GIRLY (1970)

Much as I love grindhouse cinema, I'll confess some of the themes--the rape-revenge and WIP sub-genres in particular--often leave me feeling soiled and soured on humanity, resentful of having my empathic response and innate chivalry used as a cheap fuel for 'sharpening me up' and conservative catharsis (that never full catharts). Walking the streets afterwards, in a state of semi-shock, like a Tennessee Williams heroine pining for dead 'friend' and sensing only brusque, misogynist licentious hostility all around, it takes me weeks to recover, memories of the vile recreations I endured dredging up at the oddest times. I've been told by many girlfriends that this venomous anti-misogynist rage is not sexy but what am I to do? As an English major at Syracuse during the mid-to-late 1980s, I was caught up in a time of great liberal backlash/sexual hysteria--Satanic panic and the dawn of PC thuggery--wherein sensitive new age guys like me were conditioned to feel guilty for every impure thought and meanwhile our friends in the dorm were being date-raped before there was such a phrase, and too cowed to go the cops. By senior year, there was "take back the night" marches, but by then militant feminist backlash had so overreached it targeted even me!

That's why, perhaps, I've always long been in love with dangerous women, the type who kick ass, smoke, drink, dose, carry guns, laugh at the cosmic joke and who don't need to be assaulted before they've earned the right to beat a frat boy to death with a champagne bottle. Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted is my guru. Yes, I know that's a pretty bad choice for a guru --but it's movies, man --not reality --reality died in the 80s. trouble is 99% of films don't know it.

As such, I'm always ready to walk a long way for a glimpse at the glint of true madness in a young Lolita's eye, the kind that's not kindness-of-strangers-dependent/delusional but the opposite. They absolve me of a great burden, for they don't need my anguished pounding at the ovular gates of the screen, offering like some interdimensional woodsman to enter frame and rescue them. If these women could traverse the other way they'd likely kill me instead, and I like that.

And now, I'm right with the times: the poster girl for the current era is Sarah Palin, with her tan and form-fitted bright red raincoat and MILF glasses, standing on a podium surrounded by crisp white Alaskan snow; her hot breath steaming the microphone, spouting enough fear-inducing fascist rhetoric to make Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate let loose a dove. I would never vote for her, but I dig when girls rise up and use their sexual super powers for evil instead of good, and if they can't have their revenge on Seattle, like Francis Farmer one day will, let them destroy all the side-burned swingers, angry lawyers, priests, parents, and homeless they can get their drive-in claws on! Hence my deep love for: Spider Baby, Don't Deliver Us From Evil,  Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, Vampyres, Mesa of Lost Women, Daughter of Darkness, and so on (if you know any others, do let me know).

Thank heaven, then, for little Girly. The film's treacly but rundown dead flowers and sickly sunshine decor (lots of dolls and paneling) could have been too much to handle but cinematographer-cum-director Freddie Francis does the impossible and makes the whole dreary Grey Gardens-gone-quite-gold-from-grief Brit tackiness thing seem actually cozy in its overgrown gone-to-seed, dead plant and smashed china kinda way (a good DVD transfer helps immeasurably I'm sure). Girly is the exception to the 'dotty gentry' Brit genre, that offshoot of the Baby Jane tree, for it is truly mad. Rather than the visualized madness and soapy starvation of the horror hag genre, it possesses a sense of giddy feral freedom, unwinding as a constantly devolving children's game with endless chanting and macabre undertones, sexually voracious (or arrested) family members fussing over and doting on innocent debauched wayfarers, the sort of raincoated men who seem old enough to vote but surely have no ID or worried next-of-kin. So what's not to love, even as the axe comes roaring down? The insanity of the depicted matriarchy is more honest in its scripting than Little Edie was in her imrov. Their dolls, pre-empathic (latent) sadism, games like 'Grocery Store' and 'Cowboys and Indians' and other sexy macabre head games seem all of a piece, part of a devolution brought on by incest and apparent lax mansion real estate tax, and/or big trust funds. They have no father to initiate the children into the social order, so it all comes down to lots of macabre nursery rhymes and strange "rules" of the house, and the way, even here in this macabre paradise, sex destroys everything, but oh! Oh! That Girly.

A knock-out of the Sue Lyon in Night of the Iguana /Jill Banner as Virginia (aka Spider Baby) / Carroll Baker as Baby Doll variety, Vanessa Howard captures the spirit of wicked evil as only young pre-empathetic, unsocialized wild-and-ever-nubile girlies can. Her eyes are alight with unholy mischief, and then -- later -- the guilty pangs of blossoming womanhood, and all the drag that implies. Sexual awakening drives even ordinary teenagers insane, prompting a whole slew of irrational behavior, so how crazy then must this insane girl get? Sexual awakening might even mean a kind of awful late-blooming sanity! Her rapport with the sad but savvy eyes of "New Friend" --who learns to play the game pretty damned fast--causes a rift within the deranged clan, but it's one her craziness fights against, so she winds up oscillating between compassion and sadism, or-- illustrated in a great single long-held shot of her face as she lies in bed and he goes down on her (below camera) a slow change from childish joy to passion to sadness to contentment to guilt, with the same finesse as Jim Siedow in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (with Michael Bryant in the Marilyn Burns position) if harnessed to Jane Fonda in that similar scene from Coming Home. And she's got lovely legs which in little socks and schoolgirl maroon skirts are fit drive straight male viewers like myself into moaning fits and seizures; her long long straight perfectly dirty blonde hair demarcates a princesses of the late 60s/early 70s variety; her simmering red schoolgirl uniform is like a pomegranate-squeezed hallucination against the perennial grey and mud green garden fog of parks and the zoo. She's a great complex character and Howard bites into the part with such a cunning glee that you want to lick the juice off her chin, even if means she's going to turn around bite your tongue off.

Full of joyous relish in this macabre set-up, the rest of this all-Brit cast eats it up too, this being the land of Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, Joseph Loesy, the C-of-E, and Shakespeare, they're more than capable of nailing every nuance in these bizarre characters. We simply adore the droll restraint (and throaty seductive purr come late night bed jostling) of Ursula Howells as Mumsy (the British title of the film is Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly) and the simmering of Pat Heywood as sexually frustrated murderous Nanny, with her bottle of acid and long needle ala the poison used in Hamlet. There are all sorts of sly references to decadent English royalty going on I'm probably too Yank to get but I can recognize the Shakespeare references -- at time Girly herself even rocks a Lady Macbeth-style hallway creep and murderous intent range of emotions. Even the interloper who wisely seduces the lot of them, "New Friend" as they call him, Michael Bryant (who kind of looks like a hungover James Coburn), does a good job registering a fusion of aghast and intrigued, the louche swinger slowly triumphing over the reactionary; giallo fixture Imogen Hassall is his initial fur and white-dress clad girlfriend, who dies early-on. She's excellent at being bored by the drunken dawn kid games and unaware of immanent danger as they meet and drunkenly cavort at the park playground with Girly and Sonny as the sun comes up. Francis's camerawork is imaginative and rich as always, replete with some good crane shots (he won the Oscars for his cinematography in The Elephant Man and Glory). Some of the interiors seem flatly-lit and the palette is very mushy, but that's the style of the weird kitchen sink-upstairs/downstairs Pinter-esque dramas Girly slyly satirizes. There are still plenty of dark olive greens and seething maroons. Bernard Ebbinghouse's score is a nicely subversive mix of bouncy elevator muzak and pensive classical bits that always seem on the verge of a funeral, running antithetical and brave against the nursery school maniacal zest.

Man, this film's got my number. I'm trying to less subjective here but if I love a film I take it very personally. Love kills everything it touches, including objectivity, so bear my prejudice in mind. As Burt Lancaster said in Visconti's The Leopard: "Marriage is six months of fire and forty years of ashes." If you ever were a swinger, you might use that line to justify a lifestyle that includes occasionally waking up from a two-day bender on a stranger's couch, snuggled against a snoring pit bull whom you do not know. To this day, I still don't know what happened that night, or whose couch that was, but I've chosen the swinging path over that of the spouse and ungrey garden and that's my life, and I'll probably do it again. God forgive us ("no blasphemy here," notes mumsy when New Friend tries to mention the lord at  dinner). men like New Friend, me, and countless others have let ourselves be led all through history by spirited and charismatic emotionally-unstable blondes into iron maws such as this. Some of us made it out alive, or in a state that resembles aliveness (the usual shambling relic, shivering over park bench muscatel). What have we learned? That insanity is as easy to absorb in cloistered surroundings as a local accent, that survival can depend on one's being open to the rules of childish lunacy (as true in life as in sexual procreation), that movies don't need moral centers (no bobbies or barristers appear here like unwelcome censor-demanded buzzkills to decry such upper crust depravity), that clinging to worn-out ideals can be fatal, and that the trick to staying alive--as a man trapped in a crazy woman's world--is going down early and often.

PS - And strange coincidence, almost all my own films have the same Venus Flytrap / Vagina Dentata theme, particularly QUEEN OF DIC/SKS. Will you see it?