Spider Baby – Jack Hill's Macabre Madness in 2K

Spider Baby is a grotesque horror work that finds its most fertile ground in the deformity of family relationships. Having grown up in Roger Corman's circle, Jack Hill is the director who constructs an unconventional story, set in an isolated mansion where the Merrye family hides a terrible secret.

Bruno, a loyal servant, guards its members, trying to protect the young descendants from outsiders. The hereditary syndrome afflicting them causes a progressive mental regression, accompanied by increasingly dangerous behaviors. When some relatives and a lawyer arrive to claim the inheritance, the fragile domestic routine descends into chaos.

Cannibalism, Murders, Necrophilia, and Ambiguous Sexual Relationships

Hill plays with gothic horror conventions, subverting their atmospheres through a dark humor that doesn't give too much away to the viewer. Virginia, played by Jill Banner, is the most interesting character: behind an apparent innocence hides an unpredictable personality, capable of shifting from childish play to violence.

Lon Chaney Jr. imbues Bruno with a melancholy that makes the character less caricatural, but the film also allows us to discover a young Sid Haig in the role of older brother Ralph. Shot with a very low budget ($65,000) in just 12 days in 1964 and released only in 1967 due to distribution problems related to the scandalous themes it addressed. The work retains a particular identity, suspended between grotesque and macabre, where cannibalism remains primarily a narrative suggestion, but is enough to make this dysfunctional family even more eccentric.

Shot on 35mm film, original image format 1.67:1 (1920 x 1080/23.97p), AVC/MPEG-4 encoding on a single-layer BD-25. The overall quality is very good, with a generally clean and vibrant image rendition, maintaining the overall organic feel thanks to a constant background grain. Especially in better-lit sequences, close-ups offer particularly convincing results, within a virtuous black and white rich in nuances. Contrast stability is good, with no significant issues of fluidity or overall consistency. While leaving the impression that some room for improvement remains, this encoding offers a technical presentation that should please fans of such a historically distant work.

Praise for the choice not to force Italian voices, maintaining the original dialogues and the typical texture of direct sound. The DTS-HD Master Audio dual mono (16 bit) provides a more than decent listening experience, which should be enhanced through an HT system. Subtitles are available in Italian, as well as English, French, and Spanish.

Very interesting extras: extended scene (4'), location tour of the house where the film was shot (3'), alternate opening titles "Cannibal Orgy", commentary by Federico Frusciante (11'), medium-length film The Host by Jack Hill himself (30') from his film student days, trailer. Subtitles in Italian.

The Rustblade edition, limited to 399 copies, includes the SD version on DVD-9. The O-Card slipcover is partially embossed, and it includes a small spider and 5 double-sided postcards with film images and original artwork.