The film begins with a series of twelve auditions for Gary and Georgia, organized by Mike Blackwood, concerning an imminent engagement in Singapore. Ten days later, we are en route to Singapore via Stock Footage Airlines. Wouldn’t you know it, the plane craps out right before the pilot can relay their position over the radio. Four days pass and Mike Blackwood hasn’t heard shit, and he’s also really sweaty and hitting the bottle. We then see the dance troupe, Gary and Georgia floating on an inflatable raft, lost at sea. One of the dancers is in tears. “Stop that bawling. You’re driving us all nuts!” their leader Gary consoles the starving dancer. Water is being rationed. “We can’t hold out for much longer,” opines Georgia to Gary’s disbelief. A bird distracts the troupe and one of the dancers sneaks a glug of water. “Are you crazy?!” yells Gary. “Give that to me!” He yanks the water away and slaps the water thief across her face.
After an awkward pause, the awkwardly dubbed Southern dancer shouts, “Look there, Gary, over there!” We see distant islands. “Land! Help me paddle!” says Gary, the only one with a paddle. Eventually, they make it to shore. If you’re wondering why this scene feels strange, amongst other reasons, it’s because there is not a single music cue overlaid, just foley and sound effects. After Gary hauls the girls from the raft to land, he plops down with Georgia, who fearfully mutters, “Gary, oh, Gary…” He holds her, and we fade to black.
We open next with Gary discovering drinking water and leading the troupe to it. “Okay, girls! That’s enough. Let’s have a look around,” says Gary, leading them through the island. One of the dancers falls and lands on some object. She presents it to Gary. “A hammer… with a long handle. It must be for the purpose of excavating some sort of metal. Most probably Uranium.” Clearly dance isn’t the only art Gary is well versed in. Immediately thereafter, a cabin is discovered. Inside, the troupe finds the titular corpse hung in the web (initial German release title Ein Toter hing im Netz). And so begins the horrors of Spider Island.
Is this movie a horror film? Well there is a big old spider that bites Gary and he turns into a half spider crazed killer, but no it’s not really a horror film. So it’s more of a nudie cutie? I guess so? There’s dancing girls who kind of get naked but no it’s not really just a nudie cutie either. Does that matter? Hell no it doesn’t matter at all. In fact, the confusion makes it better.
The confusion of what the movie wants to be was a question amongst viewers before this restoration existed. With the knowledge that footage was cut away over the years, people filled in the blanks incorrectly that it was ordered to be recut to be less of a sexploitation film, which yes some of the footage restored was nudie cutie material, but not explicitly to the point where there was a version that determinedly leaned further into the sexploitation genre. It’s important to discuss the journey of this film’s presentation over the years because it’s easy to forget that now is the time – sixty three years after its initial release – that Horrors of Spider Island is able to be watched at its fullest capacity yet.
Horrors of Spider Island was written and directed by Fritz Böttger, a German writer and director whose primary focus was in writing for film and television, mainly from 1950 to 1970. In the late 1930s, Fritz got his start in acting and choreography. Choreography, aha! Could this be where the impetus of the dancing troupe element of Spider Island comes from? Fritz directed two films in 1953 – Die Junggesellenfalle (The Bachelor Trap) and Auf der Grüne Wiese (On the Green Meadow). Seven years later they decided to pick up the director’s cap once more for Ein Toter hing im Netz (A Corpse Hung in the Web). The film was initially released in the US with the title It’s Hot in Paradise, then eventually was rereleased as a double feature with The Flesh and the Fiends with its now official title of Horrors of Spider Island. After Ein Toter hing im Netz, Fritz never directed a film again, but did have a good ten years of writing left in him.
One of the film’s producers was Wolf C. Hartwig, who went on to produce Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron and its sequel Breakthrough, which was directed by one of my favorite action filmmakers Andrew V. MacLagen. Wolf produced exploitation aplenty, oh did he. Their first feature film was a controversy stirring documentary Bis fünf nach zwölf – Adolf Hitler und das 3. Reich – I mean, the dude’s taking on Hitler with his first go-round, it doesn’t get much more exploitative than that. Post Spider Island, Wolf went on to sex films, and created what is referred to as the “Sex Report” film, which are those pseudo-documentary movies with sexual subject matters. Wolf’s series was titled Schulmädchen-Report (Schoolgirl Report). Hitler, spiders, schoolgirls… A real producer.
The cinematography of Horrors of Spider Island was helmed by Georg Krause, who a mere few years prior to Spider Island was the DP of none other than Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory – literally one of the most beautifully shot films of all time, and this guy’s framing up Alexander D’Arcy in his three-toothed spider make-up. Insane. According to IMDB, Krause’s earliest director of photography credit was from 1923 (a film titled Downfall) and his last was in 1967 (a couple episodes of a TV series Das Kriminalmuseum).
I present this information of the major parts of the crew to you with the hopes of gleaning some sense of context to how this movie came into existence because – believe it or not – there doesn’t exist much writing about the making of Horrors of Spider Island. These weren’t just some guys fooling around with a movie camera. These were established craftsmen of their time and industry.
Low budget films, regional filmmaking, genre films, exploitation movies, all of these words can be used to attempt to categorize these journeyed works. We’re talking about movies that would get chopped up, scenes tossed aside, new music cues added in, and a new title given every time it played a different theatrical run – that’s right, the filmmakers of Horrors of Spider Island did not refer to this movie as Horrors of Spider Island.
The aforementioned words of “regional” and “genre” have had an Oscar-worthy comeback in recent years. They’ve become clinical and respectable words that effectively group and provide context for what would be otherwise completely rogue, unexplainable films. Distributors and physical media companies like Severin and Vinegar Syndrome have seemingly cracked the code on boutique presentations of both unknown films that have never seen the light of day, or movies that have been seen for years but are in desperate need of a new restoration like Horrors of Spider Island, which years ago would most likely be found in a slim DVD case in a bargain bin at a gas station and the only word used to describe it would be “trash”.
Or you could watch it dubbed over by Mystery Science Theater 3000. Growing up in Illinois, our local station horror host was a guy named Svengoolie (“Berwyn?!”) and in contrast to MST3K, Svengoolie would minimally dub over the films, maybe include a couple bits at his studio bookending the commercial breaks, but for the most part he wouldn’t make fun of the films that much, which I always respected because as a kid I legitimately wanted to watch these films – kaiju films, Roger Corman films, Hammer films, and that sweet, sweet public domain goodness. It never made sense to me to make fun of movies that were already hilarious enough on their own or were actually downright good movies that got a bad rap – what MST3K does is almost like beating someone while they’re down.
Respect and reverence has been bestowed upon the garbage we always loved. And thus, giving a full restoration of Horrors of Spider Island allows us not only to enjoy the movie as it was made to be enjoyed but also, like a detective, to get closer to the source of the initial experience. What is it about this film that draws us in? Because whether you like it or not, the movie has been around for sixty three years now. In an age where “content” can disappear at the simple unclicking of a checkbox, Horrors of Spider Island lives on. The power of what the fuck? is clearly timeless.
Sure, looking back there is a clear cut reason why the filmmakers thought this idea was financially viable. My man Wolf is no slouch. Clearly they wanted to cash in on the monster flick, and simultaneously cash in on the nudie cutie, but like all true art the end result is something of its own creation – whether intentional or not.
Whether intentional or not, Horrors of Spider Island is a movie where logic doesn’t apply at all. A movie where the rules of survival don’t apply at all, other than rationing the water supply. A movie that is so far from passing the Bechdel Test it didn’t even come to class to take it. A movie where time seems non-existent, and then someone comes in and says ten days have gone by. A movie where music doesn’t fade in when you think it would, yet does when you least expect it. A movie that you might even remember differently in your head, like a fever dream. A movie that has become a fantasy of its own. At a certain point, the distance of time imbues intent. As if this movie was always titled Horrors of Spider Island. Trust me, it wasn’t.
Drew Hanks is byNWR’s Content Editor by day and Los Angeles-based filmmaker by night, they have written for FOX/Hulu’s The Great North, follow @mildruew on instagram for 35mm film screenings of their dark comedy feature film, The Made Man.