Spider Baby – The Movie Gourmet

Movies to See Right Now

January 25, 2019 by movie gourmet

Anne Bancroft and Aldo Ray in NIGHTFALL playing this week at NOIR CITY

This weekend, I’m in San Francisco for the Noir City film festival; check out my festival preview.

OUT NOW

Roma is an exquisite portrait of two enduring women and the masterpiece of Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). Will win multiple Oscars. It is streaming now Netflix.
Green Book: Tony Lip is a marvelous character, and Viggo Mortensen’s performance is one of the great pleasures of this year in the movies.
Stan & Ollie: Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy deliver remarkable portraits of a partnership facing the inevitability of showbiz decline.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s sweeping romantic tragedy Cold War is not as compelling as his masterpiece Ida.
The Favourite: Great performances by three great actresses, sex and political intrigue are not enough; this critically praised film didn’t work for me.
Do NOT, under any circumstances, see I Hate Kids, which I started to screen for a film festival earlier in the year, but could not bring myself to finish. Somehow, it got a theatrical release, but it only has a Metacritic rating of 12.

ON VIDEO

The Aura is a brilliant 2005 neo-noir from Argentina that I wasn’t familiar with until the Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller, programmed it into the 2017 Noir City film festival. The Aura is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon and Hulu.

On TV

On January 27, Turner Classic Movies will present an overlooked masterwork. Set in England just before the D-Day invasion, The Americanization of Emily (1964) is a biting satire and one of the great anti-war movies. James Garner plays an admiral’s staff officer charged with locating luxury goods and willing English women for the brass. Julie Andrews plays an English driver who has lost her husband and other male family members in the War. She resists emotional entanglements with other servicemen whose lives may be put at risk, but falls for Garner’s “practicing coward”, a man who is under no illusions about the glory of war and is determined to stay as far from combat as possible.

Unfortunately, Garner’s boss (Melvyn Douglas) has fits of derangement and becomes obsessed with the hope that the first American killed on the beach at D-Day be from the Navy. Accordingly, he orders Garner to lead a suicide mission to land ahead of the D-Day landing, ostensibly to film it. Fellow officer James Coburn must guarantee Garner’s martyrdom.

It’s a brilliant screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, who won screenwriting Oscars for Marty, The Hospital and Network.

Today, Americanization holds up as least as well as its contemporary Dr. Strangelove and much better than Failsafe.

Reportedly, both Andrews and Garner have tagged this as their favorite film.

One of the “Three Nameless Broads” bedded by the Coburn character is played by Judy Carne, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

And on January 30, TCM presents the often transgressive cult classic Spider Baby, the last horror film for Lon Chaney, Jr. and the first for Sid Haig.

Movies to See Right Now

December 30, 2018February 27, 2015 by movie gourmet

If you can make it to Cinequest, there are some great movie choices, including Sunday night’s Clouds of Sils Maria with Kristin Stewart (who won the Supporting Actress Cesar – the French Oscar) and Juliette Binoche. Here is my extensive Cinequest coverage.

The Oscars have come and gone, leaving these choices in theaters and elsewhere:

Clint Eastwood’s thoughtful and compelling American Sniper, with harrowing action and a career-best performance from Bradley Cooper.
The inspiring Selma, well-crafted and gripping throughout (but with an unfortunate historical depiction of LBJ).
The cinematically important and very funny (and, of course. Oscar-winning) Birdman.
The Theory of Everything is a successful, audience-friendly biopic of both Mr. AND Mrs. Genius.
Julianne Moore’s superb performance is the only reason to see Still Alice;
The Imitation Game – the riveting true story about the guy who invented the computer and defeated the Nazis and was then hounded for his homosexuality.
And the movie that is better than all of these: Boyhood. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

Here are some great choices for movies coming up on TV this week – all on Turner Classic Movies:

The Narrow Margin (February 28): This overlooked film noir masterpiece is a taut 71 minutes of tension. Growly cop Charles McGraw plays hide-and-seek with a team of hit men on a claustrophobic train. Marie Windsor is unforgettable as the assassins’ target.
Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor in THE NARROW MARGIN
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (March 3): This romantic French musical is notable for three things: 1) the actors sing all of the dialogue; 2) the breakout performance by then 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve; and 3) an epilogue scene at a gas station – one of the great weepers in cinema history.
Spider Baby (March 4): This campy horror flick ain’t good, but it’s entertaining. Lon Chaney, Jr., passes the horror torch to Sid Haig. Also on March 4, TCM is bringing us one of the silliest of mutant monster movies, Night of the Lepus (thundering herds of giant killer rabbits) along with Bucket of Blood, a serial killer movie that is a time capsule of beatnik culture.

Spider Baby: as Chaney’s horror career ended, Sid Haig’s was born

July 23, 2014 by movie gourmet

There’s a cult classic coming up this Friday night (or very early Saturday morning) on Turner Classic Movies. In the 1968 Spider Baby, a family of inbred ghouls is tended by a kind and rational caretaker (Lon Chaney, Jr.) until some greedy relatives and their shyster invade their spooky Victorian mansion and become cannibalized. Spider Baby was reportedly made for only $65,000 – and it shows. There’s the clunky and explicitly expositional beginning and ending narration and a TV sitcom look and feel. But no 1960s TV show featured a daughter kissing her skeleton father goodnight, along with cretinous uncle and aunts in the basement and negligee-clad cannibals.

Spider Baby was filmed in 1964, but was caught up in bankruptcy proceedings and not released until 1968. This explains the offensive black character, which might have passed as regrettably mainstream in the early 60s, but must have seemed odd to the more racially conscious audiences in 1968.

Chaney has fun with playing a normal human among the monsters, and there’s a sly reference to The Wolfman at the dinner table.

As Chaney’s horror career ended, Sid Haig’s was just beginning. Haig, in just his second feature, played a sex-craved Igor type. He now has over 130 screen credits, including character roles in Emperor of the North and Jackie Brown and lots of TV work. But Haig is most well-known for his horror, and it’s hard to top his portrayal of Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses. Yikes.

Spider Baby is also known as The Maddest Story Ever Told, The Liver Eaters, Cannibal Orgy and various combinations of those titles. Spider Baby has played on Turner Classic Movies before and is available streaming from Amazon, Vudu and Xbox Video.