Director: Fritz Böttger
Writers: Fritz Böttger, Eldon Howard, and Albert G. Miller
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org
A group of dancers flying to Singapore crashes in the ocean and washes up on a deserted island. Their boss gets bitten by a giant spider and transforms into a murderous monster. Will they survive long enough to escape the island?The 200th movie! Due to repeats on these sets, this is movie 251/400 which means I have only 149 movies left to go—74 and 1/2 more weeks of this. I’ll be doing this until January 26, 2019. Jesus, how is this my life? However, while it was random chance that Horrors of Spider Island came up as the 200th film, it’s kind of appropriate. I watched this more than nine years ago during the first iteration of the PD project, uploaded it then, and there’s an MST3k version of it. The whole purpose of getting these Mill Creek sets and watching all the movies in them was to find public domain films that I could add to the Internet Archive so they could be used—by me or others—in an MST3k-style midnight movie show. By sheer luck, this movie brings all those elements together in one package.
Naturally, it sucks. I mean, c’mon, irony rules o’er all and Murphy’s Law always applies. Despite this movie’s short runtime (just under 75 minutes) very little happens and there’s a lot of padding. We start with the would-be dancers sitting outside the promoter’s office waiting for a chance to audition. He arrives, they each take turns performing, and he accepts or rejects them according to some standard. The purpose of the scene is just for him to ogle the women and to give the audience the chance to do the same.
They fly to Singapore, but the plane crashes in a hilarious bit of stock footage intercut with screams. The survivors (it’s never clear how many, if any, of the women died) eventually find an island with a cabin containing the body of a scientist in a giant web. The promoter cleans the cabin out and they all settle in.
“Settling in,” by the way, means starting to snipe at each other and competing to attempt to seduce the promoter. He’s the only man on the island so what else are you going to do?
Not much, apparently because, on the first (second?) night, he takes a walk and gets bitten by a giant spider that’s been mutated by the uranium on the island. He turns into a weird-looking monster and runs away for the majority of the rest of the film.
The women strike languorous poses, argue with each other, and cavort in various swimming holes for a month before a ship arrives with two men. They find the girls, one falls in love with one immediately while the other keeps shifting his attention from girl to girl. The monster shows back up, kills some of the girls, the womanizing guy, and then the survivors drive him into quicksand where he drowns. Then they all get on the boat and leave. THE END.
It’s empty, silly, and dull, but at least it’s in the public domain. I think it’s telling that Mystery Science Theater 3000, which had its share of boring flicks, left this one alone until the tenth and (then) final season. The movie’s in the public domain so they could have used it at any time. That they waited so long to do it and that ShoutFactory, who’s currently distributing all the DVDs of the show, waited until seemingly the penultimate set of episodes to release it speaks to how empty the film is. I mean, there are a few hilariously bad shots early on, but that’s about it. You basically have an hour of nothing going on.
As I mentioned above, I uploaded a copy here years ago and you can read some reviews there. The one-star ones are usually the funniest. I don’t particularly recommend it outside of editing projects. You get some nice monster shots which could be fun for a video or a background mix for Halloween, but that’s about all.
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