By M.G. Wood

Special Edition DVD released September 25th, 2007

Runtime: 84 Minutes

Studio: Dark Sky Films

In "The Merrye House Revisited", a short documentary feature on the smashing DVD release of the cult classic SPIDER BABY, director Jack Hill takes a ride to Glendale, Ca. to revisit the Gothic house on the hill that served as the exterior for the film. Mr. Hill talks along the way about the movie, and his career and life, and at one point talks about the displeasure of having to make B-movies, while all his film school friends were off making studio pictures; only years later did he realize that his movies are now considered classics, while most of his friend’s studio pictures are all but forgotten. The exception of course being Jack Hill’s schoolmate Francis Ford Coppola (Mr. Hill served as second unit director on Coppola’s first feature DEMENTIA 13).

SPIDER BABY is a classic.

And not a classic in the quaint B-movie horror-schlock throw-some-shit-on-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks way.

No, SPIDER BABY is a genuinely creepy movie that in many ways surpasses Hitchcock’s PSYCHO in style and humor to capture the poignancy of what it is to be a freak in a freaked-out society.

Lon Chaney plays Bruno the family patriarch to three lovely children, two wily girls Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) and Virginia (Jill Banner) and a mischievous boy named Ralph.

One day Bruno is away from the house taking Ralph (Sid Haig) to the doctor, when Virginia decides to play her favorite game, “spider”: an unsuspecting messenger arrives at the house to deliver a letter and becomes ensnared in Virginia’s spider web, where upon Virginia proceeds to slice the messenger up.

You see, the kids are not alright, as a matter of fact they’re not really kids, but full-grown adults afflicted with the rare and unusual disease called The Merrye Syndrome; so rare and unusual that it’s actually exclusive to this family. We are told the disease causes one to slowly revert back to a pre-natal condition, oddly enough, a pre-natal condition which involves homicidal cannibalism.

Even after Bruno learns of the children’s mischievous ways, he always finds it in his heart to forgive. Bruno made a promise to the children’s father to never let them hate one another and to always take care of them; a close-knit family with troubles just like everybody else.

Soon our happy home is disrupted by a clan of extended family members with the unsavory intention of tearing apart the fabric that holds the family together. But, the family unit is strong, and when the outsiders invite themselves to stay overnight, Virginia convinces Elizabeth to play “spider” and rid the house of the uninvited “bugs”. Because the family that plays together, stays together.

*Jill Banner was an 18-year-old Goth goddess with big doe eyes and pasty white skin and an oddly hypnotic manner that has turned many a reform schoolboy’s head over the last 30+ years since SPIDER BABY's release. Ms. Banner left Hollywood soon after the release of SPIDER BABY in 1968. Jill Banner eventually returned to Hollywood, only to die in a car accident on the Pacific Coast highway in 1982, forever leaving her radiant performance in SPIDER BABY to posterity, however perverse.

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