Time for another Giant Spider Movie review at Last Movie Outpost, as Hawkzino continues to try and get me to quit by using my own phobia against me. Well, I have my big boy pants on right now so he will have to try harder. This time it is Horrors Of Spider Island.
Horrors Of Spider Island
The moment the opening credits start rolling on Horrors of Spider Island with its saucy-sounding smooth jazz theme playing over the cartoon image of a spider’s web, I was getting some strange Carry On movie vibes.
If you don’t know, the Carry On movies were a series of raunchy British comedies made between 1958 and 1978, with a dead cat bounce in 1992. Much of the humor was based on sexual innuendos and the plots featured old men, most of whom were gay in real life, chasing young women, with hilarious results. Honestly, they are great, harmless fun.
Having now watched Horrors of Spider Island in full, I can confirm that my initial instincts were spot-on. In many ways this is a lost Carry On film, except without the tongue-in-cheek humour. Eight young women on a tropical island spend their time in various states of undress while being pursued by men and occasionally a wolfman creature, who is really their mutated talent agent after being bitten by a giant spider.
One of the women is even called ‘Babs,’ and she is blonde, and her real name is Barbara, like the Carry On icon Barbara Windsor. Before I disappear down the conspiracy rabbit hole, I must point out that Barbara Windsor didn’t appear in her first Carry On film until 1964. That’s four years after Horrors of Spider Island, which proves that this movie’s no rip off. It’s the template!
There are plenty of opportunities for jokes in Horrors of Spider Island, but it’s played straight. The only humor is the ironic kind that comes from watching it years later and mining it for cheap laughs at how bad it is. But only a total loser would do that.
The movie is German, dubbed in English (pretty well, for the most part), but the characters are meant to be American. The movie opens with some establishing shots of palm tree-lined roads (presumably Los Angeles), American freeways, and long, open-topped cars that are as big as a whale and about to set sail.
A group of women sit in a waiting room, ready to be auditioned as dancing girls for a tour to Singapore. It’s one of the few scenes where the ladies are fully clothed, but that doesn’t last long. Babs absent-mindedly hitches her skirt up to adjust her tights while Linda drops her dress immediately after entering the audition room.
She gets the job, but you knew that already.
I like this opening sequence. The auditions are a neat and efficient way to introduce multiple characters in a short space of time, plus we get a taste of the women’s… personalities… and also their… dancing abilities.
The judges are Gary and his assistant/girlfriend Georgia. Gary isn’t a sleaze, which was unexpected. He adjusts one of the girls’ skirts when she shows too much leg. He stops Linda from smoking. He doesn’t encourage fooling around.
The only weird thing he does is sit with both legs on the desk and constantly crosses and uncrosses them during the auditions. I thought it must be some kind of code, or crabs. Luckily for him, it’s the first one: crossed legs for yes, uncrossed for no. I thought it should be the other way around, but it’s his system, he can do what he wants with it.
They take off for Singapore and the movie splices in stock aerial footage of the New York skyline, which is on the other side of the country (but what’s 2500 miles between friends?). They’re heading west towards Hawaii but crash land in the Pacific (spoiler)
The stock footage they use is hilarious. It shows a World War 2 bomber with both engines on fire plummeting nose-first into the ocean at terminal velocity.
It’s completely unsurvivable, but in the next shot, they are floating in a dinghy in the sea, holding their heads and feeling a little woozy as if they’d just stepped off a Waltzer. Maybe they jumped out before the plane hit the ocean and used the dinghy as a parachute just like Indiana Jones.
They paddle to a conveniently located tropical island. The survivors are Gary, Georgia, and seven dancing girls. The pilots must have died, but they were only seen in the stock footage and probably died during World War 2. For some reason, two of the dancers are different people to those we saw at the auditions, but who cares when their skirts have split to the waist?
They immediately find fresh water and a hammer. The hammer has a long handle and Gary proudly explains to the ladies that people on the island must be excavating uranium. Yeah, that’s what I thought too. The moment I saw that long handle I thought ‘uranium excavation.’
It’s possible that Gary is exaggerating his knowledge of the most effective excavation tools for fissile isotopes. Men will do strange things to impress the ladies. One of the women asks Gary if you can eat uranium and he says yes. I’m not sure if he’s being serious.
Their next discovery is a cabin in the woods, stocked with a month’s worth of food. I thought life as a castaway would be harder than this. There are minor inconveniences though, like having to clear out the cobwebs. And when I say cobwebs, I mean the dead old man stuck in a giant spider web in the middle of the room.
We also get our first look at the movie’s plus-sized spider: a mean-looking thing with a snaggle tooth, two eyes, and three claws on the end of each leg. Imagine the bastard offspring that would result from an unholy union between a spider and a three-toed sloth, and you won’t be too far out.
The dead old man was a Professor (why of course he was!) but in a surprising twist, he wasn’t involved in either the discovery or the creation of the giant spider. When they find his diary, it confirms that he was simply looking for uranium deposits on the island (wait, Gary was right!?).
The spider’s origin is never explained, and it appears to be the only one of its kind on the island. For my head canon, I’m saying that a spider mated with a three-toed sloth atop a pile of uranium which, as I’m sure Gary will be able to tell you, is radioactive as well as edible. The mutant spidersloth was the result.
They settle into their new home. The girls undress and stretch out on the veranda in their underwear when they’re not bickering like toddlers. Linda grabs Gary and kisses him because whatever, I don’t know. He looks scared at first but then goes with it, until Georgia sees them. Gary blames the heat and walks away.
It was at this point I realized that Gary is both the luckiest and unluckiest guy on the planet at the same time. Unlucky because he was involved in a plane crash, but lucky because he survived. Lucky because he washed up on a well-provisioned tropical island with eight beautiful women, but unlucky because one of them is his girlfriend.
After failing to fend off Linda’s unwanted advances, Gary goes for a walk and fails to fend off the giant spider’s unwanted advances. He manages to kill it by shooting it with the Professor’s gun, but gets bitten in the process, and we all know what that means. That’s right, he turns into a beastly wolfman-type creature.
If you’re thinking that doesn’t make sense, you probably have a functioning brain, congratulations. He doesn’t even turn into a spider-ma…person, or develop spider powers. It’s just Gary with
clawed hands, a snaggle tooth, and excessive knuckle hair. If this were a Carry On movie, I can totally see him being played by Terry Scott.
The women search the island for Gary. Linda remains at the cabin and mutant Gary strangles her. Is it revenge for the sexual assault? You decide! It’s a pretty good moment but is totally squandered.
Here’s how the rest of the movie should have gone: the remaining women are picked off by the monster and the survivors learn to put aside their petty squabbles, band together, fight back, and kill it. On the surface, it would be like a gender-swapped version of Predator, but look deeper and it could be symbolic of women’s liberation or something.
But that’s not the movie we get. Instead, we cut to a month later and the women are swimming naked in the sea, having girly splashy water fights without a care in the world, and two men arrive to rescue them.
Oh well, I suppose it was 1960, which was still basically the 50s because the Beatles hadn’t arrived yet.
The two men are Bob and Mike, who arrive to restock the Professor’s pantry. If this were a Carry On movie, Joan Sims would say “they can fill my pantry anytime.” Bob spies on the ladies swimming naked and abducts one of them (Gladys). We don’t see that it’s Bob; the other women think Gary did it, but soon after we see the couple canoodling on the beach. She’s fine with being kidnapped by a total stranger while totally naked. Women love that.
Mike meets the other ladies at the cabin, who are suspicious of him until Bob and Gladys return, arm-in-arm. Mike agrees to take them off the island in a couple of days when their boat returns, which leaves just enough time for a party!
Quick note: this movie barely qualifies as a giant spider movie. They kill off the spider after half an hour and its mutant creation, who’s supposed to pick up the slack on the monster front, has gone AWOL for a month. Where’s Gary? Did he find a Sandals resort on the other side of the island?
Anyway, Bob is a ladies man and would be played by Sid James if this was a Carry On movie. He juggles Gladys with the other girls like a kid in a sweet shop. Mike is more selective and would be played by Bernard Bresslaw. He takes a shine to Ann, but he’s awkward around women. For his chat-up line, he tells her he’s glad her plane crashed.
Before you laugh, her response is even better: “You say that to everybody.”
They’re made for each other.
Mike and Bob fight over Bob’s sexist ways, but halfway through they both laugh and hug it out. It’s hilarious – they both have a moment of clarity and realize how lucky they are. However, Bob’s luck runs out when he goes to meet Gladys and runs into Gary instead. Hooray, Gary’s back! Has it only been a month?
Gary kills Bob and chases Gladys off a cliff. Then, making up for lost time, he pays Georgia a visit in the cabin. Mike intervenes but Gary overpowers him. Georgia lights a flare and chases Gary off with it. Gary is VERY scared of fire, like all movie monsters. Mike hands out flares to everyone and they chase Gary into the jungle. His plan is to surround Gary, which I think is flawed because then what?
Luckily for them, Gary runs into quicksand, sinks beneath it, and dies.
Quicksand featured heavily in old movies and scared me to death as a child. I thought it was a much bigger problem than it is in real life. Oh wait – maybe that’s where he was stuck for the last few weeks.
Anyway, the boat arrives and that’s the end of the movie. As a final note, I would like to suggest that this movie is remade as a next-generation Carry On movie and played for laughs. Here are some title suggestions:
Carry On Spider (kind of obvious)
Carry On Girls (no wait, that one has already been used)
Carry On Legs (I like this one, because it refers to both the women and the spider)
Carry On Dancing (because they’re dancers)
Carry On Quicksand (it’s alliterative, and also there’s quicksand)
Carry On Gary (it rhymes)
Carry On Cabin in the Woods (I like that movie)
Carry On Screaming (no wait, that’s also been used)
Carry On Don’t Get Caught in the Web (winner!)
Rating: 3 spider legs out of 8