Spider Labyrinth - In den Fängen der Todestarantel

In the late eighties, it seemed like the Italian film industry went full out to create an interest in their horror movies, resulting in cheeseball films like The Red Monks, Ghosthouse and Witchery. Fulci gave us House of Clocks (good), Aenigma (okay), Demonia and Sweethouse of Horrors (painful), and Lenzi had House of Lost Souls (good) and House of Witchcraft. You've Lamberto Bava's Graveyard Disturbance and Demons 3 The Ogre out there too, not to mention those Zombi sequels and Marcello Avalone's Spectres and Maya and etc etc. None of those are as effective or genuinely scary as Spider Labyrinth. Why, I'm not quite sure, but this film lacks the cheese factor of any of those films and seems to go all out for creating a surreal, creepy atmosphere.

In America, a company who are working on an international project have lost touch with a Professor Roth in Budapest, so they send one of their own, Professor Whitmore, out to Hungary to find out what's going on. He's driven to Roth's house by Roth's beautiful assistant, only to be warned by Roth's wife that he's been acting strangely. Roth himself does appear to be freaked out by something, and when alone with Whitmore, gives him some notes and Polaroid photographs and tells him to meet him later that evening.

Whitmore then goes to his hotel, run by a creepy lady and apparently full of strange residents who continually stare at Whitmore. He also discovers that Roth's assistant lives across the road and isn't shy about showing of her assets, if you know what I mean. Once he goes back to Roth he finds the man murdered (hanging from the ceiling by cobwebs), and that he never had a wife in the first place. That's bad enough, but the local policeman takes Whitmore's passport, so now he's stuck in a strange land.

He decides to do a bit of investigating and this leads to people (including William Berger) trying to warn him off, him getting lost in Budapest itself (where the city seems to deliberately get him lost), and a strange creature with a nerve shattering shriek going around killing people. I'll go no further than that plot wise.

What works here is the great music, cinematography, and the ending, which took me by surprise. There's no attempts here to connect with the youth eighties style by having youngsters in the film (like Ghosthouse or House of Lost Souls), no cheese (as in Witchouse), and some serious time has been spent making every shot creepy, to give you the feeling that every single person Whitmore encounters has something to hide. I see similarities with Argento in some respects, but this film unfolds a lot more slowly and there's not a drop of blood until 40 minutes in.

I'd never even heard of this film until last week, and I've been actively seeking out Italian horror for over fifteen years! It's available on Youtube in a blurry, Japanese subtitled version, so you can watch it for free, but this needs to be released on DVD. It's brilliant.

Not really bad Italian production of the late Eighties, with a story of an ancient religion of a spider-god survived till our days in a ghostly photographed Budapest. A few scenes are well done (like the death of a maid similar to one of the finest scene in Argento's Suspiria) or evocative (like the nightmarish underground voyage of the American professor in the spider nest, full of human remains), while the major faults of the movie are in the dialogues and in the fact that a good idea is wasted in a too derivative ending

The Spider Labyrinth, to my knowledge, has never had an official DVD/Blu-Ray release and that's a shame. Much of its power comes from its creepy visuals. The dialogue and a few plot developments don't always work, but there's no shortage of imaginative moments throughout.

A young man ravels overseas to see what the hold up is with a professor and finds the man incredibly paranoid to the point of stark raving mad. He's found murdered the next day and this leads to an investigation into the occult.

The Spider Labyrinth is similar in mood and story to some of Dario Argento's supernatural giallos and it also has a nicely paranoid feel like a Roman Polanski horror film. Maybe not everything works, but it's a journey worth taking.

Not only do I hunt the independent flicks, I also try to track down those flicks that were never released in a proper way, no DVD or official VHS was released. Sometimes they were only available on VHS at a rental base. Most of those flicks are well sought after and aren't cheap to buy. But sometimes if you hunt and are patient you can find those gems. This is one of them. It's an Italian horror movie but I wouldn't say that it is a giallo. Therefore there are to much strange things going on, the occult takes an important factor in the storyline. It never bores but as always with the Italian ones the sound isn't what it should be. The added sounds like doors closing or the wind is always too loud and that makes you look for failures. Like when the wind blows hard you see leaves flying away in front of the street but further the trees are standing still. Do I need to say more. But the movie works and has his creepy moments. the killings aren't bloody or gory but they work and that's good, isn't it. There is some stop motion used with the rip off of the spiderhead scene in The Thing, but still it's worth seeing. The version I have is English spoken with Japanese subs and clocks in at 87 minutes, uncut. And for those perverts out there, yes, some nudity is involved but due the Japanese release private parts are blurred, you know what I mean...

Professor Alan Whitmore (Roland Wybenga), co-ordinator on a project investigating a strange religious sect, travels to Budapest to retrieve a missing report where he becomes entangled in a web of intrigue, murder and occult activity.

Although its stylish cinematography, shocking violence and dreamlike atmosphere were undoubtedly influenced by Dario Argento's supernatural classics Suspiria and Inferno, and its narrative is eerily similar to Roman Polanski's under-rated occult horror The Ninth Gate, The Spider Labyrinth is no second-rate knock off: in my humble opinion, it is far a more accomplished work than either of Argento's celebrated movies, and it preceded Polanski's film by more than a decade.

Morphing slowly from a giallo-style murder mystery into a surreal Lovecraftian horror where ancient gods and their murderous followers secretly conspire to spread their evil around the globe, The Spider Labyrinth is a brilliantly crafted nightmare, tinged with a sense of paranoia and madness, packed with cool visuals, laced with eroticism, and topped off with several standout scary moments: appearances by a supernaturally strong, knife-wielding hag are guaranteed to send a shiver up the spine; a suitably freaky finale features some truly unsettling FX work from Sergio Stivaletti; meanwhile, fans of sexy Euro-babes are catered for by the lovely Paola Rinaldi as Genevieve Weiss, Whitmore's enigmatic (and frequently naked) contact in Budapest, and Claudia Muzi as hot hotel maid Maria.

As far as I know, The Spider Labyrinth still awaits an official DVD release, which I think is a travesty for such a fine film; until some enterprising company snaps it up and gives it the treatment it deserves, fans of bizarre Euro-horror will have to make do with the bootleg version that is available, a VHS transfer I believe, but still well worth getting one's mitts on.