Also known as The Young and the Damned, this is the story of two drifters: Danny (Lowell Brown, High School Caesar), a rich kid who has run away from home, and “Big Stupid” Bix (Brett Halsey, Touch of Death, The Devil’s Honey), a long-time hobo who is mentoring the former.
Bix begins to make lovey eyes with an innocent waitress named Carrie (Joyce Meadows, I Saw What You Did), who’s already dealing with the creepy affections of Jesse (Jack Elam). Yeah, so creepy that he eventually murders her.
This film’s writer, Jo Heims, would later write Double Trouble for Elvis, the story for Dirty Harry and Play Misty for Me. Its director, Charles R. Rondeau, also made The Devil’s Partner and the fact that I can remember than without the internet both makes me happy and somewhat sad that I know this much about junk movies instead of something important that can actually help the world.
You can watch this — as riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 — on Tubi. You can also download it on the Internet Archive.
Man, Jack Hill rules. Sorceress? Switchblade Sisters? Coffy? The Big Doll House? That’s why Tarantino referred to him as “the Howard Hawks of exploitation.”
Of all his movies, I love Spider Baby most of all. It’s the most perfect of all films, packed with menace, sweetness and madness all in equal measure. Who else would let Lon Chaney Jr. sing the theme song to their movie other than Hill?
This $65,000 movie — shot in The Smith estate house that was originally occupied by Judge David Patterson Hatch, who wrote books on the occult after he retired — pretty much disappeared upon release and numerous title changes didn’t help it find an audience. Yeah, titles like The Liver Eaters, Attack of the Liver Eaters, Cannibal Orgy and The Maddest Story Ever Told didn’t work.
But it found the right people when it was all over. People like Johnny Legend, who made sure that this movie wouldn’t die.
Spider Baby is all about the Merrye family. The end of the family, that is, as the last three children all live in a mansion that’s falling apart and are protected by their chauffeur Bruno (Chaney, absolutely perfect). They all suffer from a disease called Merrye Syndrome that only impacts members of their family, hence the name, and causes them to regress down the evolutionary ladder as they grow older.
Two relatives visit with their lawyer to try and get whatever money is left, but the kids have lost all control and Bruno can no longer stop them from doing what they do best: kill, baby, kill.
Virginia (Jill Banner, The Stranger Returns) is known as Spider Baby because she loves trapping people in makeshift webs, climbing around the house and eating bugs when she isn’t murdering delivery people like Mantan Moreland (who is also in Lucky Ghost and nearly replaced Shemp in the Three Stooges).
Ralph (Sid Haig!) loves the ladies and has completely lost his mind. He can barely communicate now and uses the dumb waiter to silently get around the mansion.
Finally, Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn, Old Yeller) may look normal, but she’s just as demented as her siblings.
Meanwhile, Clara, Martha and Ned have regressed even further and live in the basement, where they must constantly be fed human bodies. And oh yeah — the skeleton of the children’s father gets kissed good night by Virginia before bed every single evening.
Of course, the arrival of new people can only mean one thing: everyone must die in a dynamite explosion. That’s how these things go.
Carol Ohmart from The House on Haunted Hill plays one of those interlopers as does Quinn Redeker, the only person I know that wrote the story for The Deer Hunter and appeared in a movie with the Three Stooges.
Sid Haig avoided Lon Chaney Jr. for the first two days of filming because he had no idea how to interact with him. One day, he was needed for a scene and the future Captain Spaulding went to the former Larry Talbot’s trailer. He knocked on the door and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Chaney. You’re needed on set.” Chaney told Haig, without skipping a beat, “Stop that. I’m not Mr. Chaney. I’m Lon. You’re Sid. Let’s leave it at that.”
Haig also related that in the scene where Chaney discusses the toy, the crew broke down into tears and gave him a standing ovation. He deserved it.
This movie makes me incredibly emotional. Maybe it’s the fact that the children are doomed to never fit in. Perhaps it’s because Chaney realized that he’d never have — or even had — a role this good. Or maybe I just really torn up by movies.
Four best friends from boarding school — rich kids, of course, the kind you most want to die — are headed to Block Island for the kind of graduation party that only exists in movies. But oh no — they miss the last ferry and get the trip from hell thanks to a crew that has no intention of letting them live, much less make the party.
Jeff Kober, who was in the remake of The Hills Have Eyes 2, as well as Tank Girl, The First Power and the TV series Kindred: The Embraced plays the main villain. Matty Cardarople, who plays Keith the video store guy on Stranger Things, and Brett Azar, who was a T-800 in the Terminator: Dark Fate, also show up.
It also has the based on a true story tag, so…you knew I had to watch it.
Dead Sound is available on demand and on DVD March 3 from Uncork’d Entertainment.
DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR team.
Ted V. Mikels had the body of a Greek god with a giant handlebar mustache, lived in a castle in the Nevada desert populated with live-in women (his Castle wives) and made astoundingly crazy movies. He was a magician, acrobat and fire eater before he started making movies and once he began filming them, he left this planet with pieces of insanity such as Girl In Gold Boots, The Black Klansman, The Corpse Grinders, Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, The Doll Squad and many, many more.
Dr. DeMarco (the ever-job hungry John Carradine) gets fired by the space agency. Not NASA. The space agency. So he does what any of us do when we get downsized. No, he doesn’t develop a case of the shakes and contemplate how to kill himself so his wife can take advantage of his life insurance because he’s failed yet again.
He makes superhuman monsters from the body parts of innocent murder victims that can be controlled by flashlights to the side of the head.
That said, those undead, well, astro zombies get loose and the CIA and an international gang of spies all get mixed up.
This is Wendell Corey’s last film, an ignominious close if I ever saw one.
Wayne Rodgers, who would become a star on M*A*S*H* co-wrote and co-produced this movie, the last time he’d work with Mikels.
But come on. You’re watching this for Tura Satana. Seriously, of all the women to walk the millions of years on this Earth, there could be only one Tura, the women who studied martial arts so that she could go back and get revenge on the men who assaulted her as a child, like a living and breathing version of They Call Her One Eye.
“I made a vow to myself that I would someday, somehow get even with all of them. They never knew who I was until I told them,” said the goddess herself.
She also survived being shot, breaking her back in a car wreck and a wedding proposal from Elvis Presley. Seriously, my love for Tura Satana knows no boundaries.
She’s why I watched this movie.
As Glenn Danzig once sang in the song “Astro Zombies” — which more people know than probably this movie — “With just a touch of my burning hand, I’m gonna live my life to destroy your world. Prime directive, exterminate the whole fuckin’ race!” The Misfits were the perfect band to convey the junky charms of this film.
You can watch this on Amazon Prime. The Rifftrax version is available on Tubi.
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