Remaking Spider Baby seems to be a thankless task, but it’s one that Dustin Ferguson and crew have taken on.

If you haven’t seen the original, the Merrye family has been cursed with a disease called Merrye Syndrome, which only affects members of their family, hence the name, and causes them to regress down the evolutionary ladder as they grow older. They’re protected by their butler, Bruno, who realizes that he can’t control them for long.

Here, Bruno is played by Noel Jason Scott; the Spider Baby herself, Virginia, is played by Skylar Fast; Ralph, the role that Sid Haig essayed, is played by Cody J. Briscoe, and Elizabeth is played by Emma Keifer. Much like the inspiration, the family is being challenged by relatives who want the home and the estate. What they don’t realize is how dangerous the family can be, including the ones who have regressed into lunacy and cannibalism in the basement.

This has some meta-casting in it, as Beverly Washburn, who played Elizabeth in the original Spider Baby, plays a new character, Meredith. While Ron Chaney, the grandson of another star of the original, Lon Chaney Jr., plays Dr. Skinner. There’s also an opening that introduces a new character, Theresa Merrye, played by Brinke Stevens.

Ferguson has said that he wanted to make this movie because the first one inspired The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and House of 1000 Corpses. In fact, the chance to make a movie like Rob Zombie’s is why he directed this. Spider Baby leans into that Rob Zombie feel, as the credits and theme song sound quite like the singer’s work. In fact, Robert Mukes from that film plays The Storyteller in this version.

I had a few issues with this, as the CGI spider isn’t as fun as the original, the film feels way too yellow, and the credits often have basic typewriter font in black over black images, obscuring the names of the cast and crew. This is probably the best-looking movie of the 140+ that Ferguson has done, and it looks like he applied himself on this, even if it ends with the requisite seven minutes or longer of credits when what we really want is more of the story.

The cast does a good job in this, but I feel for them, as they’re up against a classic with the kind of cast that rarely assembles for one movie. In fact, remaking this movie at all feels like a bad idea; there’s no way to be compared favorably unless you absolutely outdo or change the original, and even then, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

I get the challenges of microbudget filmmaking, that you only have some talent for a day and that you’re trying to get the most you can out of the meager finances that you can drum together. The thing is, Spider Baby cost $65,000 to make ($605,000 in today’s money) and was in no way considered big budget. Yet it has created a quite rightful cult following because it’s weird in a very earned way. It’s just unsettling enough, and often what it alludes to is much scarier than fake blood or a giant spider. While this is an improvement for Ferguson, I hope that he can learn from it and push himself toward original works that we can appreciate for decades to come.

You can purchase Spider Baby here.