El laberinto de las arañas

An American professor of archeology Alan Whitmore is ordered by his superiors at his university to go to Budapest.He travels there to work with another researcher and stumbles into pagan worshippers of a giant subterranean spider monsters.A crazed demonic killer is slaughtering those who stumble unto the secrets of 4000 year old cult and there seems no way out of the labyrinth."Spider Labirynth" is an eerie and very stylish homage to Italian horror as well as the film with extremely dense Lovecraftian atmosphere of terror and menace.The use of colors in "Spider Labirynth" reminds me Dario Argento's brilliant "Suspiria" and "Inferno".The special visual effects by Sergio Stivaletti are gruesome and bloody and the suspense slowly builds up.9 out of 10.Along with Michele Soavi's "Deliria" definitely the best Italian horror movie of late 80's.

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...

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

This one starts off pretty slow. After a brief scene involving two boys playing, a man is sent to Budapest to investigate what is going on with a professor there who was supposed to have sent something. It starts to pick up once he gets there and meets the professor. The professor is a nervous man who slips him something once his wife leaves. The investigator says he'll come back later that night to talk more. When he does, the police are there, and it seems some of the people he met may not have been who he thought.

Clearly the movie had a budget. It has lots of locations, some nice special effects, and camera-work that involves cranes.

What seems initially to be a giallo movie (and arguably still is) becomes a bit more supernatural than is usual for that subgenre. There's a woman with enormous strength, an exhibitionist research assistant, an old man with a warning, spider-shaped scars, heavy rolling balls, and it just keeps getting stranger. Some good murder set pieces, and a totally bizarre climax. The ending was pretty satisfying.