Ein Toter hing im Netz

Silly, stupid, bad acting, worse dubbing, non-existent plot...I liked this movie!

Manly and ruggedly handsome Gary and his sweet and shrewd girlfriend Georgia are taking a team of dancing girls down to Singapore. Too bad their plane catches fire and slams into the ocean at full speed. Miraculously, Gary, Georgia and most of the dancers survive this horrific accident with not a broken limb or even a bruise in sight. They wash up on an uncharted desert isle and find a cabin containing a corpse hanging in a giant spider web. Momentarily upset, they soon shrug it off and strip down to their underwear while a sultry sax plays. Gary wanders off into the stormy night after Georgia catches him playing tongue wars with one of the sluttier dancers. He never returns. Georgia and the other girls are now alone on the island...or are they? Some unknown menace strangles the slut and then disappears again, leaving the rest of the girls to go skinny dipping and wrestle each other in their underwear. When a small boat arrives, carrying the partners of the dead man in the web, there's time for a wild dance party and lots of making out before sailing home. Unfortunately, Gary has been waiting all this time (having done nothing but hide inside of a tree for the entire middle of the movie) and makes his appearance on this last night, ready to wreak bloody carnage! Gary has been bitten by a mutant spider and is now one himself...sort of. Actually, he looks kind of like Neanderthal Man with glue- on vampire fangs but we're supposed to believe that he is now a spider monster!

The horror elements of this film seemed almost an afterthought, thrown in to attract a larger crowd. Really, this is just an exploitation film, featuring lots of curvy young women gadding about in their underthings, dancing, cat-fighting, swimming, bathing and seducing the young men who find them. It's a terrible movie, but it's amusing nonetheless. If you like cheap exploitation and aren't picky about things like plot, then you'll enjoy this one. It's a really poor man's Russ Meyer film...with spiders!

This West German production is a bona-fide trash classic. It's monumentally silly but hugely enjoyable. It concerns a troupe of female dancers and their manager whose plane crash lands in the ocean, leaving them stranded on a desert island. This island is rich in uranium, resulting in the mutation of a spider into a large alien-like creature whose bite turns an unfortunate victim into a werewolf-like spider-monster.

This is an early entry in the sexploitation genre, seeing as a large part of its running time is made up of scantily-clad women dancing, fighting, arguing and running away. Obviously it's now pretty tame stuff but that doesn't stop it from being a lot of fun. The women have a host of crazy accents as a result of the dubbing in the movie. Perhaps something was lost in the translation? Maybe so. But an awful lot was gained by it in terms of general hilarity. The dialogue in this film is pure crapola gold. Like when, shortly after arriving at the island, the manager finds a hammer and says something to the effect of, 'a hammer...and with a long handle...that must mean mining...most probably for uranium!' Brilliant. It certainly removes the need for any further exposition. Another classic line occurs when the girls find one of their party dead, and one of the women opines 'she must have been strangled by the spider'. Yeah, that IS the first thing one would assume isn't it? A spider that can strangle you. As it turns out, it is yet another quite brilliant guess by our heroes, as the spider is indeed capable of strangulation, seeing as it has little hands. And a funny evil face. I am quite badly arachnophobic but I was quite fond of this particular giant spider, and was a little sad to see him killed early on in the film. Yes, that's correct; The Horrors of Spider Island only has one spider. And his screen-time must be all of 30 seconds. In most 60's sci-fi horror schlock such a lack of screen-time for the central monster would be a disaster, as these films would be padded out with boring dialogue. Not in the case of this movie. It simply finds other ways to entertain via the hilarious spider-monster called Gary and the bitching women and the love-interest geologists who turn up. The geologists are two guys who arrive and cause the dancers to immediately fall in love and fight over them for no discernible reason. Furthermore, when one of the ladies asks one of these chaps to say something nice to her, he replies, with no irony, 'well, I'm really glad that your aeroplane crashed'. Ah, romance. Anyway, these two blockheads hold their own in the entertainment stakes, for example, at one point they argue and decide to have a fight but one of them insists that if they have to have a punch-up it must be indoors! So they go inside and proceed to knock each other about, in the process knocking over every prop in the room. So unnecessary, so funny.

This is definitely recommended. Trash enthusiasts will lap this one up. Where quite a few bad 60's sci-fi horrors disappoint and ultimately fall flat, this one delivers the goods. You'd be clinically mad to take this seriously, so instead sit back and enjoy a quite brilliant slice of rubbish.

Yes, it's a terrible movie. But it's quite fun watching a crashed plane full of models spend their time go-go dancing and skinny dipping on Spider Island instead of looking for food or rescue. A great one when you're in the mood for grade-Z movies, and a terrific MST3K episode.

When I watched and later reviewed "The Sinister Urge", I made the comment that pornography, as was defined by Ed Wood, consisted of women in non-revealing bikinis. I must amend that statement. Pornography in the case of "Horrors of Spider Island" consists of women wearing furry bikinis, as well as prancing, preening, and stripping at the drop of ANY hat.

Our story concerns the "tragic" plane flight of a group of dancers and their manager on their trip to Singapore. I guess the nice people of Singapore needed evidence of a morally bankrupt society before they went with their fundamental Islamic state. Anyhow, the girls are more seriously threatened by one of the guys who comes to rescue them. There's a dead professor, some uranium, and this mutant spider that's about the size of the Taco Bell dog who tries to strangle people. The only problem is, there's more scenes of women wiggling than there is of the spider that's causing all the "horror".

It's obvious what the real purpose of the movie is when one of the dancers says, "Ohhh, it's SOOOOO hot!" and then begins to strip for the camera. Notice also that the dancers come in every flavor from tall to short, meek to wild, and from non-athletic to athletic; all the better that every man find at least one of the ladies he likes. Be sure to keep your eyes on the very athletic one; she's a cross between Steffi Graff and "Chyna" from the WWF.

This is a German movie -- the dialog is dubbed, and not well in some places. It is quite racy even for the early 1960s. It's obvious that this bomb never was shown in America.

Sterno says this movie is number one...I just can't show you the digit that says so.

The HORRORS of being trapped with lovely women for days and days! One cannot imagine the terrible, horrible, mind-blowing pressure that must have been gnawing at Gary's very soul...oh, who am I kidding? Character depth is all three dimensional here, as in "I wish this movie had been filmed in 3D". Girls in ripped dresses, towels, bikinis, and floral panties, and is there a downside? Well, yes, there is the terror of bad dubbing, and the fear of back story being told in a painfully ungainly way. Thank God for MST, and it is a crime they are gone. I miss them.

Anyhoo, if ya get the chance, and can take the intense heat, check out this rockin' flick.