Horrors of Spider Island - 1960

Directed by Fritz Bottger (it is written in some places that the film was actually directed by star Alexander D'Arcy).

This movie is considered a wonderfully bad film with mismatched scenes, limp English language dubbing, and a script that continually becomes more and more vague about what's going on. A poor effort at being a "true" monster movie because beneath the special effects is the throbbing heart of a totally different story entirely, that of misunderstood but beautiful show girls who just want to be loved.

This troupe of nightclub dancers signed up to travel to the Far East with a lucrative booking with the Mike Blackwood Talent Agency, but the plane taking them from Los Angeles to Singapore catches fire somewhere after Honolulu. It careens out of the sky with mismatched pieces of stock footage and then, instead of a crash, we see stock footage of huge ocean waves swelling up threateningly. Then we see the Los Angeles office of the talent agency frantically trying to find out what happened, dealing with phone calls looking for the vanished troupe.

Back out at sea, a liferaft carrying the ladies and their manager Mike (apparently the plane crew didn't make it) hopelessly floats with an endless horizon of water around them. Complaining, whimpering and on the verge of panicking as their ration of water gets smaller and smaller, Mike isn't above giving the ladies a slap to keep order. Then a bird is seen in the sky. "If there's a bird, there must be land!" and pronto, an island is spotted nearby (actually it looks like two islands in the distance) and you wonder, how'd they miss it until it was that close?

The manager paddles with an oar and the ladies all lean over the sides of the life raft and paddle with their hands, making for some odd looking propulsion as they pass in between rocks along the coast of the island (actually shot on the shores of the now extinct country of Yugoslavia, circa 1959.)

Stumbling ashore, Mike has to carry some of the women onto land as the girls lay themselves out on the rocks in a faint of exhaustion. The next morning, Mike discovers a fresh water supply gushing down over the rocks toward the ocean, and after the girls have had a long drink, he rounds them up like exhausted schoolkids on a field trip and insists they explore the island where they soon discover an abandoned building with a tin roof. Unfortunately, inside its got a gigantic spider web with a man hanging in it (it looks to be made of thick rope, neatly and effectively arranged, like a fish net.) With a single blast of "shock" notes from the sound track and a loud scream from the girls the group retreats from the building, but Mike and his girlfriend and comanager Georgia (Helga Franck) go inside to inspect. In long shot from where the girls are now standing in the field we see the dead body hauled away and Georgia urging them to all come back and inside the building.

With all of that out of the way, the story gets down to its real topic of interest, what happens when there's only one guy trapped on an island with eight physically fit show girl women?

Well, they sweat a lot (they're all inside the tin-roofed building all the time for some reason. Why don't they go outside and get an ocean breeze?) and the women start having arguments, and as was happening before in this script by Fritz Bottger, Eldon Howard and Albert G. Miller, they complain a lot. With three writers you'd think these female character might have more on their minds, but they simply don't. Mostly we have visual reasons for them to lay out on the ground in prone positions or they swim in the water, and then they go back under the hot tin roof, sweat and argue again.

The girls' manager, played by D'Arcy, starts being pestered by a few of these lonely women which causes the manager's official girlfriend to angrily rebuke him. He leaves the sweaty hut for a walk at night and is attacked by a peculiar looking spider-creature that is alternatingly large enough that you think it is man-sized, and then small enough that it appears to be a hat-sized spider-puppet on a tree limb. Either way, it bites the manager, turning him into a kind of "spider-man" that then stalks about at night, though rarely getting anywhere near the girls, because apparently the horror movie part of this story just isn't that important.

Without the manager (probably off in the woods somewhere spinning a web) the girls continue to complain, argue and then physically fight each other in a mostly preposterous display of ineffective grappling.

Eventually a pair of young men arrive who were the assistants for the scientist who lived on the island (the one found dead in the giant spider web when the girls first arrived). And then they fall in love and are rescued from "Spider Island."

This could have been a better film

The original scenario at the beginning of the film of signing up the show girls for the trip to Singapore is relatively brief but done efficiently and sets the expectation that Horrors of Spider Island is a competently made B-movie. D'Arcy as the manager and his girlfriend (played by Helga Franck) are presented as having some depth to their characters (along with the pair displaying actual professional acting skills) that the relationship between them, implying so much more than what the dialogue alone is saying, is perfectly suited toward a story that should expand with showing us people under pressure when stranded on an island with a spider-man on the loose.

But this professionalism starts evaporating once the girls and D'Arcy are on the island, and it appears the script (if there really was one) got lost with the burning plane. Random ideas are tried to keep the assortment of stranded ladies doing something interesting, a lot of it involving the camera just watching them as they move from one place to another, and especially, arguing and complaining at each other.

The cast takes a shot at being more than a lackluster melodrama but the vapid script can't provide them any lift, and the dubbing seems to sabotage what dialogue there is*. We've got a mishmash of thin "backstage" soap opera with a monster roaming loose, which the cast mostly can't seem to remember is "out there." Neither can we.

Wrapped up in an exploitation style presentation, Horrors of Spider Island has a peculiar, but mostly elusive, quality of incompetence that it is both ridiculous, sometimes engrossing and funny.

*Note: There's a German language version of this film, which is apparently the main version that the dubbed American one is made from. A quick look at this "original" version shows that the dubbing into the English language really damages this film's effectiveness. The German-language version Ein Toter Hing Im Netz seems more coherent and the acting improved because the audio actually matches the character speaking lines with B-movie emotive authority, something almost totally absent from the US version. However, that version was made for an European audience with the cast swimming around sans clothing along the shoreline, just adding to the lopsided imbalance of "is it a monster movie or is it a show girls on vacation" movie.

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Original Page May 2020 | Updates March 23, 2026