Now things are starting to roll. Disc one of my 50-movie Sci-Fi box set had some pretty trying films on it -- hour-long clunkers that still managed, despite their swift running time, to be wretchedly dull and packed full of stock footage and filler. Disc two steps the game up a notch, and the first film on this disc is Horror of Spider Island. It's still a pretty crummy film, but in a much better way. Plus, it has all the things an undemanding viewer wants from a cheap old sci-fi film: girls in bikinis, rubber monsters, bad make-up effects, and dancing.

A group of sexy dancers and their barrel-chested, sucking-it-in manager with a thin little Errol Flynn mustache and penchant for not putting on a shirt crash on a mysterious tropical island, where in between gratuitous bikini shots and shower scenes, they discover an old professor dead and strung up in a giant web. This is mildly distressing to them, and when the man of the bunch gets bitten by a giant funny-faced spider, he turns into a hideous freak-faced ghoul and starts killing off whichever women happen to wander off alone. The spiders themselves are ridiculous, but the freak make-up on the guy who gets bitten is pretty good.

Eventually, some friends of the professor show up to save the day, but even though they discover the professor is dead, many of the girls have been murdered, a freak is on the loose, and there are giant mutant spiders hanging out in the jungle, it doesn't stop them from taking time out for a care-free party full of dancing and high school-level petty jealousies. Yes, murder by hideous giant spiders and the mutant man they created is always best dealt with through flirtation, giggling and bikini dance bashes.

As is par for the course with this sort of movie, there's a lot of scenes consisting of nothing more than the women sitting around going, "I don't like the look of this." Where this movie makes a marked improvement over the films of disc one is in its willingness to augment its boredom with bikinis, monsters, showering, skinny dipping (always tastefully shot to imply nudity without actually showing nudity), and gratuitous clothes-ripping catfights. Now this is what a bad B-movie should be!

Labels: Set: Sci-Fi Classics