Multiple reasons may exist for a carnival sideshow’s use of garish paintings and a curtain to curtail peeks from the ticketless, but I’m only interested in the most obvious: Because you don’t get what you pay for.
Legendary B-movie director Fred Olen Ray (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) knows this; in fact, he literally wrote the book on it. Amplified by the barker’s ballyhoo, the sideshow posters outside the tent promised one thing and delivered another on the other side of the admission booth: something always lesser, often phony. For example, what was depicted as a giant spider with a human woman’s head actually would be — zut alors! — an illusion achieved by the lady sticking her head through a prop atop of a web of rope, with everything below her neck concealed.
Which brings us to Ray’s carnival-set Spidora. Its key art and tagline — hell, its very title — prime the viewer for a fanciful, “eight-legged love story” of this so-called spider woman. This is not that.
As much of a con as the shows it emulates, this is about Princess Marina, the Lobster Girl (the Amy Adams-esque Megan Sheehan), she of the claws for hands. Now, she does don a mask to moonlight as Spidora, which we get in one all-too-brief scene. But the rest? The rest is Marina and the smitten, Shakespeare-quoting suitor (Bobby Quinn Rice from Ray’s Super Shark) who’s a regular to the Museum of the Weird, Strange and the Unexpected. (Try fitting that on a ticket.)
Ray’s affection for the state-fair “freak show” is evident and reverent, given the sheer amount of coverage allotted to Marina’s act, the introductions of the top-hatted host (Jerry Lacey, TV’s Dark Shadows), the coat hanger swallower (Grindsploitation’s Krystal Pohaku) and the fire dancer (Crystal Marie) who twirls nary a tassel, but lighted wicks dangling from her pasties.
Less-exotic-sounding subject switcheroo notwithstanding, more to interested parties’ detriment is Spidora’s running time, misleadingly labeled at “Approx 90 Minutes.” That number is accurate if you include — and the Retromedia Entertainment DVD does — 1952’s notorious Chained for Life among the bonus features. Separated from that vehicle for conjoined sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton, Spidora runs a pat 15 minutes, which is not enough time to achieve anything but a start. Ray may not have had the funding to expand the short into a full film, but he definitely had the story, however unexplored. —Rod Lott