Spider Baby (1968)

spider-babyGrisly murder, incest, and suggested rape are all fodder for dark comedy in this must-see about a family of cannibals and how they deal with outsiders who snoop around their old cobwebbed house. The family all have a rare disease that makes them progressively become more mindless and deformed as they age so the adults stay locked in the basement where they howl like mad dogs while the children run free up above eating insects and slicing up mailmen. There are more than a few parallels with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre here, but without the Texas, without the chainsaws, with a little of the massacre, and with two cute teenage girls instead of Leatherface and the self-mutilating hitch hiker.

Lon Chaney Jr., in easily his best role since The Wolf Man, is the family chauffer left to care for the kids since their elders slid into unreachable psychosis, but Chaney’s way off his rocker, too. The sexy Jill Banner is the sickest of the two teenage daughters. She thinks she’s a spider and has an amazing S&M scene where she ties the good-natured interloper Quinn Redeker up to a chair and comes on to him.

This was actually filmed (in one week) in 1964, but didn’t come out until 1968 because the producer went bankrupt.