User Reviews

"I will show you my Full Moon cut as a gift to celebrate your departure from this world," so mocks Kyoshiro Nemuri to one villain at the end of In the Spider's Lair, the eleventh of the Sleepy Eyes of Death films.

This entry (also known as The Human Tarantula) was picked as the best in the series (and one of the ten best martial arts movies) by the writers of the 1985 book Martial Arts Movies, Richard Meyers, Amy Harlib, and Bill and Karen Palmer. They put it this way: "A nihilistic samurai cuts down all in his path in an attempt to understand his love/hate relationship with Christianity."

While I prefer Sword of Seduction (#4), Hell Is a Woman (#10), and maybe A Trail of Traps (#9) as well, In the Spider's Web has much to recommend it. First, the evil siblings make for good villains. These illegitimate children of the shogun were supposedly executed, but in fact have been shipped off to the country due to their sadistic behavior and incestuous longing. However, not liking the slow pace of the countryside, the two have found a new hobby. They kidnap the local youths and kill them for fun. The brother likes to practice his archery on the peasants. The sister has migraines which she eases by watching others die.

In addition to the villains, In the Spider's Lair features a great deal of action. This entry probably has the highest body count since Sword of Satan (#6). Third, the film stands as one of the most downbeat of the series. Often in the Sleepy Eyes of Death films there is a silver lining, not so here. Fourth, the film has an especially memorable music score. Some of the other entries have featured good music as well, but I particularly liked the score for this film. Finally, the swirling color over the opening credit makes for a pleasing beginning (even if the viewer has no idea what it is supposed to mean).

A few quibbles, the evil spawn of the shogun plot has been done by the series at least twice before. Also, while there is a lot of swordplay, none of the fights have that wow quality to make any one of them stand out.

These are minor complaints for what is one of the best in the series. A little over twenty years ago, I saw this film without subtitles. Understanding the plot definitely improves the viewing experience.

There's no deviation from the Nemuri Kyoshiro formula here. If it ain't broke don't fix it Daiei probably thought, which is what turned Daiei properties like Nemuri and Zatoichi in the staples of puply chambara cinema they are. Nemuri arrives at a small village, a fight is posed then postponed, there's a place called the Devil's Fortress and people are being kept locked there and tortured by the villainy occupants, then at some point the villainy occupants are introduced to us by name and a shadowy connection to the Shogun is implied. There's usually a "Spider Woman" involved, she's as beautiful as she is wicked, this time played by Makao Midori who gives a great show, and all the bad guys are cartoon cutouts that spell "evil" none too subtly.

For the next hour the road spits out wily female assassins at Nemuri, who chops them down or seduces them out of their clothes then chops them down. It's no wonder that Nemuri has almost completely lost track of his initial purpose established in the first movies of the series: revenge against the devilish priest who raped and killed his mother during a Black Mass. Female assassins have been throwing themselves at him for the past 6-7 movies and he's bed most of them down.

It all gets a bit repetitive after a while but the explosive finales promised by the Nemuri series almost without fail make every one of these movies worthwhile. Here the devious scheming son of the Shogun becomes witness to the Full Moon Cut like so many before him, there's a decrepit cabin out in the fields, fake papier-mache crows fly over it and a woman lays crucified inside, we are treated to not-so-subtle repudiations of samurai honor, and Nemuri recovers the young protégé he was looking for but not exactly as he was hoping. Like a Roger Corman Poe film, Human Tarantula opens with closeup shots of an inky substance flowing in abstract patterns and ends with a cursed castle going up in flames, and like a Roger Corman Poe film, it's not so much the familiar plot that makes it worthwhile, but the charismatic protagonist and the extravagant set-pieces of stylized violence.

The recreation of the Black Mass that shows up here as Nemuri's memory (reverie?) is probably the most impressive thing in the movie, it's like something out of a Sergio Martino giallo with a naked Japanese woman in place of a naked Edwige Fenech. A pale female body hovers in complete darkness, fire-engine red blood trickles down on it, and a procession of hooded figures carrying candles circles at the bottom of the frame.

What sets this one apart is the great score that sounds like the opening bars from a Morricone spaghetti western punched through with lots of crooning by eerie female voices. Sergio Leone may had seen Yojimbo in a Rome theater back in 1960-1 but it probably wasn't until this point in time when spaghetti exports hit Japanese screens - those showing 'foreign' movies at least, because most of the rest were playing Toho's kaiju movies, Daiei chambara like Zatoichi (Nemuri was probably the one impressionable teenagers had to sneak in to see because the tone is darker and the content more perverse), goofy teen comedies and Ken Takakura's and Koji Tsuruta's ninkyo eigas.