An ancient, small bus of a firm ironically named the Rocket Transportation Company drops off Brenda Joyce in the town of Domingo. As that means “Sunday” in Spanish, I wondered if that town was in Mexico, though it doesn’t appear to be. At least, it isn’t identified as such. I don’t even know if she arrived on a Sunday, ready to start work as an assistant to a blind woman played by Gale Sondergaard.
This is the opening of 1946’s The Spider Woman Stikes Back. It is a sequel-in-name-only to 1943 Sherlock Holmes feature The Spider Woman. Since there’s no Holmes or Watson, what is the connection between the two? That would be Sondergaard, though her character has a different name here. That would be Zenobia Dollard, with that surname sounding hilariously like “dullard” at all times. And yet, that is the one thing her villainous character is not.
The movie, on the other hand, is all kinds of stupid, though often amusingly so. Sondergaard has gone through a line of assistants, one after another who supposedly left town without telling anybody. Naturally, there is nothing mysterious happening there. Try to be surprised when the letter Joyce sends to the woman she replaced comes back “address unknown”.
Joyce will be unconscious on her first night in the requisite spooky mansion. Sondergaard takes her employee’s limp hand and I was hoping she put it in a warm bowl of water. Instead, she does something slightly less diabolical and steal some of her blood. It is this she then feeds to her weird flowering plants in the basement. Alas, these plants which feed on human blood cannot talk, so they do not have the opportunity to command her to “FEED ME!”
Sondergaard apparently grows these to make a poison which is then used to kill local cattle. First, it seems like other poisons would be easier to obtain, or even make, if she really felt compelled to go the DIY route. I’m imagining an Etsy for poisoners who want to make sure they shop organic. Second, she’s using it to kill what and why?! And she takes her dear sweet time prepping it, plucking each petal in a way that has me certain she is thinking “I’ll kill her…I’ll kill not…” while doing this. Lastly, it doesn’t seem to take much blood, so why is she eventually killing each assistant?
The real star of this is Rondo Hatton, the exceptionally distinctive looking actor who turned the tragedy of acromegaly into his own niche in early horror cinema. He plays the mute servant to the supposedly blind woman. There’s an obvious missed opportunity for comedy with that setup. I’m imaging something akin to the Gene Hackman scene in Young Frankenstein. Another missed opportunity is when he startles Joyce as she explores the house in the middle of the night. She apologizes for screaming. If only she had then taken another look at him and screamed again.
There’s also Kirby Grant as Joyce’s past and, obviously, soon to again be love interest. That Joyce knows somebody in town is something which is going to make it more difficult for somebody to get rid of her. We see him within the first minute of her arriving in town so he gives her a ride to the mansion. I didn’t see him remove the firewood he tossed into the passenger seat, so I wonder if she, by sitting there, was on his wood that entire time.
Whether or not Joyce’s boss kills her by the end of The Spider Woman Strikes Back, Grant and her assistant probably don’t have much a future together. In one moment, he finds her asleep and she said it must have happened when she was talking to his mother. When relations with a possible future in-law start out like that, I propose they both move on.
Dir: Arthur Lubin
Starring Gale Sonergaard, Brenda Joyce, Kirby Grant, Rondo Hatton
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray