The Spider Labyrinth (1988)

 

Director: Gianfranco Giagni

Screenplay: Riccardo Aragno, Tonino Cervi, Cesare Frugoni and Gianfranco Manfredi

Cast: Roland Wybenga as Professor Alan Whitmore; Paola Rinaldi as Genevieve Weiss; Margareta von Krauss as Celia Roth; Claudia Muzii as Maria

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Ragtime jazz over the opening is different for an Italian genre film, but Spider Labyrinth is an unconventional film from the era. It is an elusive film, for me a Holy Grail of the golden era of Italian horror films, one which despite being made and release in the late eighties is not pure eighties cheese in the slightest. It gets strange, lurid and bloody, but this is not the era of Bruno Mattei or cheesy hair metal music, but something else. Its director Gianfranco Giagni is not even a cult genre film director from this era, but someone who made one horror film, this as his debut, and never returned to it, which makes this fascinating if one tragically without a follow through.

This is a slow burn, in which American professor Alan Whitmore (Roland Wybenga) is sent to Budapest, Hungary to help with a project in Budapest, Hungary. Suspicion is felt when he is meant to meet Professor Roth, about inscriptions from 3^rd Millennium B.C. being transcribed by professors like Roth across the world, only with Roth upon being met being paranoid and talking about the titular labyrinth trapping him in its web. The black orb thrown through his window, reoccurring elsewhere, raises further concerns, and eventually Professor Roth is found dead, hung off the ceiling banisters on spider webs, which sounds the alarm bells for Whitmore.

Slow burn is apt, Spider Labyrinth taking its glacial time with a seething sense of dread to everything. Warning ahead, this is a film where the point when it gets weird also happens to reveal the secrets that the narrative builds to, hence the warning for spoilers will have to be evoked, and for some, maybe just reading this passage or so will need to be enough. Those with the patience with its slowness will be rewarded by how unexpected the twists are with it's almost Cthulian perverseness, whilst those staying on should realize this takes its sweet evil time.

For those wishing to continue with the review, our lead is sunk among a community he is separate from, and even Roth’s female assistant is a temptation for Whitmore, living over the other side from where he is staying, able to see her every night naked and undressing through the open windows. There is a building mood contrasted by an ageless and distinct atmosphere, entirely because this was shot in Budapest itself. Italy could shot their genre films in interest locations, but there were some real curiosities at this time in the later era - there is an action film called Ten Zan: Ultimate Mission (1988), for example,  shot in North Korea of all places with Mark Gregory of 1990: Bronx Warriors (1982) fame as the lead – but my mind goes to Aenigma (1987), a really lurid Lucio Fulci film from this time, tonally alien, but sharing a DNA in how being shot in Belgrade, Serbia with its drastic change in architecture and environment really adding personality.

It is among the many factors which add to this, a Gothic mood of spiral staircases and halls of white linen there for a bloody murder to stain them in the first overt horror moment. The film does eventually have gore and sex, and but this within this dread inducing environment is the slowest of burns, turning into a phantasmagorical nightmare after its sweet time, including a lengthy scene of the lead driving around Budapest which will feel long. Drip feeding the tension as a drama, most of the film is not structured as a pulp horror film for the most part, more of a psychological one. The score even starts imitating Bernard Hermann, which as this film does have people being killed in lurid ways, does show the deliberateness of this film‘s tone.

It is also at this time, a spoiler for the film has to appear again for a final time. I advise, even if the film is difficult to see, if you wish to not spoil the excitement of what happens, try to track it down with utmost recommendation from this review. It is a film which takes patience but gets very interesting, which is not even necessarily the right word to explain what happens. Those who do not mind can read on…

…the stop motion spider appears, and a film I already admired gets even more interesting as it begins to reward this patience. The horror becomes that of the “Weavers” cult being studied, which is unfortunately still existing and dangerous, and whilst it takes to develop from a mystery to this revelation, once spider people and its weirdly Lovecraftian ending transpires, it escalates. It is less cosmic tentacles, but a baby spider God with suddenly prominent practical effects and people being possessed by spiders, this jump it has been built to neither out of place nor compromised. The Spider Labyrinth goes from the same ill ease The House of Laughing Windows (1976) from Pupi Avati had, a considerable piece of praise for the film in terms of comparison, as that giallo thriller was legendary for its slow burn mood, to a level of weirdness appropriate for the late eighties Italian genre films which yet feels more disturbing for the buildup. Whether the film can work once you know the twist or not becomes subdued, thankfully, by how much mood this has and adds so much to the final production.

There is instead a further disappointment that Gianfranco Giagni went into documentaries and television work for the rest of his career, as he has a strong eye for gothic dread here just in one film. The screenwriters deserve as much praise for this film's twisted leaps in logic, with one Cesare Frugoni prolific in the likes of Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978), all of them alongside others in the film's production coming together well here. There is only the unwanted sting in wondering, with how the Italian genre film industry was to dissipate in the mid-nineties, what would have happened if Giagni had more investment to have more genre films in his career alongside what he had. The fact The Spider Labyrinth is not an easily available film is a question in itself, but this alternative world to consider is tragic too, alongside imagining everyone else outside of the director's chair, in terms of what they managed here, if horror was still a credible genre to continue into even by the Millennium.