I wonder what happened at the end of the eighties, after a few years of dry season in horror movie land. Sure, there was one or twice or thrice good movies - often from the old masters like Fulci or Argento, and newcomers like Soavi and Bava Jr. But much of the leftovers was trash, to be honest. Sometimes fun movies, but rarely interesting. But on the side, obviously not in the spotlight of the fans came several interesting supernatural horror films - often starring elderly former stars trying to squeeze out one last paycheck before the rent’s due. One is the underrated Spectre, another one is from the same director, Marcello Avallone; Maya. But the one superior to all others is The Spider Labyrinth.
Roland Wybenga is Professor Alan Whitmore, who travels to Budapest to investigate the sudden silence of a colleague of his, Roth. He’s not really in to this mission, but gathers his nicest late eighties fashion, trims the beard a little and heads right into the labyrinth streets of this old Hungarian town. When he finally meets Roth something odd is going on, but his colleague gives him - in secret - a note book with important information. The next day Roth is found hanged in his study. What’s going on? Whitmore soon suspects Roth was involved in a sect and manages to dig up more evidence for this. At the same time a witch-like woman is hunting down and brutally killing those who have talked with our hero…
The closest comparison I can drop to further explain what The Spider Labyrinth is is Suspiria and Inferno, but less visually surrealistic. But is without a doubt on the same level of mysticism, esotericism and violence as the two Dario Argento classics. But I confess, I automatically love movies built around solving mysteries, finding clues, talking to people, finding out secrets. Wybenga’s Whitmore is a competent hero, but more of an intellectual than the usual macho man, which is fine by me. I prefer characters like that before those who always start a fistfight anyway. Roland Wybenga is a typical hero of the time, with the same look as many others in Italian genre cinema. But I liked him. Sympathetic in some way. He disappeared after this film, but everything points at him dying from AIDS related illness in 1995. A damn pity. Anyway. William Berger shows up as The Old Man of Warning / Town Drunk who Drinks too Much Because he Knows too Much, and it makes it even more similar to a bunch of other films dealing with mysterious societies and village conspiracies: Dead & Buried, Halloween III and Dagon, to name a few.
What’s really cool with The Spider Labyrinth is how damn creepy it is. I’m not a child anymore and I’m rarely scared of movies, but even I got creeped out on a couple of instances, for example when a woman sits in her barricaded room, rocking an empty cradle and having a big, weird doll sitting beside her. The scene is not scary if you look at details, but the whole shot is a marvelous exercise in atmosphere. Gianfranco Giagni, the director, makes the movie looks like a million bucks and even if the budget probably was quite low he carefully uses every penny available to make every scene spectacular. There’s a lot of kills for example, not all of them super-gory, but everyone of them is part of impressive set-pieces, nice stunts (the scene when the witch is throwing a man around inside a cramped room is awesome, almost Hong Kong style ouch-that-hurts-stunts!) and a good amount of gore.
The finale is impressive and bizarre, with some really cool and insane special effects by Sergio Stivaletti. I’m not gonna spoil them here, but they’re worth waiting for. I mean, if you like John Carpenter’s The Thing you will like these.
The Spider Labyrinth is a mysterious, violent and extremely good-looking supernatural giallo - almost, with lots of fantastic locations, a good score by Franco Piersanti and a captivating but not always logical screenplay. But I’m gonna go so far to call this a masterpiece of Italian horror and it deserves an official release on blu-ray...or even DVD, I can live with that instead of my decent but still, in comparison to how it should look like, a disappointment.
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