| A Corpse Hung in the Web | |
|---|---|
Film poster |
|
| Directed by | Fritz Böttger |
| Produced by | Gaston Hakim Wolf C. Hartwig |
| Written by | Fritz Böttger Eldon Howard Albert G. Miller |
| Starring | Alexander D'Arcy Barbara Valentin Rainer Brandt |
| Music by | Karl Bette Tony Crombie Willy Mattes |
| Cinematography | Georg Krause |
| Editing by | Heidi Genée |
| Distributed by | Centra Films |
| Release date(s) | 16 April 1960 |
| Running time | 89 minutes |
| Country | West Germany Yugoslavia |
| Language | German |
A Corpse Hung in the Web (German: Ein Toter hing im Netz) is a 1960 German-Yugoslav science fiction film directed by Fritz Böttger. The film was dubbed and released in the United States as an adult-only feature titled It's Hot in Paradise in 1962, and later re-issued in 1967 in a slightly edited version called Horrors of Spider Island.[1] The film was featured in the tenth season of the movie-mocking television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K).
Contents |
Gary, a nightclub manager, flies a group of women from New York City to dance in his club in Singapore. While flying over the Pacific Ocean, their plane catches fire, splits in half, and plummets into the ocean; oddly enough, no one in Gary's group is killed, while no one (pilot, stewardess, etc.) who was not in Gary's group survives. We next see the group days later, suffering from dehydration on a life raft, when they finally spot a small island and spend the night on the beach.
The next morning, they discover fresh water and decide to go exploring. They are quickly amazed and excited to find a cabin, but delight turns to horror when they open the door to discover a dead man hanging from a gigantic spider web. According to his journal, the man was a professor mining for Uranium, but he feared something terrible was about to happen to him. There's no indication how long the professor planned to be on the island, but the women estimate there is enough food to last them about a month.
That night, Gary proceeds alone out onto the island where he is bitten by a giant spider and turns into some type of spider-man beast. He flees into the woods, leaving the women to wonder what has happened to him. The next day, seemingly possessed by uncontrollable violent urges, Gary kills one of the girls. The remaining women, still unaware of what has happened to him, have no idea that he is the one who has done this.
A month passes, and the women are running low on food when they spot a ship on the horizon. They are unable to signal it before it leaves, but two men arrive in a rowboat with supplies for the professor. They soon find the women, who tell them the professor is dead. As they all wait for the ship to return, they celebrate their last night on the island with a wild party. One of the men sneaks off to rendez-vous with a woman, but both end up being killed by Gary. Finally aware of Gary's fate, the remainder of the group hunts him down with torches until he flees into quicksand and dies.
In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 mockery of the film, the riffers mocked the facts that there appeared to only be one actual spider on spider island which had less than two minutes of screen time, and that Gary looked nothing like a spider after being bitten. In their parody, one of the characters was supposedly bitten by a spider, but the only visible changes were that his skin turned orange, one of his hands turned into a gorilla hand, and he grew a pair of goofy teeth.
The film has been released by numerous companies as a "bargain bin" disc. The MST3K version of the film has been released by Rhino Home Video as part of the Collection, Volume 11 box set.