Pretty Good

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The acting in this movie is really good.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Web of the Spider (1971) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Journalist Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa) is having a conversation with Edgar Allan Poe (Klaus Kinski) when a bet is made. The bet is that Alan can't spend an entire night inside the Blackwood Castle where there are rumors of strange things inside.I've always enjoyed watching remakes because it gives someone a new stab at some familiar material. There were a handful of directors like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock who managed to remake their own works, which is an even more interesting thing to do. Italian director Antonio Margheriti made CASTLE OF BLOOD in 1964 and seven years later he'd do a color remake with WEB OF THE SPIDER. As I said, I really do enjoy watching remakes but there's no question that this film is really lacking when compared to the original. I think the biggest issue that this film has is the fact that it's in color and this just takes away so much from the story. The original film contained some great B&W cinematography that actually added to the atmosphere and it actually helped make a rather eerie picture. The sets and costume design look great here and the cinematography is great but the color just really doesn't help matters.I'd also argue that the slow nature of the film really doesn't help matters either. The problem is that there's really not much of an atmosphere here and it's certainly not creepy so the slow-burn that the director goes for just isn't as successful as I'm sure he was hoping. Yet another problem is that there just isn't anything fresh or original done with the material outside of the opening scenes with Kinski playing Poe. These early scenes were actually quite good and it's too bad that Kinski doesn't stick around for long.I thought Franciosa was good in the lead role and Michele Mercier is good as the mysterious Elisabeth. Kinski clearly steals the film but he's only at the beginning and end. As I said, WEB OF THE SPIDER is technically well-made but on its own it just doesn't have enough to really work. When compared to the original, it makes this one all the more forgettable.

In comparing this 1971 remake with its 1964 original, one immediately misses the presence of Barbara Steele, although in both titles the 'heroine' only makes her first appearance at the half hour mark. Director Antonio Margheriti must have felt the absence of color in "Castle of Blood," and really adds little else to this new version, with Michele Mercier's Elisabeth fleshed out to some degree, as we see more of her absent husband, barely seen in the original. All the plot elements are virtually identical, right down to the lesbian love scene, resulting in three corpses lying on the floor in roughly two minutes of lustful activity. It was definitely daring in 1964, but here is treated in such timid, predictable fashion that it loses all the bite of the original. The guest filled ball is the one sequence that adds more running time here, 106 minutes over 1964's 89, Elisabeth juggling multiple affairs while her husband is away in America, and both male and female lovers equally jealous to the point of murder. The main weakness in both versions remains the same, a skeptical journalist who doesn't engender audience empathy with his failure to discover what the audience already knows. I would recommend the black and white version with Barbara Steele over the color one, both of which aired twice on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater, between 1976-1982.

I picked this one up at the dollar store (for a buck, naturally) and it was well worth the price (but not much more than that). This is classic schlock theater fare, perfect for Halloween. More mood than actual plot. You can't take it too seriously because it takes itself so very seriously and that makes it almost comical at times. This is no cinematic masterpiece, but as long as you keep your expectations realistic, you'll have fun watching it. I wish I knew Italian so I could decipher the original title. Somehow, the American title "Web of the Spider" isn't too descriptive as spiders don't figure very prominently in the plot. I guess it's a metaphor for not being able to get out of a situation once you're in it.

I recently found myself an original Italian widescreen print of this film that is gorgeous, and helps explain some of the negative user comments about it. Nella stretta morsa del ragno, as I have been taught to call it, is more than just a technicolor revisitation of Antonio Marghetti's CASTLE OF BLOOD. The problem is that he tried to make it much too more -- to explore the period detail in particular -- and in doing so the focus of the film became muddled.One of the aspects that made CASTLE OF BLOOD so remarkable was Marghetti's use of light and dark in such a calculated manner -- whenever Alan Foster strikes a match or lights a candle, it is an EVENT within the framework of the shot. In NELLA STRETTA, candles and matches become props to be carried around by characters to establish the sense of place & setting.Marghetti's greatest miscalculation, though, was in lighting his sets to show off the rich, exquisite detail his larger budget could afford. The result is a series of events that look like they were filmed on a movie set, not a nightmare playing out in front of our eyes in living black and white. On that plane of reasoning, NELLA STRETTA has more in common with Marghetti's VIRGIN OF NUREMBERG with Christopher Lee, which is all about color picture texture and the musical score. NELLA STRETTA also amps up the music, with a Robert Fripp-ish atonal guitar riff that pops up whenever something weird is about to happen. The film this becomes almost formulaic, and the suspense generated in CASTLE OF BLOOD becomes more of a slog to get to the good parts.And there is one really, REALLY good part: I still remember it scaring me so much as a kid I refused to go into our basement for weeks afterwards ... It is the segment when Dr. Carmus takes his little trip down into the Blackwood family crypt and finds something that should probably have best gone undisturbed.'Tis a pity, though, that an adventurous company like Blue Underground or Anchor Bay Entertainment doesn't resurrect and "restore" this bizarre, flawed but interesting bit of Eurohorror; With his widescreen shot compositions and color schemes intact, the Italian cut I found not only runs circles around the prints turning up on the Brentwood and Diamond DVD sets, but it does away with the "another film where every shot is a closeup" charge -- those closeups are the result of a widescreen image being chopped, reformatted and blown up to play back on television sets. And, as is evident in the latest DVD release by Diamond, some of the distributors looped, slowed down or even froze individual frames to cover up what little graphic luridness that Marghetti used and was deemed unacceptable.Yet right there we come to the meat of the thesis on why NELLA STRETTA MORSA DEL RAGNO will always be looked upon as less than a success -- it is too tame for the time period it was made in. The Italian print does include some very brief nudity and, like the Synapse DVD release of CASTLE OF BLOOD, spends more time establishing the illicit lesbian relationship between Elizabeth and Julia ... But it's nothing too thrilling, and by today's standards the whole affair has the shock effect of a good DARK SHADOWS episode.Yet it is worth checking out, especially if you are a fan of atmospheric 1970's period Eurohorror with a touch of the erotic. Timeless Video's VHS runs 94 minutes but has really awful color rot to the print. Brentwood's print from the CIRCUS OF DEATH and TALES OF TERROR box sets runs about 96 minutes and looks a bit better, but not much. For the present, the version to go with for US buyers is to be found on Diamond's double bill DVD with CIRCUS OF FEAR, runs about 98 minutes, has a somewhat richer color range and much better quality audio, and for it's budget line price you really can't beat it.I give WEB OF THE SPIDER/NELLA STRETTA MORSA DEL RAGNO *** out of ****, but only because I have a soft spot for it, and still feel the hair rise up on my neck whenever Dr. Carmus lights his candle and goes looking for that breathing sound .... shiver!