Spider's Venom

SPIDER FOREST looks like it had some intriguing ideas in place prior to filming, but the final product is a crabbed and often hard-to-follow farrago with a light smattering of atmospheric moments. A lovely young lady dwells within a European forest where super-venomous spiders roam, although she is, it seems, impervious to their deadly bite...her male lovers, however, aren't so lucky. When a young artist takes lodging in the aforementioned locale, he becomes smitten with the mysterious spider-girl, pursues her, and becomes inadvertently embroiled in a covert Nazi experiment to create a highly lethal neuro-toxin. Far too much going on, and quite sloppily presented. Whatever potential may have been in play here is sadly lost to mishandling of the material, mostly in relation to editing/continuity problems and a knotted-up tangle of a screenplay. Pity. 4/10

'Legend of The Spider Forest' aka 'Spider's Venom' (1971) is quite the deliciously strange arachnid-lurking celluloid curiosity, partly shot in what handsomely appears to be the eerily bucolic Bavarian mountains, sinfully concerning the especially bizarre, esoteric legend over the deadly mysterious machinations of 'Spider Woman'; robustly played with wicked verisimilitude by the diabolically delicious Nada Arneric. A great number of libidinous young men are inexplicably expiring in the uber spooky forest; is it REALLY the dastardly machinations of the nubile Arneric? or is there something far more preternaturally sinister afoot? Throw in the ubiquitously loony German scientist for scurrilous seasoning and you have a hallucinatory, mercurial mish-mash of deliriously odd/creaky horror grooviness that is B-movie bound to appeal to a goodly many freak-seeking, Euro-horror aficionados!