Movie Review: Spidarlings (2016)
Spidarlings is a surrealistic musical/horror film recently acquired by and distributed by Lloyd Kaufman and the team over at Troma. Written and directed by Salem Kapsaski, this film is about Eden (Sophia Disgrace) and Matilda (Rahel Kapsaski), a couple who are just trying to get by. They are living in squalor in a small, trashy house. Matilda works at a swanky bar called “Juicy Girls” but isn’t making much money, and Eden is unemployed waiting for her disability money to come in. Their landlord stops by and puts them on notice and they have to scramble to come up with two years of owed rent.
They meet a strange shop-owner named Mr. Banner who is played by Lloyd Kaufman himself, who shows them a spider, and Eden decides to buy it. Matilda isn’t happy about it, but they take it home. Matilda goes to work, and after falling asleep the spider does some interesting things to Eden while Matilda is away. This begins a strange transformation and even stranger events to follow.
Despite Matilda not being able to get much going for work at the club, there are a lot of things going on in Spidarlings. One thing you will notice is that there are a lot of nods to Argento and other horror references that can be seen in the background or just in the style of filming. There are definitely a couple of scenes that were seemingly very influenced by Argento’s style and really shine.
There are a few musical scenes spread throughout this film, and are all well done and reminded us a lot of Rocky Horror or Little Shop of Horrors. There are also some scenes where they decided to mix in some animation instead of live-action as well. This really adds to the surreal element, and there is a lot of artistic expression shown throughout.
The artistic vision that Kapsaski had when directing was really unique and executed fantastically. The cast did a great job with these characters, and in such a different type of film, it must have been challenging at times to get these scenes just right but they nailed it. If there was one other thing we would have liked to see it would have been to elaborate more on the part of the story with the spider. It definitely has a unique role, and it would have been great to see more of the story develop around it. That being said, this spider does things in this film that we definitely hadn’t seen before.
At the end of the day, Spidarlings is a unique film that blends surrealistic fantasy, musicals, and horror and pulls it off in great fashion. While mostly focusing on the first two elements, the scenes in this film that did contain horror elements were good and delivered more than expected. We would absolutely recommend this to anyone who enjoys musicals, surrealistic films, and horror. Spidarlings is available to watch on Troma’s streaming service “Troma Now” here: http://watch.troma.com/
