This West German production is a bona-fide trash classic. It’s monumentally silly but hugely enjoyable. It concerns a troupe of female dancers and their manager whose plane crash lands in the ocean, leaving them stranded on a desert island. This island is rich in uranium, resulting in the mutation of a spider into a large alien-like creature whose bite turns an unfortunate victim into a werewolf-like spider-monster.

This is an early entry in the sexploitation genre, seeing as a large part of its running time is made up of scantily-clad women dancing, fighting, arguing and running away. Obviously it’s now pretty tame stuff but that doesn’t stop it from being a lot of fun. The women have a host of crazy accents as a result of the dubbing in the movie. Perhaps something was lost in the translation? Maybe so. But an awful lot was gained by it in terms of general hilarity. The dialogue in this film is pure crapola gold. Like when, shortly after arriving at the island, the manager finds a hammer and says something to the effect of, ‘a hammer…and with a long handle…that must mean mining…most probably for uranium!’ Brilliant. It certainly removes the need for any further exposition. Another classic line occurs when the girls find one of their party dead, and one of the women opines ‘she must have been strangled by the spider’. Yeah, that IS the first thing one would assume isn’t it? A spider that can strangle you. As it turns out, it is yet another quite brilliant guess by our heroes, as the spider is indeed capable of strangulation, seeing as it has little hands. And a funny evil face. I am quite badly arachnophobic but I was quite fond of this particular giant spider, and was a little sad to see him killed early on in the film. Yes, that’s correct; The Horrors of Spider Island only has one spider. And his screen-time must be all of 30 seconds. In most 60’s sci-fi horror schlock such a lack of screen-time for the central monster would be a disaster, as these films would be padded out with boring dialogue. Not in the case of this movie. It simply finds other ways to entertain via the hilarious spider-monster called Gary and the bitching women and the love-interest geologists who turn up. The geologists are two guys who arrive and cause the dancers to immediately fall in love and fight over them for no discernible reason. Furthermore, when one of the ladies asks one of these chaps to say something nice to her, he replies, with no irony, ‘well, I’m really glad that your aeroplane crashed’. Ah, romance. Anyway, these two blockheads hold their own in the entertainment stakes, for example, at one point they argue and decide to have a fight but one of them insists that if they have to have a punch-up it must be indoors! So they go inside and proceed to knock each other about, in the process knocking over every prop in the room. So unnecessary, so funny.