Cereal At Midnight

Three years after the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Spider Woman (1943), which co-starred Gale Sondergaard as the titular femme fatale alongside Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Universal released this deceptively-titled film  The Spider Woman Strikes Back . This is not a sequel. Gale Sondergaard takes top billing in this picture and shares most of her scenes with Rondo Hatton, one of the more tragic figures in horror history. The presence of neither is enough to save the film from being one of the final nails in the coffin of Universal's 1940s mystery, suspense, and horror legacy.  The Spider Woman Strikes Back  is not a particularly well-regarded film by most, and yet I have great affection for it, despite the obvious flaws.  The plot of the film finds a young woman named Jean Kingsley (played by Brenda Joyce) arriving in a small town, having accepted a job to assist a blind woman who lives in a large house at the edge of the village. The blind woman is Zenobia...

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I'll admit something to you right off the bat: I wanted to like this movie more than I actually did. Don't get me wrong; it's a very good movie and I'm glad to have seen it, but I think I had built up my expectations to a level that could never be met, regardless of how good the movie is. See, for years, 1940's The Mark of Zorro  has been known to me as the movie that a young Bruce Wayne and his parents had just seen when they were gunned down in an area of Gotham City known as Crime Alley. Legend has it, according to at least two comic book writers, that Thomas, Martha, and Bruce Wayne had just left the theater and were walking home when they were approached by Joe Chill, and the events that followed changed the course of Bruce's life forever. I've always liked this particular origin because it meant that Batman was motivated not just by the death of his parents, but by the heroism of Zorro that he had witnessed on screen that night and that Zorro's ...