November 2nd Is WEB OF THE SPIDER Day, and there IS nudity, folks!!

I'm working with some people on what will hopefully be a "restoration" of the film, much like Synapse did with CASTLE OF BLOOD. Tim Lucas has been aiding our research and lately I made contact with Edoardo Margheriti, son of director Antonio, who is helping us to find an original script or other documents pertaining to the film's execution in 1970, and hopefully an original Italian print.

One of the common "complaints" about the film is that it lacks the zest that would have made it more interesting to casual viewers, specifically nudity, and I can assure you that this movie WAS supposed to have some of that, plus a heightened sense of perversity and the macabre alike that were both edited out of the English language release.

The long and short of it is that the dollar DVDs or bargain bin sets featuring WEB OF THE SPIDER do not come *CLOSE* to representing what a grand, tragic, spooky opera this was meant to be -- and actually was for foreign language audiences. The film was probably a 2:35:1 Techniscope affair originally (maybe even 70mm) that would have run almost 112 minutes with all footage present, so what you are seeing in those fullframe English versions are a re-formatted 16mm (maybe 35) print that has had about 1/4 of it's content removed, possibly for television audiences.

In other words it is a pale shadow of the film Margheriti filmed, but because the original release was such a disaster what made it to English audiences by 1972 or so was a truncated, time compressed version that omitted almost all of the subtlety and nuance from the original form. This included not just one but two scenes with nudity and sexual content, additional trims to transition or expository scenes, and the most amazing aspect is that no single version appears to have been made featuring all of the elements prepared: There is a 107 minute Italian version, an 85 minute German version with an additional scene, 106 minute shortened Italian versions with various subtitlings, a French version that runs about 105 minutes, a Spanish version who's runtime has yet to be determined, and then the 94 minute English version that was shortened to 92 minutes for some markets.

We hope to at least make a "composite" print using the longer Italian version that would include the missing German scene in the correct place and have translations for the other languages (hopefully the audio tracks themselves) and might give people a better example of what this film should have been like. I agree that it does not have the stark, experimentalist impact of DANSE MACABRE/CASTLE OF BLOOD, but it was a different film made for a different time, and one of the most noble collossal miscalculations in the history of cult horror that deserves to be evaluated based on the merits of the original vision. Those public domain reburns don't even come close. I will not rest until a more worthy version is made available for all.

And for those of you with a soft spot for this movie, November 2nd is the day (or night) that the film's action takes place on, so Halloween ain't over yet, but then again It's Always Halloween At The Castle of Terror.