Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Verity Robins Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

mark.waltz A decade before this film, the exotically beautiful Gale Sondergaard had won an Oscar for being the not quite noble servant Faith in "Anthony Adverse", and followed this up with a decade of equally sinister characters. Her role as the villain in a Sherlock Holmes film was her most silky smooth spider woman to date, so Universal followed that up, giving her real spiders as co-stars as well as the deformed Rondo Hatton who speaks not a word but presents a gentle demeanor underneath his imposing figure.The lovely heroine in danger at their hands as the newly hired secretary/companion to the allegedly blind Sondergaard who has a mysterious and evil agenda concerning each of her secretaries, becoming wonderfully evil in the scene where she reveals her plans. You can't take these B movies as anything but fun camp, and Sondergaard gives it her all. No matter her distaste for the story or quality considering her talent, she never lets it show. At only an hour, this is harmless, wonderful watchable fun, a perfect addition to any double bill.

The_Void This film is not as well known as the earlier Universal flick The Spider Woman; and that's because this one isn't a part of the Sherlock Holmes series, isn't nearly as good, and actually has nothing at all to do with spiders. The plot focuses on a young girl that goes to become a nurse in a blind woman's house. However, it turns out that the woman is not really blind and is actually taking blood from the girl in order to feed it to her plant, which ties in with some plot about murdering cows. Aside from the fact that this film features Gale Sondergaard, I really don't see any similarity to The Spider Woman at all - she doesn't even reprise her role! The name, therefore, is just a cash-in on the success of the original. It's the sort of trick I'd expect from Italian films of the seventies and eighties, but not something often done by Universal studios! You can't blame them, though, as the film really does have no other selling points. It's a poor and rather dull tale. Nothing of interest happens for the entire duration, and I'm not surprised that it only runs for about fifty eight minutes. Overall, there's really no reason to track this film down - Sherlock Holmes fans will not be impressed!

dbborroughs In name only sequel to the film Sherlock Holmes movie Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman. The plot here has a young woman staying at a house with a strange woman named Zenobia (played by Gale Sondergaard from the Holmes film)as a house keeper/companion. Unknown to the young woman is the fact that Zenobia is draining her of some blood every night to feed to her plants. Standard but somewhat awkward thriller isn't bad, but isn't anything special. The film feels like a program horror film where they just sort of threw elements together and hoped that they stuck. Is it a horror film or a pseudo-Holmes film? Its never really clear and the film suffers for it. The producers even went so far as to put another connection to the Holmes series by having Rondo Hatton as a mute Handyman, but he isn't given much to do other then look menacing.. Its good but nothing special.

Michael_Elliott Spider Woman Strikes Back, The (1946) ** (out of 4) Rare and forgotten Universal horror film has a nurse going to a creepy house to take care of a blind woman. The blind woman actually has her sight and is poisoning cows so that she can run the farmers off. Sound dumb? It's actually very dumb and the title is quite misleading, although I guess they were trying to cash in on the Sherlock Holmes film. This is the type of film where you keep waiting for something to happen but it never does. The performances are all rather dry as is the direction but it does move at a nice pace making the 57-minutes go by very fast. Jack Pierce is credited as the makeup artist yet there's no makeup in the film!