Ever wanted to be a really naughty spider?
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Study Abroad: Chapter One, Page Ten written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
And now it is the first of October, and as promised we have a new set of adventures with a new set of Gnosis College characters. We begin Tales of Gnosis College Volume II: Study Abroad. Lon has provided an appropriate (and immensely detailed) cover for the first issue.
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Study Abroad: Chapter One, Cover written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
Since it’s the way things work in the Gnosis College world, Cleo and Tondelayo find themselves in peril, and so naturally I had Dark Vanessa do an illustration of it.
You’ll have to read the story to find out how these lovelies got into this situation and, perhaps more to the point, whether they’ll get out of it.
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Cleo Mount and Tondelayo: Spider Encounter by Dark Vanessa and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
Cleo Mount, in the second Study Abroad story, makes a very loyal friend named Tondelayo, and both of them have character designs as well. Cleo:
Eat your heart out, Pam Grier! and Tondelayo:
That loincloth is as much as Tondelayo ever wears, and I hope that makes you look forward to the story.
(Click on the images for larger sizes.
Cleo Mount and Tondelayo character designs written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
A cover from a bande dessinée adulte series called Luciféra, about which I know very little, except that it appears to have run from 1972 to 1980 and was published by a company called Elvifrance to which French-language Wikipedia attributes “une réputation sulfureuse.” I wonder why.
I run the illustration here not so much because it’s Erotic Mad Science per se, but because it’s a rather fine example that the initiation ritual that Cleo Mount went through in Study Abroad drew on something that’s captured many other imaginations.
Having enjoyed myself writing a tale of a woman who turns into a giant arachnid, I thought it fitting to watch a movie about arachnids turned into women. Is there such? Of course there is! Probably there are many, but one of the most readily accessible is a 1953 oddity called Mesa of the Lost Women.
Told largely in flashback, the core story of on Leland J. Masterson, World Famous Specialist (in what exactly it isn’t clear) who answers a summons of the mysterious but brilliant Dr. Aranya, who’s running a laboratory inside a mesa in a Mexican desert.
A mad-lab, it turns out. Dr. Aranya has figured out a way to transform tarantulas into beautiful women. There are a few seconds of half-way decent mad-lab footage.
Dr. Aranya is the gentleman on the left in the white lab-coat. Do you recognize the actor? Neither did I. But a little digging turned up that he was someone genuinely Hollywood famous:
Yes, Jackie Coogan. “The Kid” in Charlie Chaplin‘s The Kid. He would go on to play Uncle Fester in the 1960s Addams Family television series. Possibly he did not look back on this movie as the high point of his career.
Masterson, upstanding Pillar of the Establishment he is, throws an absolute fit when he finds out what Aranya is up to. I really don’t understand what Aranya’s problem is: it looks like Aranya’s work is succeding brilliantly. His creations are intelligent enough to help him with his scientific research, can communicate telepathically, can regenerate lost limbs (although we don’t see them do this), and recover in minutes from what would be fatal bullet wounds (we do se this).
Oh, and did I mention that some of the female ones are smokin’ hot? The most successful in this regard is “Tarantella,” played by Tandra Quinn. She treats us to a dance in a cantina, which doesn’t really do much to advance the thin plot, but which at least provides a few more minutes of watchable footage.
Since Masterson (played by Harmon Stevens) refuses to help Aranya, Tarantella gives Masterson an injection which turns Materson (temporarily) into an idiot. In this condition, he looks eerily like a prototype for Peter Sellers‘s role of Chance the Gardener in Being There (1979).
I mean, maybe it’s just the power of hats, but the resemblance is uncanny. There are even moments in which the speech mannerisms in Stevens’s performance seem to prefigure those in Sellers’s.
This movie clocks in at 67 minutes and feels overlong. Such an interesting premise, so little done with it. Most of the movie has to do with a bunch of very unlikeable characters trying to survive attacks from Dr. Aranya’s creatures. A useless and intrusive narrator appears at the beginning and the end of the movie to warn us that mankind is outclassed by the insects (tarantulas are arachnids, not insects) and “the hexapods” (tarantulas have eight legs, not six). It features one of the most headache-inducing musical scores to hit my eardrums ever.
Oh, and even if you can pardon the patronizing way this movie treats Mexican people, we get Wu, an Asian valet right out of Stereotype Central: fatalistic, servile, and prone to communicate primarily in cornball pseudo-Confucian aphorisms.
There are things that I do genuinely miss about old movies, but characters like Wu are not one of them.
Still, I should think this is worth mining for a few minutes of footage for the mad science completist. It’s public domain and available at the Internet Archive.
Link here in case the embedding doesn’t work.
Quoth Cleo as she walks deeper into the rain forest shedding clothes “You needn’t bother collecting, unless you want it for yourself. I for one will never be needing it or any other clothing again. I take a straightforward visual inspiration from Me Me Lai, who would get naked as could be in any number of Italian jungle cannibal movies, including Ultimo mondo cannibale, whence these screenshots come.
If we can tear our attention away from naked jungle frolics for a few moments, we might wish to ask ourselves what on earth is going on here. The answer, I guess, comes not from the frolics but from the satirical speech Cleo gives to Aloysius and Jireen: “I would work hard, get some sort of professional degree, then some sort of boring professional job. Get married to some boring professional guy. Live in a suburb in a McMansion with a brace of S-U-V’s and perhaps a brace of kids going to soccer practice. “
I suppose that Cleo’s rather astonishing rebellion mirrors ones I’ve had. Cleo is doing exactly what she should not. I’m not a huge admirer of David Brooks, but I must say that his Atlantic magazine piece “The Organization Kid” is rather on the mark. Our elite colleges swarm with compliant, hard-working kiss-asses — and boy do I know, because I taught a lot of ’em. The last time they rebelled against anything was during potty-training, and since then they have been building their resumes. They accept the system (easy to do, I sup
pose, when you have such a privileged place within it) and look forward to their professional degrees and professional jobs. I taught quite a few of them, and after a while I rather began to long to teach someone with a little fire in the belly for a change. So maybe Cleo involves a bit of personal wish-fulfillment for me, and not just because she’s so cheerful about getting naked out of doors. I mean, leave college to turn into an immortal spider-goddess? Talk about rebellion! You’ll never get a job with Goldman Sachs that way, young lady.
At a deeper level, I suppose, Cleo’s serenity at her own change might reflect another conviction, the one I put in the Thaumatophile Manifesto, which is that if you want a worthy life, you ought to embrace what you are (or have become) rather than trying to suppress what you are, even if other people will think it’s gross. You’ll surely die with regrets if you live any other way.
There’s a visual inspiration for what happens to Colonel Madder in the end, and also for much of what happens to Cleo Mount over her interesting Gnosis days, and that’s a strange little movie often called Horrors of Spider Island, or sometimes by its original German title Ein Toter hing im Netz, or sometimes by Yog-Sothoth-alone-knows what title under its shifty distributors attempted to market it over the years.
We are talking very simple plot here: a cast of young women (and one man) are lost on a Pacific island when their plane to Singapore goes down, leaving only them as survivors. Their situation doesn’t seem so bad, as they have supplies and fresh water, except that there’s some sort of creepy spider-critter who has the ability to turn people into were-spiders (the first example of such a thing I know of).
Not that I can really recommend the experience unless you’re very much into the were-spider thing, but the film is in the public domain, and you can watch it at the Internet Archive. It probably counts as a good bad movie. Nothing too explicit that I can remember — there is one unconvincing girl fight and what looks like some skinny-dipping in ill-focused long shot.
The were-spider thing is supposed to be horrible, although as it will turn out, Cleo has something of a different interpretation of her fate.
Bonus Dr. Faustus bleg: Many years ago I came across a volume at (I think) Forbidden Planet NYC which consisted of various adult cartoonists doing work showing how they were inspired by cheesy sci-fi. There was at least one section that I’m sure was inspired by Horrors of Spider Island that contained some illustrations that were rather more explicit on the concept of woman/were-spider interaction than anything that shows up in the actual movie. But at the time I was living on a very meager graduate-student stipend so I reluctantly put the book back on the shelf. I didn’t regret it as much as walking away from The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, but I still feel sorry not to at least remember the book’s title. If anyone remembers this volume and can give me some information about it, I’d be grateful if you could let me know, either in correspondence or in comments.
Readers of the EroticMadScience blog in its early days might recall a post on the real-world models for the four studiers-abroad in which I commented that Iris Brockman was a bit more buxom than her model Hedy Lamarr and insisted further that this really was a plot-relevant detail.
See? It was. Iris was able to play on the fact that there are certain things for which men (straight ones, anyway) are fools in order to effect the rescue of Cleo.
Well, maybe that all still seems adolescent. Rather than resist I’ll just play along by throwing in a fake motivational poster that is (I hope) on point.
Found
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In celebration of the victory Cleo Mount achieves over national security thuggery using her curious emerging powers, a picture of a body-paint spider girl. Appears (and, sadly, often disappears) in various places but this one is from here. Comix footnote: I had been vaguely aware that Marvel Comics had created a slinky and appealing Spider Girl character, but in researching the Spider Girl meme I discovered somewhat to my surprise that there was also a DC universe Spider Girl who appeared briefly in the 1960s. Her primary super power was…super-strong prehensile hair. By Cthulhu, that sounds like something out of the Tick‘s fictional universe…Spider girl triumphant
