Tag Archives: spider

Prey, Watched

a spider's prey, watched by a large ominous eye

At its original Tumblr-post source (see final paragraph of this post for details) this artwork was identified by tags and captions as “Empire Pictures movie poster: Catacombs (1988), Concept Art, Empire Pictures.” Despite the “concept art” reference a poster or cover-art version of the artwork is available:

catacombs cover art

According to Wikipedia, the 1988 production date for Catacombs that we see in IMDB is somewhat misleading. Empire Pictures had credit difficulties during production and was seized by its bankers; the film was not released for five more years, and came out direct-to-video under the title Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice. So it’s rather unclear the extent to which the Catacombs promotional artwork ever would have seen commercial use, perhaps helping to explain the “concept art” labeling. I can, however, confirm it got used as part of a double-feature release on Blu-Ray:

catacombs art blue-ray cover

Who, you may well wonder, is the artist responsible for our carefully-observed heroine and well-wrapped spider-snack? A solid artist credit is not easy to obtain in this case, but a random commenter at a random LiveJournal post offers the name of Giovanni Natalucci, who, in turn, is credited by Allmovies.com as a screenwriter and production designer for Catacombs. This brief bio and extensive filmography as a set designer (in Italian, on Italian Wikipedia) include a lot of fantasy films that may be familiar to readers, perhaps the most famous being 1985’s Ladyhawke.

This post is a reblog with added provenance from a 19 November 2013 post at Infernal Wonders. The image source at that time was this post at the お前達には失望した tumblr. (It machine translates to “I was disappointed with you” and has the English subdomain at Tumblr of “humongous”.) Here is an Internet Archive link in case the Tumblr link should fail in the future, as so many do.

The spider’s sex slaves!

While browsing around for fetish-fuel material pertinent to Cleo Mount’s adventure abroad, I came up with this curiosity at an online fetish e-book seller.*

Cover to a book "The Spider's Sex Slaves."

And if this 1970s-vintage literature ain’t erotic mad science, then I’ll eat my labcoat. From the publisher’s description:

Clive Beford’s [sic] articulate prose creates a strange world of ingenious women who developed a subterranean community where men are used as servants, slaves and playthings. The Spider Lady collects an army of competent female characters who populate a bizarre world of work, technology, armaments and wealth.

And in particular, it contains a character named

…Dr. Klebanoff, a gifted surgeon who used her extraordinary skills to change captive men into sex-toys for the hard-working staff.

Now that sounds like a mad scientist indeed! (But a quibble for Mr. Bedford — if this gifted surgeon is a woman, shouldn’t her surname name be…Klebanova?)

I haven’t read it, but it looks like I’m likely to.

(*) Exercise you imagination for a second, and imagine yourself transported in time back to 1950, and trying to explain to someone at that time that in your time there are such things as “online fetish e-book sellers.” Not so easy, is it?

Study Abroad: Chapter Three, Page Nineteen

Fact: the peevish-looking monkey looking on from the last panel is a member of a real species, Nasalis lavratus, that lives in the region Cleo was supposedly exploring. So now if your spouse or parents or whoever catch you reading this, you can truthfully tell them that the material here is educational.

Cleo and Tondelayo fucked by giant spiders

(Click on the image for larger size. Creative Commons License
Study Abroad: Chapter Three, Page Nineteen 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.)

Study Abroad: Chapter Three, Page Seventeen

If any smart-alek arachnologists write in to explain to me that the spiders in the last panel here are physiologically impossible, God will kill a catgirl. Thank you.

The little spiders done, the big ones move in

(Click on the image for larger size. Creative Commons License
Study Abroad: Chapter Three, Page Seventeen 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.)

Study Abroad: Chapter Three, Cover

December is here, and it is time to begin Cleo Mount’s account of her adventure abroad. And Lon really comes up with a corker of a cover, something straight out of the classic horror-movie promotion poster (but better, ‘cuz there’s more nudity!). Can things really be that perilous for Cloe? Read the chapter that follows this month and find out…

<Cleo Mount menaced by a giant spider!

(Click on the image for larger size. Creative Commons License
Study Abroad: Chapter Three, 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.)

Study Abroad teaser IV: Cleo and Tondelayo in trouble

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.

Naked Cleo and Tondelayo meanced by giant spiders!

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.

(Click on the image for full size. Creative Commons License
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.)

Very bad spiderweb

Having explored certain erotic possibilities inherent in spiders and their webs both in past posts and in scripts I would be remiss in not passing along a few images found in a recently-viewed public domain movie with the unimprovable if not really accurate title The Bloody Pit of Horror (1965).

The plot revolves around a group of models who, together with their photographer, publisher, and a writer, stop a spooky old castle in order to shoot covers for a series of horror novels.  Hardly the worst idea anyone has ever had (I’ll bet kink.com could have great stuff with the setting) but unfortunately this particular spooky old castle turns out to have been the execution site and final perhaps-not-resting place of a sadistic killer “from centuries ago” called the Crimson Executioner.

Uh oh.  Well, as you can probably guess things are not going to turn out very well for this exceedingly dim-witted ensemble as they are stalked about the castle and cruelly done in by a mysterious killer.

The spiderweb is one of the killer’s ploys.  One of the characters is bound in it.  The ropes across the floor will trigger a cascade of arrows at her if touched, and thereby turn her into something like St. Sebastian.  Meanwhile, the exceedingly cheesy fake spider is working its way toward her, complete with lethal venom.

The actress playing the part (I believe Moa Tahi, whose film credits include such interesting-sounding projects as The Topless War and Dr.Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs) manages to look the part of someone in her situation.

Bloody Pit of Horror ain’t mad science (although the spiderweb thingy is almost technological enough to qualify), but it sure keeps up a level of stupid that kept me laughing; it might also have some appeal for fans of dungeon and torture scenarios.  We also get to see Mickey Hargitay, then-husband of Jayne Mansfield and father of Mariska Hargitay, chew the scenery in a villain speech in which he denounces women for threatening to ruin the purity of his perfect body and declares his intention to purify the world through murder, all the while rubbing his half-naked body with oil.  Hmm….

It’s also in the public domain and available at the Internet Archive.  I embed below.  The color is rather washed out (the Crimson Executioner barely makes it to Salmon Executioner here) and the dubbing adds a level of hilarity.

I recommend watching with the help of your robot friends.