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?

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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.)

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Study Abroad: Chapter Three, Page Eighteen 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.)

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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.)

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Study Abroad: Chapter Three, Page Sixteen 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.)

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Study Abroad: Chapter Three, Page Sixteen 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.)

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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.)

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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.

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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 interpretaiton 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.

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