Eight legs to hold you

"SpiderBabe"
(2003)

Some years ago, the lovely and talented Misty Mundae (now going by her real name, Erin Brown) starred in a crapheap of "erotic" film parodies for Seduction Cinema. I've seen a couple of them, and while not amazing, they do include a lot of hot lipstick lesbian action, and they have the right tone for cheap, campy, silly sexploitation. The one I really wanted to see was this, a sexed-up send-up of the first "Spider-Man" movie, which I happened to have liked very much. If you've ever seen one of those XXX porno titles based on a popular movie (the house recommends the amusing "A Clockwork Orgy"), you get the idea here - everything is slanted toward sex, from the tongue-in-cheek character names to virtually every interaction in the film. Only the typical softcore audience, wily eleven year-old boys and frustrated middle-aged men, will find renaming the Daily Bugle the "Daily Bunghole" amusing, so the producers are certainly in tune with their audience.

Misty has the lead as Patricia Porker, who we're supposed to believe is a nerd because she wears glasses and one dude keeps calling her that. She lives with her Aunt Maybe (played by a scary woman who calls herself Bubbles VaVoom) and Uncle Flem, an older couple who run an S&M service when their niece is out of the house. Everyone thinks Patricia's a prude, but in private, she has steamy fantasies about bumping uglies with her clueless jock childhood friend, who works at some sort of gay cowboy club to, er, make ends meet. Misty's naked twice within the first five minutes, so everything, as The Dayton Family says, is chicken but the bone. Of course, Patricia is soon bitten by a radioactive spider (a tarantula, probably some crew member's pet). She gains super strength, a sense of moral justice and unquenchable horniness. This leads her to put on a slinky outfit and beat up random bad guys, often receiving some lovin' or at least a flash of boob in thanks. When she's in the SpiderBabe suit, she has bright red streaks in her hair and painted nails, but these miraculously disappear whenever she changes out of her costume. She also gains the ability to shoot a wad of webbing out of her lady parts after a bit of manual stimulation, but after she does it a couple of times, she seems to forget about this useful power for the rest of the flick. Too bad, the "special effect" is funny as hell.

Misty's best female buddy is played by saucy brunette Darian Caine, whose fucked-up teeth and non-plastic body parts give her the same sort of real-life-person sex appeal as our star. Darian's sister runs the lab that created the spider, and since we've seen her talking to herself in the mirror, we're not surprised when she is turned into the Green Goblin stand-in The Femtilian, with crimped hair, a British accent and a snakeskin spandex outfit to signify the transformation. She doesn't seem to aspire to anything more villainous than getting it on with Patricia/SpiderBabe. Meanwhile, SpiderBabe's running around satisfying her urges with ladies she rescues, the newspaper editor and Darian. After this last admittedly pleasant scene, Misty asks, "Are we lesbians now?" and Darian replies "We're just friends who made each other feel really good." Eventually, after SpiderBabe kisses her stud muffin crush while hanging upside down, she gets to blow him in an alley. She fights the Femtilian in an amusing battle, then sums up all the lousy things that happened to her before sighing, "I can't wait for the sequel." That's never going to happen, but this finale does rib the ending of "Spider-Man" pretty well. I liked "SpiderBabe" better than "Playmate of the Apes" or "Lord of the G-Strings," but that could be due to my affinity for its source material. It's probably just Misty's outfit. She looks great in the mask.