The curse of the black widow actors refers to a supposed curse that has affected the actors who have portrayed the character of the black widow in different adaptations over the years. The black widow character, also known as Natasha Romanoff, is a popular Marvel comic book character who has been featured in various films, TV shows, and animated series. The character is known for her exceptional combat skills and intelligence, making her a vital member of the Avengers. Despite the popularity and success of the black widow character, there have been several instances where the actors who portrayed her faced tragic or unexpected events in their personal lives. These incidents have led to the belief in a curse associated with the role. **One of the most prominent examples of this supposed curse is the death of actress Marguerite Chapman, who portrayed the black widow in the 1947 film "Captain America".
**One of the most prominent examples of this supposed curse is the death of actress Marguerite Chapman, who portrayed the black widow in the 1947 film "Captain America".** Chapman died in 1999 from a combination of pneumonia and old age, but some attribute her death to the curse. **Another example is the tragedy that befell actress Scarlett Johansson, who played the character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
MADE-FOR-TV TERROR: CURSE OF THE BLACK WIDOW (1977, aka LOVE TRAP) ANCHOR BAY VHS
I touched upon this movie in my Spookies review and deliberately mentioned I wouldn’t be going into depth about it because I had plans to review it, well, here I am, reviewing it! This aired on September 16, 1977, that would have made me eight. Incredible. And what got me to want to see it was that TV Guide ad, when original artwork for made-for-TV movies was an art form unto itself. As noted in the Spookies review and the review I did just prior to this one, Earth Vs. The Spider, I was into insects and spiders when I was a kid, and, yes, that interest eventually and naturally translated to movies about them, but Curse Of The Black Widow was something entirely different than those “Big Big” flicks from the 50s. This was a horror film about a giant spider, but it was still channeling those 50s flicks, however the spider isn’t nearly as gargantuan; this one is roughly the size of a small car, I’d say. And it came with a twist, a twist involving a transformation of a woman into the aforementioned advertised giant spider (woman), namely a black widow!
The black widow was a favorite of mine when I learned of it, the females being jet black arachnids with red hourglasses on their underside, and a venomous species of spider to boot! This movie is where I learned of the Chinese myth of the spider woman, it’s mentioned in brief by one of the supporting characters, Max Gail of Barney Miller (1975-1982) fame, playing medical examiner Phil “Rags” Ragsdale, an acquaintance of lead character, private investigator Mark Higbie (Tony Franciosa).
I don’t exactly remember why I missed seeing this on its debut, but it came on at 9pm (8pm in other areas), so it could have been my bedtime curfew, and I remember telling my grandmother to watch it for me and let me know if the black widow looked like it did in that ad! I had never seen anything like it, an almost sexy nightmarish marriage of spider and female. The next morning she told me, yes, it did! It would be another two years before I would see it though, ABC re-airing it in 1979 but under the alternate title, Love Trap. To this day I don’t know why it was re-titled, and subsequent viewings many years later went back to its original title. I was ten by this time and allowed to stay up later, but when it came to the full reveal of the monster in the third act it looked nothing like what was advertised, it was essentially just a giant black widow spider, and what I figured happened was my grandmother fell asleep, like she tended to do during films at night, and lied to me the next day. She lived with us until her death in 1981 or 1982, and I have to imagine I asked her why she thought it looked like that, but I have no memory of asking her. Anyway, I was utterly disappointed, not so much in the movie overall, but in its reveal, and can you imagine how much more memorable this flick would be had the transformation resulted in that thing, or some facsimile?
The next day in school I mentioned this movie to several friends, asking if they had seen it, and recounting it extensively, pondering with one of them, Mike Sherman, why they renamed it “Love Trap.”
I ran into it again unexpectedly during high school, in 1985 or 1986, during the fall, and it was around the time Lifetime was a new channel, it was aired several times during this two week period, but oddly I had lost all interest in it. I remember coming across it one day after I got home from school, watched part of it, and couldn’t understand why I thought it was so good, and why I was so obsessed with it. That’s certainly changed nowadays, but that snippet of time of it being of not giving an utter shit about it still boggles my mind.
The next time it comes into my life is when I discovered it had been put on tape by Anchor Bay in 1999 and by then it had reached full-on memory movie status.
Below are three publicity photos I managed to find on the internet. I’ve come across portions of others too small and/or not clear enough to post, if anyone knows where to get more, please contact me, I’d love to add them to the review. I suspect the bulk of them are with Dan Curtis’ estate, which is why it would be great to eventually get a blu-ray release with a photo gallery. I also believe there are others in color.
According to the book, The Television Horrors Of Dan Curtis , Robert Blees came up with the idea for the movie and co-penned the screenplay, I’d love to know where he discovered the legend. I’d also love to know whether Curtis had any input on that TV guide ad, probably not, but there’s a trait the shapeshifted spider woman has that makes me wonder if the script had something more nightmarish she transformed into that Curtis just couldn’t pull off with the effects budget he had.
In a prologue we see lead character Mark Higbie at a bar hanging with this guy and the bartender (later we’ll see he’s friends with the bartender, but just met this other guy who’ll be revealed to be a Frank Chatham), there’s a sense the movie is trying to catch up with events that just unfolded and they seem to involve an attractive woman who may have also been hanging with the guys, and who’s returned to ask for help to get her car started. Higbie offers his assistance, but she’s adamant she wants Chatham to help her. This is the spider woman, she has on a long, black, fur coat, dark hair, red lipstick and speaks with a European accent. Her “broken car” is no more than a simple ruse to get Chatham alone in the parking lot, where she transforms into a giant spider and hammers her two fangs into his chest, killing him dead on the spot! Hearing his cries Higbie and bartender, Carlo Lenzi ( Michael DeLano ), race out to find his body. While Higbie is transfixed by the corpse and its horrible wounds, Carlo is gazing up the cliff near the restaurant; Higbie follows his gaze, and sees “something.” Back in the bar Carlo tells the cops he wasn’t sure what he saw, Higbie says the same, and adds whatever it was it was moving real fast up that cliff and he doesn’t know anything that could do that unless they were some sort of freak or human fly. This scene sets a creepy tone for the movie and for what I thought would be a great reveal of a spider woman depicted in that ad, and I had high hopes right there in the beginning after she changes and the film shifts to spider POV. When that happens you can hear this sinister heavy breathing as she advances on Chatham, like something a human throat could make.
The spider woman watching from the top of the cliff.
There are three transformations in the film, but the spider, in all its glory, is not seen until the very end. Each time she transforms the camera zooms in on her eyes and we get this weird, visual effect, but this movie has a level of unwanted cheesiness to it, during the second transformation, mixed in with the heavy breathing is the sound Rodan (1956) makes! I don’t know why Curtis thought it would be cool to give the spider Rodan’s vocalizations. I suppose if you don’t know that movie it wouldn’t mean anything to you, but I do, and it just doesn’t fit this film. We don’t hear it again until the very end when the spider is in its death throes.
For the first two murders all that’s shown are the fangs, and the second death is a bit bloodier, for a ’77 TV movie I was surprised they showed that much, there’s a quick shot of the guy screaming and then a zoom in on his face as the fangs are in his chest. In the final act we get a brief shot of the spider’s head and it doesn’t weave silk from spinnerets like a normal spider, but spits it from its mouth.
The story bounces between Higbie and the rich Lockridge family. For some reason Lockwood is credited in the opening credits, but Lockridge is the name used in the film. The “Curse” of the title is a curse that runs through the female line, and though never delved into the Lockridges have this curse running in their family. The focus is on two fraternal twin sisters, Leigh (Donna Mills) and Laura (Patty Duke Astin), who had a very bad beginning. A plane crash in the Sierras left their father dead and their mother to give birth to them in the wilderness and one of them was severely bitten by spiders. The curse can be triggered by a spider bite, and once triggered the woman is condemned to transform into a giant spider during the full moon, and when she’s under severe emotional distress, so upsetting her out of the cycle of the full moon won’t get you webbed up and sucked dry. The movie is setup as a mystery, first what’s doing the killings, and second once the spider woman myth is finally accepted, which sister is it—Leigh or Laura? For a while the narrative and clues will make you believe it’s Leigh, when in reality it’s Laura. The twins have been plagued by misfortune when it comes to men, a few years back Leigh’s husband went missing on a cruise, and this Frank Chatham was there, but at that point he was Laura’s fiance, and during the movie Laura’s new fiance will be found dead at his home, encased in silk outside of his beach house. Ragsdale will surmise it looked like he was in the process of being dragged off when something interrupted the perp. This new dude of Laura’s had a sexual history with Leigh too, so you can see where all this is leading, Leigh seems to have a penchant for stealing her sister’s men, but, maybe, the more important lesson here is don’t betray a woman who can transform into a giant spider and kill you.
The nanny, Olga (June Alysson, left), Laura Lockridge (Patty Duke Astin, middle), “niece” Jennifer (Rosanna Locke, right).
Their nanny, Olga (June Allyson), is in charge of their family estate, and it’ll be apparent Laura’s penchant for taking the form of a giant spider is well known by her and Laura’s mother, who incidentally is presumed dead, but isn’t. A flashback to Laura’s teen years will show a quick scene of her transforming (done POV style so as to keep the spider off screen until the very, very end) and killing her then boyfriend, with Olga and her mom witnessing it. Olga was able to retain her sanity, her mother not so much, so she was sheltered in a room upstairs for the rest of her life, and Laura visits her every time she comes back. Leigh knows nothing of her sister’s curse, or that her mother is still alive. I dug some of this family melodrama and history and would love to have gotten a sequel that explained more of how this curse entered their lives.
Writer Blees added an interesting wrinkle into this curse, Laura has a split-personality that goes by the name of “Valerie Steffen,” and has a European accent, it’s Valerie who’s the spider woman, if you want to think of that way! Laura is a classic plain Jane, and when the moon is full she puts on a wig, makes herself gorgeous, and goes hunting for prey, it’s the connection of this Steffen character to Chatham’s murder that’s perplexing the authorities. This split personality had me considering the curse more deeply; it’s never explained what childhood trauma created “Valerie,” making me wonder if it’s part of the curse, like something along the lines of possession. It had me thinking of a “demon” passed down through the female line, kind of like the plot of Mausoleum (1983). Of course this is all speculation, just a working theory of how you could logically connect the curse to a split personality that goes trolling for men on moonlit nights knowing it can transform into a giant spider with the sole purpose of feeding on them.
After that prologue Higbie is about to get even deeper into this curse when the next day Leigh wants to hire him to find out who killed her fiancé. And once he starts asking all the right questions Lt. Gully Conti (Vic Morrow), who’s in charge of the case, threatens him with imprisonment if he continues to help her. You see, in this part of California, every once in a while dead men with wounds in their chests, like someone pounded a pair of pickaxes through them (this exact analogy is used in Chatham’s murder), and having every ounce of their blood drained have been popping up, and they’ve been keeping these murders on the down low. To be precise there have been three previous ones, one in October of ’74 and two in November of ’75. Medical examiner Ragsdale has been on the case long enough to think along unconventional lines and came up with the spider woman theory. But before he shares it with Higbie he wants him to find an ex-heavy weight by the name of Marion “Popeye” Sikes (H.B. Haggerty) and listen to what he has to say. Apparently this dude actually saw something extraordinary during one of the murders. He told the cops what it was back then, but they thought he was nuts. Higbie gets him to finally tell him and he says he it was a giant spider. And that’s all we get. I wished he had pressed him for details, but that scene ends after he blurts out, “I saw a giant spider!” I would think if someone hit me with that I’d want to know a little more. Back st Ragdale’s office the M.E. pulls out a book and tells still unbelieving Higbie about the Chinese myth of the spider woman, about this enchanting woman who took weary travelers to a nearby cave to rest, and once they fell asleep would turn into a spider and feed on them.
This “Valerie” has got balls too, she returns to that very bar where she killed Chatham, telling Carlo she wants to talk to the police. I’m calling bullshit right here, I always assumed she liked Carlo too and came back to drain him. Carlo calls Higbie and tells him she’s here and he’s going to take her over to his house so he can take her to the cops. After they pull up to a red light, she snatches the keys from the ignition and bolts from the car, leading him to a nearby zoo where she kills him! This is the more explicit fangs-in-the-chest scene I mentioned before. Since these transformations are never shown I kept wondering if she was shedding her cloths and then transforming, or was it something like Bela Lugosi turning into a bat where all her clothing transformed too? That would be the cheesiness rearing it’s head if the latter was the case, but the movie keeps you in the dark about this aspect of her metamorphosis. During Carlo’s death she does begin to shed her coat and unzip her dress, so who knows.
There’s a scene where Higbie had something sent off to a lab to be tested, but it’s never revealed what it was, blood or some kind of fluid from one of the victims I imagine, test results come back and they couldn’t identify it, the closest it came to was the venom of a black widow spider! Ah-ha! So now we have the reveal of what kind of spider she’s changing into, bringing us full circle again to the film’s title. During the third act reveal of Laura being the cursed one, “Valerie” finally comes out after a traumatizing flashback to that first killing in her life and begins to select her sexy cloths for this coming night of manmeat hunting. In so doing we catch sight of a red hourglass on her belly just above her underwear line, and the weirdest thing about is it’s fucking pulsating!!
Higbie heads off to the area where the plane crashed to see if he can find the Indian guide who rescued them, eager to find out which sister had the spider bites. The local Indians also have a spider woman myth, and once he finds the man (Jeff Corey) he learns some new things, like in spider form the cursed chick is invulnerable, except to fire! This will explain the crime scene at the home of that dead webbed up dude on the beach, he’s known to be a crack shot according to neighbors, and when he was attacked he used his gun on his assailant at point blank range, the bullets are found in the walls of his bedroom, but not a trace of blood or flesh on them.
In the beginning when the movie was introducing us to the Lockridge’s at their home, Laura takes her “niece” Jennifer (Rosanna Locke) down to the boathouse the family no longer uses, they don’t go in, they just enjoy the scenery. I couldn’t figure why just before the scene ends the shot lingers a little too long on the boathouse. What’s that about? Well, as we’ll learn in the final act this is the lair of the spider woman. By the way the mansion acting as the Lockridge house also acted as the funeral home in Phantasm (1979).
The lingering boathouse shot
The soap opera of the family comes to a head with Leigh discovering that always locked room contains the mother she thought had died. This leads to a confrontation with “Valerie” who confesses a lot of things, one of which being she can transform into a giant spider. Well, that blows. She does and webs up Leigh, her mother (June Lockhart), on the other hand, decides suicide would be the better option for her, and hurls herself out of the top floor window. Keep you eyes peeled on the slow motion tumble because it’ll be obvious a stunt man is doing it.
Higbie ends up at the Lockridge home this fateful night when he realizes it’s the last night of the full moon, he also has Laura on the phone, asking her which sister was bitten by spiders, she lies, so he tells her to get out of the house before Leigh arrives, but after he hangs up he tells “Flaps” (Roz Kelly), his secretary, he thinks she’s lying. I need to remind you this is happening after he’s learned fire is the spider woman’s Achilles’ heel, so you’d think he’d have like, maybe, I don’t know, some Molotov cocktails with him, so when Flaps asks him if he has any idea what he’s going to do if this thing shows up, he says he doesn’t! And Higbie doesn’t’ even carry a gun, as if that would have done anything anyway, but Flaps takes the gun he’s supposed to be armed with out of her purse and hands it to him, chastising him for always forgetting it. He pockets it and at least replies the very thing I was thinking, that he has no idea what that’s gonna do.
It’s Laura’s “niece,” Jennifer, that directs him to the boathouse, since earlier we learned when she was a kid Laura liked to go down there “to relax,” and they can’t find her in the main house. And by the way who’s that dead old lady on the pavement in front of the house, and where the fuck is Olga, she’s always around?! If Higbie was really smart he’d wait until daybreak to bust into the spider woman’s lair, but I can understand his urgency, Leigh is the one he’s really concerned, and it’s fairly clear Laura has her, and is probably also responsible for Olga’s uncharacteristic absence.
Dead mother on the pavement everyone thought was dead, “Well, she is now,” Flaps says.
I’m guessing Higbie remembered something of the talk he had with the Indian because once he gets into the boathouse he finds a lantern and lights it up with a match, which means he has “fire” in his possession now. This is where the film gets old fashioned Gothic and I liked that. Higbie skulks through the dark, abandoned boathouse with only a lantern to light his way, the upstairs clearly full of cobwebs and overturned furniture . . . I’ve seen this scene in many a haunted house movie. This is also where I perked up, more than normal I should say, because I knew the movie was getting ready to show us the full spider and its lair. Higbie pussyfoots down a dark narrow staircase that leads to the boat storage level, and there’s a great moody shot of the “causeway” leading out onto the lake with the full moon in full blaze outside.
This shot would look great if this flick ever got remastered.
Higbie doesn’t have to wait long for the horrors of her lair to assault him, the moment he gets off the staircase something from the corner of his eye grabs his attention, he turns and finds Olga’s dead body stuck fast to a spider web. Anthony Franciosa’s performance in this part of the movie is quite believable; he’s good at showing shock and fear. He creeps up to it and touches its cheek! As he moves deeper into the lair there are massive amounts of cobwebs and partially cocooned skeletons everywhere! The presence of the skeletons had me wondering about her true number of victims. The cops know only of three over the intervening years (not counting the ones in this current cycle of the moon that is), the ones left behind, the ones connected to the sisters, but now we see there were probably more she didn’t do a hit and run on, but others she took into her lair, or, maybe, even lured there.
Higbie eventually stumbles upon Leigh half cocooned and immediately assumes the worst, but he sees her breathing and quickly pulls her free. Up to this point he’s been relatively quiet, and had Leigh not come-to in a screaming fit (understandable though) they may have been able to pussyfoot right back out, but then again when it comes to normal spiders, the ones who use webs to capture prey, disturbing any portion of their web alerts them to potential intruders or food, and tearing Leigh down may have already alerted the spider woman to his presence.
This is another shot that would look great in high definition, when Leigh spots the spider scuttling towards them.
Out of desperation Higbie pulls his gun and empties it into the spider to no avail, he then suddenly remembers he has fire and whips the lantern at it. The spider catches fire, they race out of the boathouse, and it goes up in flames, hopefully with one, dead, giant spider trapped inside.
For the most part the effects for the spider were done well, even when it’s seen in its full form at the end moving about, but all that goes into the shitter after it catches fire. It’s clear they didn’t know how to animate it while it was burning, so it just swings back and forth like it’s on an obvious wire, with Rodan sounds bellowing out of it.
A sequel is setup with “niece” Jennifer. I put “niece” in quotes in this review because we eventually learn Laura wasn’t her aunt but her mother. Leigh and Jennifer are the only ones left alive of the Lockridge family now, and the last shot has Jennifer wanting to take a quick swim, she sheds her robe, and when she waves to her aunt and Higbie, we spot a red hour glass on her belly!!
Director Dan Curtis certainly loved vampires, he’s most famous for creating the original Dark Shadows (1966-1971) show, which was about a vampire, then went on to create The Night Stalker (1971) movie, which was also about a vampire, and helped re-create Dark Shadows in the early 90s with a remake series. The spider woman myth in Curse Of The Black Widow certainly has shades of vampirism, not to mention lycanthrope. For decades after I hoped Curtis would do a sequel, but he never did. And this is the only movie in existence about the spider woman legend, where the entire film is its focus, I mean. Check out my Spookies review and you’ll see the next time that legend was tackled in live action, but the movie doesn’t focus on it, the impressive spider woman is only a short segment, but an extremely memorable one. The film is about a house haunted by various demons.
The legend has also made various appearances in one form or another in other TV shows: Perversions Of Science (1997), from the makers of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt (1989-1996) series, has a quick blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in “Plainly Possible.” And the only live action show to focus solely on this myth was an episode of Tales From The Darkside (1983-1988) from season three called appropriately enough, “Black Widows,” but you never ever see the spider woman, just the claws. The story does feel like it’s paying homage to Curtis movie in some ways. This was still a favorite of mine even without an actual monster. And the last time I saw this legend in live action was from an episode of Special Unit 2 (2001-2002) titled, “The Web.”
Believe or not the legend has even made it into animation: the Dungeons & Dragons (1983-1985) cartoon has one titled, “The Hall Of Bones” where Lolth, The Demon Queen Of Spiders appears. She’s a long running character of evil within that role playing game and managed to score a cameo in the toon; the original Thundercats (1985-1989) got in on the fun with, “Queen Of 8 Legs,” and there’s an anime film I bumped into decades ago called, Blood Reign: Curse Of The Yoma (2001, aka Curse Of The Undead: Yoma) that has some shapeshifting spider people in it too.
To date there is not legit release of this movie on disc, but there were a couple on VHS, like the previously mentioned Anchor Bay one I used for this review.
VIDEO: 1.33:1 FULL FRAME
This “Valerie” has got balls too, she returns to that very bar where she killed Chatham, telling Carlo she wants to talk to the police. I’m calling bullshit right here, I always assumed she liked Carlo too and came back to drain him. Carlo calls Higbie and tells him she’s here and he’s going to take her over to his house so he can take her to the cops. After they pull up to a red light, she snatches the keys from the ignition and bolts from the car, leading him to a nearby zoo where she kills him! This is the more explicit fangs-in-the-chest scene I mentioned before. Since these transformations are never shown I kept wondering if she was shedding her cloths and then transforming, or was it something like Bela Lugosi turning into a bat where all her clothing transformed too? That would be the cheesiness rearing it’s head if the latter was the case, but the movie keeps you in the dark about this aspect of her metamorphosis. During Carlo’s death she does begin to shed her coat and unzip her dress, so who knows.
** Shortly after the release of her solo black widow film in 2021, Johansson filed a lawsuit against Disney for breach of contract. This legal battle added fuel to the belief in the curse. **While these events may seem coincidental, there is no concrete evidence to support the existence of a curse.** The tragedies faced by some of the actors may simply be a result of the unpredictability of life and the challenges that come with being in the entertainment industry. **It is important to recognize that actors take on various roles throughout their careers, and attributing unfortunate events solely to a specific character may oversimplify the complexities of their lives.** The notion of a curse associated with the black widow character may be nothing more than a superstition or an attempt to find meaning in coincidental occurrences. In conclusion, the curse of the black widow actors is a concept that has gained traction due to the unfortunate events that some of the actors who portrayed the character have experienced. **However, there is no concrete evidence to support the existence of a curse, and it is crucial to approach such claims with skepticism and recognize the complexities of an actor's life.**.
Reviews for "Crossing Paths with the Black Widow Curse: The Unfortunate Lives of the Cast"
1. John - 2 stars - I was really disappointed with the actors' performances in "Curse of the Black Widow". The dialogue felt forced and stilted, making it hard to connect with any of the characters. It seemed like they were just going through the motions and lacked the emotional depth needed to bring the story to life. Overall, the acting was a major letdown and it took away from the overall enjoyment of the film.
2. Emily - 1 star - The acting in "Curse of the Black Widow" was atrocious. It felt like I was watching a high school play with inexperienced actors who were trying too hard to be dramatic. The delivery of lines was over the top and unnatural, making it difficult to take any of the characters seriously. The lack of chemistry between the actors was also evident, making the relationships between the characters feel flat and unconvincing. I couldn't wait for the movie to end, just so I wouldn't have to endure the poor acting any longer.
3. Michael - 2 stars - I found the performances in "Curse of the Black Widow" to be lackluster and unconvincing. The actors seemed disconnected from their characters, almost as if they were reading lines off a teleprompter without any true understanding of the material. Their lack of depth and emotion made it hard to invest in the story or care about what happened to the characters. Overall, the acting felt amateurish and took away from the potential of an otherwise intriguing film.
4. Michelle - 2.5 stars - While "Curse of the Black Widow" had an interesting story, I couldn't help but feel let down by the actors' performances. They lacked the subtlety and nuance needed to fully bring their characters to life. The delivery of lines often felt forced and unnatural, making it hard to fully engage with the story. The film had potential, but the weak acting was a major drawback that prevented it from reaching its full potential.