The Spider Woman Strikes Back (Blu-ray)

Gale Sondergaard more or less recreates her role as the homicidal "Spider Woman" that she first essayed in the 1943 Sherlock Holmes film of the same name. This time Ms. Sondergaard plays a wealthy rancher who advertises for a young woman to serve as her secretary/companion. Several girls have gone to her ranch to apply for the job; none have returned. When Brenda Joyce arrives to take the job, she uncovers Sondergaard's secret. The crafty villainess has been draining the blood of young women, using the blood to feed her huge carnivorous plants, cultivating a poison from those plants, then using the poison to kill the cattle on all neighboring ranches. All this so that she can bankrupt her rivals and claim their land, which she thinks is rightfully hers! The film is as loopy as it sounds, but SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK was one of Gale Sondergaard's most popular films; when asked years later what she thought of it, she replied airily "It didn't kill me." SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK costars another Universal horror-film icon, the tragically deformed Rondo Hatton.