Wednesday Weirdness 115 during Hooptober XII {15/45}
🕷️Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

| In short: Dermal interdimensional cartography, a man-archnid petrol station clerk, and multiple multilingual sloppy-fellatio fatalities. It’s Spiderman, just not how you know it. – I don’t care how tight Marvel bodypaints Tom Holland or Andrew Garfield, Marvel can go suck a fuck.

| This movie teaches us: The establishing shots of phallic frotting, dew-kissed spiderwebs, and dripping spunk might give you a hint this isn’t one to sit down and enjoy with the in-laws, per se.

| This movie also teaches us: Carrion vacuum cleaners are a thing?

| This movie also teaches us: Police sketches are never not funny.

| Verdict: Absurd, sexy, and funny, Mamántula had me laughing out loud several times. Ion de Sosa’s 16mm mid-short is not perfect—my main gripe was the occasional CG insert that clashed with the rest. (To be fair, I suspect some of that clash was intentional camp, but the digital sheen can jar against the celluloid’s sticky grit.)

Since this is the first of his oeuvre I’ve seen, I haven’t really got a frame of reference, but this 40-minute queer sci-fi-body-horror-romance(?) managed to hold my interest and curiosity and felt approx 369% fresher than Bruce LaBruce’s latest effort.
This was also extra-surreal because the titular character’s human form resembles an ex of mine (plus years of mileage). In a way, this played like therapy: laughing at monsters who wear familiar faces.

I hate to state the obvious, but depending on your experience with blowjobs leaving you a discarded soufflé husk, viewer mileage may vary.

| Listed: For Size Matters Not, a Favorite First Seen 2025, and an anachronistic addition to Arachnid April and Monster Make Out May. My lists, my rules!