While I’ve been loving the deranged take on 30s Film Noir stylings that Spider-Noir has been furnishing us with, the little segue into freakish, mutant body horror performed by the previous episode felt like a breath of fresh air. Well guess what, true believers? If you loved what they did then, you’re going to love what they do now as they dedicate the entirety of episode 6 into fully embracing the aesthetic of a far out, 50s, sci-fi horror flick.
But with the temporary shelving of both the Film Noir and superhero aspects of the show, we find that Spider-Noir is able to focus more attention than ever before to another aspect of the season that’s proved to be endlessly watchable: Nic Cage acting like a fucking weirdo. Yes, we’ve had a dazzling array of over the top accents out of him already, and even the baseline of his portrayal of Ben Reilly has been noticably eccentric to say the least, but get set, because Cage is about to embrace the spider part of Spider-Man more than anyone else before him.
After Cat Hardy let Ben Reilly’s secret identity slip to Dr. Alethea Faber (the cat’s out of the bag, so to speak) her assistant, Ogden, comes to visit the gumshoe at his apartment to plead with him to aid with their attempts to find a cure from all the mutations caused those WWI experiments. In a twist that not even Ben’s spider-sense manages to catch, Ogden turns out to be one of the POWs he freed from the Germans, but despite being in his thirties, his mutation has caused him to age prematurely, and even more shocking is that Dr. Faber is his mother. Determined to save her son, she’s talked her boy into drugging Reilly if he refuses, so when the P.I. does, he ultimately awakens in Faber’s secret lab, strapped to a gurney and pumped full of sedatives.
While Ben surfs his way through unconsciousness on a blitzed-out nightmare sequence, we discover that Faber is so devoted to the mission of saving her son, she’s gone from benevolent doctor to full-blown mad scientist without Ogden even realising it; but after taking samples of Ben’s blood prove to yield no results, she moves on to taking samples from his actual organs. Miraculously, she manages to to harness a cure and de-age Ogden, but unbeknownst to them, Robbie’s article detailing her whole operation has already been printed in the Daily Bugle, and worse yet, Silvermane has read it.
As the crime boss and his trio of metahuman muscle arrive to search for more superpowers to bolster their ranks, Reilly manages to make a break for it. This proves to be exceptionally wise because not only has Faber managed to kill every other person who has come to her for help, but the fact that she’s kept their bodies pickled in vats don’t sit particularly well with Flint, Lonnie or Dirk who aren’t particularly fond of the malformed remains of their old war buddies being presented like a mad scientist’s freak show…
As changes of pace go, the shift into sci-fi/horror territory for Spider-Noir proves to be an utter banger of a decision that manages to supercharge the show with a fresh burst of weirdness into an already strange format. If you thought the last episode had a tinge of the 1958 classic, The Fly, wait until you get load of this, as the entire episode is set almost within the dingy confines of Faber’s lab as she preys on all those soft, squishy organs that lurk within Reilly’s person. The first order of business is to dole out some twists concerning Ogden’s true age and parentage (not entirely unforeseeable considering he’s played by Dirty Harry and Hellraiser’s Andy Robinson), and to fully register Faber as something of a secondary season villain due to her single minded determination to save her son’s life. However, from here we’re given a phantasmagorical nightmare sequence, a twisted horror show in the form of failed experiments and a whole new showcase for just how bizarre Nic Cage can still really be.
First order of business is that dream sequence that feels very much like the show’s makers are trying to one-up the entire Spider-Man franchise by targeting both the trippy Peter Parker transformation sequence from Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man and the even screwier Mysterio scene from Spider-Man: Far From Home – and then trying to furiously beat them at their own game. Miraculously, it actually succeeds, with such hallucinogenic sights as a sedation mask turning into a tarantula latched onto Ben’s face, spiders spilling from a surgical cut in his side, Reilly being confronted by his own alter-ego and even being reduced to the size of a bug just in time to get spattered by a rolled up newspaper. It’s completely wild, and yet it’s a fairly understandable reaction for someone with arachnid DNA swimming in his gene pool; but the crazed visuals allow Cage to fully throw himself into full-on mania with what comes next.
We’ve already heard from Reilly about how he has to suppress his more spider-like urges, but now we get to see what that means both in flashbacks to the military examining him post WWI, and his antics when he finally escapes from that gurney in Faber’s laboratory. Gurning, twitching and convulsing like there’s an actual arachnid inside of him, Cage employs every violent tic in his repertoire as Ben’s arms keep springing uncontrollably into spider poses as the actor presumably attempts to convey how a spider would carry itself if it suddenly found itself in a human body (think reverse Kafka). It’s utterly batshit and bugnuts all at the same time and it’s completely fucking glorious as we get whole new examples of the actor going full rage-cage for our enjoyment.
The final aspect of “Nightmare On A Gurney” that brings home the episode with style is the climax, that sees Silvermane and company conveniently arrive to try and plunder Faber’s work. While it admittedly may be a bit of a narrative shortcut, it does mean that we get yet more chances for the trio of Marko, Lincoln and Leyden to show their extra dimensions. Yes, they’re a group of crooks saddled with the powers of sand, strength and electricity, but that doesn’t mean they’re not shaken by the sight of a bunch of misshapen freaks all floating in green vats like something out of Alien: Resurrection. One guy looks part mantis, another even more mutated than that, and the fact that the show is so willing to throw itself headlong into such darkly strange imagery and yet treat it with such a impish, gonzo sense of humour is precisely what makes it stand out from other spider-projects. In fact, I’m now rapidly becoming convinced that the world of Spider-Noir is how Nic Cage actually sees the world in general, and if that isn’t reason enough to watch, I don’t know what is.
Spider-Noir hits a second all time banger of an episode by boldly ditching both the superhero and noir stylings and instead puts it’s stamp on the kind of science perverting horror flicks that wouldn’t pop up for another twenty years or so in actual cinema. While Cage’s spider-acting and that nightmare sequence seem to be locked in a death struggle to see who can be the more mental of the two, the true winner is anyone who wanted this show to fully take advantage of just how endearingly strange it all is.
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