The Spiders: Part 2 - The Diamond Ship (1920)

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Imagine waking up and turning over to your lover only to find her missing and a huge black spider on her pillow. Imagine parachute jumping from a hot-air balloon high above the ruins of an Incan city in Mesoamerica. Imagine the chief protagonist dressed like Batman sans cape and living shipboard in a crate complete with your favorite liquors, a reading library and arsenal. Imagine a primary character name Kay Hoog – who happens to be a man. If you can imagine that, then it might be a flash-back to this film. Fritz Lang showed his filmmaking genius early in his career with "The Spiders." These two first installments, beg for a remake and for some creative effort to produce the final two segments - "The Secret of the Sphinx" and "For Asia's Imperial Crown" - that were never made.

Well, well... Here's part two of Lang's trivial adventure hokum and as it is evident from the start that it's even weaker than its predecessor, one's glad that this Feuillade wannabe wasn't fully realized.The succession of hair-raising stunts and long dull sequences of hollow travesty is almost hypnotic in its banality. But even as pure entertainment, the pic's a misfire.But no worries: Just a few years later, Lang would strike cinematic gold one movie after another. (He could never fully shake off the pulp roots of this early work, though.) 3 out of 10 Buddha diamonds

In San Francisco, the sportsman Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt) follows Lio Sha (Ressel Orla) in a subterranean Chinatown and discloses that her organization is seeking a Buddha-head diamond that will release Asia from tyranny. He is captured, but he escapes and chases The Spiders, embarking as a stowaway in the Storm Bird. The ship heads to London, with the criminals trying to find the diamond in the mansion of the millionaire Terry Landon (Rudolph Lettinger). They do not succeed and abduct Terry's daughter Ellen (Thea Zander) asking the diamond as ransom. However, Terry does not have the stone, and Kay Hoog discovers that it is in the Malvinas Island. He goes to the island, where he faces The Spiders.The sequel of "Die Spinnen, 1, Teil - Der Goldene See" is also a flawed movie, with a messy and silly screenplay. The great merit of this film is the hero Kay Hoof, certainly the source of inspiration of Indiana Jones. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "As Aranhas Parte 2 – O Navio dos Diamantes" ("The Spiders Part 2 – The Ship of the Diamonds")

Unless you're into film history, stay away from this thing!The plot is slapdash. The hero blithely drops from a flying plane, onto the roof of a building. ("Oof!") A la Jack Armstrong, there's a completely unexplained escape. A homing pigeon finds its way to a moving ship at sea. Obscure clues are identified immediately against all odds while obvious clues go ignored for centuries. Poison gas conveniently appears ex machina. As in The Golden Sea, the pacing is haphazard.(Poor Ed Wood! How can we bash the guy when he probably learned his "art" from films such as this by Fritz Lang?)BTW, in this film, unlike in The Golden Sea, some of the characters amazingly don't look German (though for some reason our American hero very much dresses like a German; more so than in The Golden Sea); instead, the non-Teutonic Chinese are made to look like vermin.