Gale Sondergaard and Rondo Hatton, both of whom played villains in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films, join forces in this creaky Z-grade thriller that, despite the title, has zero connection with the 1943 Holmes adventure The Spider Woman.
Sondergaard plays supposedly blind woman Zenobia Dollard who hires pretty young Jean Kingsley (Brenda Joyce) to be her assistant. Rondo Hatton is Mario, Zenobia's disfigured, dumb henchman, who aids in drugging Jean so that they can extract her blood, using it do nourish the carnivorous plants growing in the basement. Zenobia's plan is to use the plants' petals to poison local livestock and buy back the farmland that once belonged to her family, paying rock-bottom prices.
This weak plot struggles to sustain the incredibly slight runtime of 59 minutes, the action padded out with pointless scenes at the local store, of farmers struggling to understand what is happening to their cattle, and Jean wandering around the house at night. Sondergaard makes for a great villainess, and Hatton is suitably creepy, so it's a shame that the film is so mundane, the mystery not worthy of either performer.
The ending is extremely abrupt, director Arthur Lubin seemingly in a hurry to wrap things up (and not a moment too soon): one second, Jean is making her way to her bedroom, the next she is in the clutches of Zenobia and Mario, having their nefarious scheme explained to her (for the benefit of any viewer still awake by this point). Jean's romantic interest, local farmer Hal (Kirby Grant), suspects that something is wrong and so Zenobia orders Mario to burn the evidence, the blaze claiming the lives of both villains. Jean is rescued from the inferno by Hal, who makes a gag about warm milk. The end.
3/10.