Cave Of The Silken Web (1967)

The second sequel to Monkey Goes West follows a similar template to the second part of Princess Iron Fan - Sun Wukong and the gang continue on their travels, and a group of spider women attempt to trick them so that they can eat Monk's flesh and gain immortality.

This is another visually stunning entry in the series, with even more cute babes (definitely the prettiest Spider Goblins I've seen) and a fun story with lots of twists, betrayals and body swapping. Basically every character here has the ability to transform their appearance, so half the film has someone impersonating another character to play a trick.

The spiders are kind of dumb, as you'd like to think spiders are, so they're quite easily fooled into turning against each other. The heroes aren't much smarter though, so they get fooled almost as easily, and it's only Sun Wukong's suspicious, garrulous nature that gets them out of trouble.

Yueh Hua is replaced in the Sun Wukong role in this film by Chow Lung-Cheung, who doesn't have many other credits to his name but is a pretty good Monkey King. I would guess he has a Chinese opera background, so he handles the mannerisms and acrobatics well.

This might be my favourite film in the series, the spider women are a delight (prepare for an attack of arachnophilia), all the body-swapping makes the film suitably chaotic, whilst the costumes, sets and effects are all high quality and make the film look quite special for its time.