General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Italian Spiderman

Italian Spiderman is an Australian comedy parody series that presents itself as a lost 1960s Italian superhero film. It began in 2007 as a fake trailer made by film students at Flinders University in Adelaide under the banner Alrugo Entertainment, and grew into a ten-part web series broadcast on YouTube in 2008, later assembled into a 40-minute complete cut.¹^•² The title character is a pudgy, moustachioed hero with no arachnid powers and no relationship to Peter Parker, who smokes, drinks, uses guns, and fights villains in the style of cheap 1960s and 1970s Italian action cinema.²

Key fact	Detail
Origin	Fake trailer for a nonexistent 1964 Italian film, made in 2007 as a final-year Screen Studies project by Dario Russo at Flinders University, Adelaide¹
Production	Basic footage shot in a single day on 16mm film; effects, voiceover, and soundtrack added afterward¹
Web series	Ten three-minute episodes funded by a $9,500 South Australian Film Corporation grant, posted weekly on YouTube in 2008¹^•³
Full cut	A 40-minute "complete & uncut" edition was posted online in 2012 by co-writer and composer Will Spartalis²
Plot	An asteroid with the power to clone people is stolen from Professor Bernardi by Captain Maximum, who wants to build his own army; Italian Spiderman must stop him⁴
Reception	92% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from two critics' reviews; cult following as an esoteric spoof⁵
Follow-up	The creators later made Danger 5, a pulpy World War II send-up for Australian television²

Spoilers

Story and character

In the story, an asteroid crashes to Earth bearing the ability to duplicate human beings, and Captain Maximum takes it from Professor Bernardi, intending to build a private army with it, prompting Italian Spiderman to go after him in order to rescue the world.⁴ The Rotten Tomatoes synopsis describes the same premise as an otherworldly substance with amazing cloning properties falling into the hands of an evil criminal mastermind.⁵

The hero is deliberately unlike the Marvel original. He is an out-of-shape, moustachioed antihero who smokes, uses guns, and fights bad guys with his fists, since he does not use webs.¹⁰ Gizmodo summarizes him as a superhero who must "drink, smoke, womanize, and murder his way to justice."² The i-Italy interview describes a character affected by incurable machismo, rude to friends and foes alike, an unrepentant womanizer who in one episode punishes the woman he just saved for not preparing his macchiato promptly, propagating with irony many of the worst stereotypes trailing Italians.⁶ Screen Australia's synopsis crowns him "the people's fist", "the holy mustache", "the righteous wind", and "the ace of bass".⁹

The fake trailer and its backstory

The project began as a mock three-minute trailer for a very bad 1964 Italian film that never existed, made as a final-year project for the Screen Studies course and filmed around Flinders University's 1960s concrete architecture and pine forest.¹ The trailer achieved cult status on YouTube and MySpace and gathered more than 1.8 million hits in its first five months online.¹

The invented history. The trailer was presented as genuine: a Wikipedia entry pretended it was a 1968 Italian action-adventure film deemed "un-viewable" by Italian distributors and never released, with the story that the only 35mm print was lost at sea and recovered in the present day, allowing Alrugo Entertainment to release it through YouTube.⁶ An Italian account adds that the film was attributed to the fictional 1960s producer Alfonso Alrugo, who supposedly could not distribute it because of debts, and that the presumed heirs of Alrugo recovered the cargo in 2008.⁷ The deception was convincing enough that some viewers believed the Italian Spiderman movie actually existed.⁸

The web series

In May 2008 the South Australian Film Corporation made a $9,500 grant to support a series of short videos based on the character, and the first half-hour of the "lost" full-length movie was posted on the internet in ten three-minute installments.¹ Screen Australia records the series as completed in 2008 with a format of 10 x 3-minute episodes.⁹ Episodes appeared weekly on YouTube, with the final episode, Part 10, posted on July 24, 2008.³ The i-Italy interview with Dario Russo describes the project at that point as twelve YouTube installments that had reached millions of viewers.⁶

In 2012, co-writer and composer Will Spartalis posted the full-length, unedited 40-minute cut on the internet.² The series was screened at the 2009 Adelaide Film Festival.⁹

Style and influences

The production recreates the texture of low-budget 1960s and 1970s genre cinema: cheap special effects, overblown voiceover, and a cheesy soundtrack, features the Flinders news article calls integral to B-grade Italian movies.¹ Commentators note that the clips recreate not just the costumes and music of those earlier films but even the camera movement and non-synchronized sound.⁶ The Missile Test review observes that intentional flashes of bad editing and askew dialogue overdubs were recreated with enough authenticity that many viewers believed they were watching a real 1960s Italian version of Spiderman.¹¹

Dario Russo named the Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, whose work spans thrillers and fantasy, and Danger: Diabolik, the film version of a famous Italian comic, as two of his main sources of inspiration.⁶ Critics place the film in the tradition of unauthorized foreign superhero movies such as Turkey's 3 Dev Adam (1973) and Indian Superman, which it parodies alongside 1960s Italian action films.² Listverse describes it as an Australian-made homage to 1960s and 1970s Italian action films like The Three Fantastic Supermen, and the only intentionally funny entry in its list of mockbusters and rip-offs.¹²

Reception and legacy

The trailer's rise to viral fame was unplanned for its creators, and the project drew attention from outlets including Newsweek.com.¹³ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 92% Tomatometer from two critic reviews; critic Dennis Harvey of 48 Hills called it "deliberately cheesy but also amazingly resourceful on slim means" and noted its well-deserved cult following.⁵ WatchMojo ranked it second in its list of the funniest Spider-Man parodies, calling it both a spy parody and a Spider-Man parody and "the strangest foreign Spidey".¹⁰ The production also spawned a well-known meme.¹⁴

The Alrugo group of five Australian creators, some with clear Italian origins, dissolved in 2010, but its members went on to make Danger 5, a pulp World War II parody series for Australian television.¹⁵^•²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Comedy, drama, and general-genre web series › Premiered 1999 to 2016

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?