Just perfect...

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

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.

This "Spiders" sequel, "The Diamond Ship", is just as ridiculous and sensational as the series's first part. The rich adventurer continues in his pursuit of the criminal gang, the Spiders, who are after a diamond that's linked with Asian independence, leading the protagonist into a world of espionage, kidnapping and to a subterranean Chinatown.Fritz Lang continues to copy other filmmakers, including Louis Feuillade. An early scene in this film is, I think, evident of Fritz Lang's poor direction at this early point in his career: the overhead shot of a bank robbery, with no ceiling, was done better by Maurice Tourneur in "Alias Jimmy Valentine" (1915). With Tourneur, it was an innovative, well-photographed scene, but with Lang, it's derivative and poorly done. It's the same with the rest of this two-part series; there's some technical skill, but it's all inferior duplication of other films and serials. Lang would become a great director, but that didn't begin here. And, German silent cinema would be one of the greatest periods in film history, but "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920) is still the beginning of that. "The Spiders" is merely what everyone else had already been doing... often better.

This episode is a worthy continuation in the series. As in the first part there is a lot of action. The search is on for the Buddha shaped diamond. This is the sort of film that inspired Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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.