Jill Banner - Film and Television Career

Film and Television Career

Banner made her film debut in Spider Baby with Sid Haig and Lon Chaney, Jr. Directed by Jack Hill (Coffy, Switchblade Sisters), the film was tied up in litigation from 1964 until 1968. Released under various titles, including Attack Of The Liver Eaters and Cannibal Orgy, Or The Maddest Story Ever Told, the four-year-old black and white feature quickly faded from view in the tie-dyed electric-Koolaid-acid Sixties. We know of Spider Baby today largely through the efforts of Los Angeles cult film resurrectionist Johnny Legend. The film tells the story of the Merrye family, a clan of bizarre cannibals who suffer from a deteriorating mental condition. They eat bugs, cats, and visitors under the watchful eyes of their caretaker, Lon Chaney, Jr. It was an extremely warped version of the 1960s television horror families The Addams Family and The Munsters. Jill was only 17 when Spider Baby was filmed.

While Spider Baby remained in legal limbo in the mid-1960s, Banner was featured in Deadlier Than The Male (1966), a British mystery about two female assassins, starring Nigel Green and European bombshells Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina. She played Wendy, one of the wholesome teenagers in C’mon, Let’s Live A Little (1967) with singers Jackie DeShannon (What the World Needs Now is Love and Put a Little Love in Your Heart) and Bobby Vee (Take Good Care of My Baby), one of the last films of the fading "beach party" genre. In the psychedelically paranoid spy spoof The President’s Analyst (1967), Banner was a flower child named "Snow White", who temporarily rescues James Coburn (Our Man Flint, In Like Flint) from a combined conspiracy of the American CIA, the Russian KGB, and The Phone Company (referred to cryptically as "TPC").

Banner was featured in several episodes of Jack Webb's police-procedural shows, Dragnet 1967 and Adam-12, usually playing clueless teenagers and spaced-out daytrippers. In the Dragnet story "Forgery", she played a pot-smoking woman who is duped into a life of check fraud by two hippie dope dealers. In another episode, "The Hammer", Banner played a hardened but stupid juvenile whose sociopath boyfriend has murdered an elderly man for money and a ring. When she is captured, Banner's character shows no remorse, prompting Detective Sgt. Joe Friday to say: "I'll bet your mother had a loud bark."

Banner performed in several movies and TV shows in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Shadow Over Elveron (1968) with Don Ameche and Adam-12 co-star Kent McCord. In The Stranger Returns (1968), a comic spaghetti western (aka Shoot First Laugh Last and Un Uomo, Un Cavallo, Una Pistola), Banner played the pretty daughter of a corrupt postal official who falls into the hands of banditos, only to be rescued by The Stranger. She was also featured in Hunters Are For Killing (1970), an early Burt Reynolds movie, also known as Hard Frame. In an interview, Reynolds once joked that such films were typically shown in prisons and airplanes because no one in the audience could leave. She also appeared in episodes of the television shows The Bold Ones and Cade's County (1972).

Banner had an uncredited bit part in Christian Marquand's frenetic movie Candy (1968), but the scene she appeared in was deleted from the final print. The psychedelic film also featured Ringo Starr, Richard Burton, John Huston, and Jill's co-star from The President's Analyst, James Coburn.