Mesa of Lost Women (1953)

Must See Movie...

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

For most of this movie I was completely confused.There's a narrator, then a guy tells a story and by the time the plot kicks in, you have no clue what is happening. A mad scientist is mixing women with spiders which somehow makes the women impossible to kill while at the same time producing weird spider babies wearing wigs and midget men. Then a random crazy guy tries to kill a spider woman,who was dancing in a bar for some reason.The crazy guy manages to kidnap a rich guy and his servant,a pilot and a random woman and makes the pilot fly them away until the plane has problems and crash lands on a mesa. You never see anything on the mesa except the crashed plane.It seems like they want us to believe it's a jungle,because jungles exist in Mexico. There's a twist at the end that explains some stuff but it doesn't help the movie. The best thing about this movie is that it wasn't boring.That earned it an extra star.

Mesa of Lost Women isn't a particularly accurate title for this movie. But when you understand what a ludicrous story this one has, coupled with the fact it was made by filming extra bits to make an unreleasable earlier movie feature length, you start to understand that it might have been a bit of an effort coming up with a title that truly encapsulates the content of this one. Set on a mesa in Mexico, a mad scientist who lives in a cave conducts experiments with spider glands. By way of this he creates mutant human-spider people and an actual giant spider. A group of chumps wind up landing their plane in the area and, needless to say, things go a bit pear-shaped.To begin with, it's a strange story but to make matters more bizarre it's incoherently told. One clear sign of a ropey screenplay is when you have lots of narration instead of events and this one has a fair bit of that, courtesy of Lyle Talbot, star of various Ed Wood movies such as Jail Bait (1954), which in turn is a film which shares the same score that adorns this one; namely, a truly incessant flamenco guitar monstrosity which will batter you into submission well before the end. But you know what? I kind of like this one. Its clunky nature is somewhat easy to get on board with and it contains a hilariously demented bit of acting from Harmon Stevens as the deranged Dr. Leland J. Masterson. But it also has strange and unique aspects that I thought were great too. Such as the really funny, yet quite good idea of having the spider-people played by male dwarfs and statuesque women (who I like to think of as the spider-babes), the reason for this combination is a result of the male/female inequality of the spider world where the females are dominant and the males pathetic weedy underlings. Only in a cheap exploitation movie would such a great concept even be considered! Anyway, the spider-babes are a clear highlight of the movie. They wander about silently staring ominously at strangers, while looking properly slinky and seductive at all times. The movie actually peaks when the most prominent spider-babe called Tarantella (played by the very attractive Tandra Quinn) embarks on a mysterious and elaborate dance in a cantina before she is shot by the lunatic doctor. Its moments such as this that mark this one out as a film that should be seen by lovers of old-school Z-grade exploitation.

Man, what a piece of work this is. Written by jaded monkeys hammered on bad tequila, apparently directed by a 14 year old who saw a Hammer film once, and edited with a weed-whacker, this is the kind of movie you think of when you think of Grade Z, bottom-of-the-barrel sci-fi from the "Bad Old Days" of drive-in triple features and Saturday night "Creature Feature" shows.Even for sympathetic and easy-to-entertain bad movie fans,it's hard to get a handle on the screenplay. Narrated by Lyle Talbot in his most portentous and hammy voice stylings, the story line makes no sense - it's told as a flashback, but the whose flashback is it supposed to be? The movie doesn't seem to know, and we never find out. There's no coherent,logical answer to that question...nor anything else in the screenplay. I think the endless flamenco guitar loop on the soundtrack is meant to distract the audience from this, or at least fill in some of the dead space in the acting and the blocking and the dialog. Even for such a lame premise, the movie has a bone-thin plot that requires endless padding and extra footage - apparently from another movie - that doesn't really jibe or blend with the footage about Coogan and the party of adventurers who get stranded on his Mesa.Meanwhile, poor Jackie Coogan tries to salvage his dignity while playing a mad scientist who unleashes the forces of darkness on the party of adventurers/kidnappees, only to have everything go wrong in, what else, a lab fire. I added two extra stars to the score out of sheer pity for him.This isn't actually the worst movie I've ever seen, since a few scenes would have actually have worked if the tempo was snappier,and the basic premise of the screenplay holds some interest in spite of its hamhanded execution. Also of interest because it makes the work of Ed Wood Jr. look good by comparison, and I didn't think that was possible.

High on a mesa in Mexico, mad scientist Jackie Coogan (as Aranya) turns spiders into people. The females become voluptuous beauties, and the males become ugly dwarfs. It is explained that this parallels the insect world's gender inequality. One example of a "spider woman" is voluptuous Tandra Quinn (as Tarantella). She is shot after a sexy dance, by wide-eyed doctor Harmon Stevens (as Leland Masterson). He tries hard to give the film's most awful performance. But, Mr. Stevens receives stiff competition.Mr. Coogan, who became a big star as "The Kid" (1921), was popular again as Charles Addams' "Uncle Fester" on TV's "The Addams Family" (1964). Lyle Talbot provides useless and tedious narration. The soundtrack, by Hoyt S. Curtin, is among the worst ever composed for a motion picture. It's nice to see cast and crew have a good grasp on the poor material. The film is enjoyably bad some of the time, but long stretches of boredom and the incessant soundtrack music could cause physical pain.* Mesa of Lost Women (6/17/53) Herbert Tevos, Ron Ormond ~ Jackie Coogan, Harmon Stevens, Robert Knapp, Paula Hill