Customer Reviews

Mesa of Lost Women

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

A difficult and preachy film that falls into that slender catagory of 1950's sci-fi/horror set outside the United States and in Mexico - South of the Border chillers (KRONOS is another) - where the labor was cheap, the deserts always dry and the talent always in a sweat. The story behind MESA is simple enough - a mad doctor has crossed the power of a spider with the sexual wiles of the female form - creating a labor force of immortal, super strong and mute women who do his every bidding, biting and killing for... reasons unknown. Like all mad scientists he simply does what he does because he can... no reason needed. While MESA comes up short in many ways (is it a cautionary tale? Is it an environmental feature?), it does have it's moments - the best being found in Harmon Stevens performance as Dr. Leland Masterson - a man turned mad by the experiments of Dr. Arana (our evil villian) - whose performance is a near exact copy of Lon Chaney Jr. as "Lenny" in OF MICE AND MEN (in fact, Leland has escaped from a mental hospital in this film and is being hunted down by a man named "George") - very uncanny. This film also features THE SPIDER - perhaps one of the most often used monster props in fast and cheap sci-fi movies in the 1950's (you can also see it in MISSLE TO THE MOON), plus there is a cameo of Dolores Fuller (GLEN OR GLENDA) - the one time love and leading lady of Ed Wood. While this kind of movie is not for everyone - collectors will want this film - it crosses so many lines (there are moments in this film which have a Todd Browning FREAKS feel to it which is too exact to be anything but direct theft), it has one good performance, one famous name (Coogan) - and one awful leading lady, Mary Hill - whose line delivery is so emotionless that you can see the punctuation at the end of every sentence - awful - but fun. As for the casual viewer - I do recommend MESA OF LOST WOMEN as it is a true conversation piece, and despite how bad it is - you will watch it straight through, not understand one moment of it - and then find yourself wanting to watch it again just to see if it was really that bad.

Mesa Of Lost Women is one of my favorite hunks of cheese! Jackie Coogan (yep, uncle Fester) is a mad scientist, working with petuitary gland transplants. He's successfully transplanted tarantula glands into human women (it doesn't work on men, only turns them into evil dwarves), turning them into mute amazons with extremely tacky wigs. Another scientist visits Dr. Fester and sees the horrible experiments. He refuses to help, so the head spider-woman "Taran-Tella" (Tandra Quinn) injects him with a serum that seems to make him bonkers. The good doctor ends up in the nuthouse, only to escape out a window. Anyway, he seeks revenge on Taran-Tella and shoots her (after she is allowed to dance in a saloon, causing hearts to race). The vengeful, nutty doctor then forces a pilot (Allan Nixon) to take him back to the mesa. Lots of spider-women and dwarves roam around aimlessly. A giant, stuffed tarantula flops onto a hapless victim or two, and fun is had by all. The ending is no surprise, but I'll not spoil it here. The soundtrack is hideous!! A flamenco guitar twangs along, accompanied by piano work best described as being played by a hammer-handed baboon on acid! Highly recommended...

Fans of astounding cinema will enjoy this movie, since it plays like a lost Ed Wood film. Ron Ormond took an unfinished movie started by Herbert Tevos, and tried to finish it with minimal effort - the story is presented as a flashback via a minor character who couldn't possibly know the story, continuity errors and overripe dialogue abound. Jackie Coogan (!) plays a mad scientist who is creating giant spider puppets and then turning them either into knock-out women or leering dwarves. An incredibly odd movie.

I would have to include Mesa of Lost Women in that unique subgenre of "is it spellbindingly awful or just awful?" (members of which include The Creeping Terror, Beast of Yucca Flats, They Saved Hitler's Brain, Teenage Devil Dolls, Battlefield Earth, etc.). Bad movie fans may find this a scream, or merely dull depending on their taste and mind-set at the time of viewing (and how many Carl Dreyer films they've made it through). No rants please, I love Carl Dreyer movies. It is fairly slow-moving, even for a poverty-stricken 50s thriller, and that guitar-and-piano score has the potential to put the most stable person in the rubber room. That said, the plot, dialogue, characterizations, etc. are so loony that there is much to marvel at for those tough enough to stick it out: Jackie (Uncle Fester) Coogan as a demented scientist, Spider-Babe Tandra Quinn's bizarre dance stylings, mutant midgets, florid narration, etc. And this is mandatory viewing for fans of that giant spider prop (you know the one).
The DVD itself is not terrific, but serviceable. The brightness, contrast, and tonal values are quite adequate, although the sharpness is a bit soft, and the print suffers from relatively low-level but fairly constant speckling, dirt spots, and sporadic vertical and horizontal scratches. Some stretches of the film are pretty clean, some aren't, although overall it is still an improvement over the VHS copy I taped off PBS [!!] several years back. Interestingly, the TV print shows vertical scratching at the same points in the film and in the same locations in the frame as the DVD; perhaps these flaws derive from the master elements. In other details, the prints were not identical. There appear to be no missing shots/scenes other than the 15-second "prologue" tacked on to the TV print before the opening titles (was this part of the original theatrical release?). The DVD actually runs just slightly longer than my tape. Extras include the Mesa trailer (also a little dirty), chapter stops, and five more trailers advertising other Image discs. Not as impressive as other Image releases (e.g., Missile to the Moon), but given the history of this movie, it's possible that no better print of the film was available. Once again, Z-movie completists will probably be pleased with the disc, if not overly excited; anyone not into this stuff already, run for your life!

There is one thing about this movie that stands out in my mind. The music is awful; really awful. The music is so awful that even if the movie content had been five stars, the music would have knocked it back to two stars. The combination of repetitive, annoying guitar and a spinet or piano that appear to be out of tune, poorly played, or just bad music, is terrible on the ears. By the time the movie reaches its final seconds you are thankful for the end.

The whole movie is a flashback of a guy brought out of the desert who wants to go burn something. This fellow's ravings are so intense that you think this movie has promise. Now we go to a flashback.

We meet Dr. Leland Masterson (Harmon Stevens) who willingly goes to Zarpa Mesa to see Dr. Aranya's efforts. Dr. Aranya is played by Jackie Coogan, a long-time veteran of television and movies who many may remember best as the original Uncle Fester on "The Addam's Family." Dr. Masterson sees how horrible Dr. Aranya's experiments are, and he refuses to help, and then goes bonkers, turning into some sort of weird ultra-goodie for much of the rest of the movie. Dr. Masterson shoots a woman who we know is one of the super spider women, and then climbs on board a plane to head somewhere. The engine conks and the passengers land by happy coincidence (can you see this one coming?) on Zarpa Mesa.

Evening falls and passengers are picked off one-by-one with weird puncture marks. Finally, the few remaining passengers are taken to Dr. Aranya's laboratory, where a big fight ensues, there are flames and an explosion and we are returned to the present. Wow. Such excitement. Such danger. What an awesome movie.

This movie is so bad that it is bad. There is minimal charm to the movie. I like Jackie Coogan, but his role could have been played by anyone. The music was awful. The best part of the whole movie was the plane crash, which I thought was reasonably realistic. With movies like these I try to either be at least a little frightened, or amused. I was neither with this movie. I wish there was some way to put this movie into perspective so that you have an idea of whether you should buy it. Since I cannot, I will say that if you like a movie that is about tarantula women, with minimal appearances of any real tarantulas, and you can handle the awful music, then by golly, this could be just the movie for you. However, I will note that this movie is worse than anything comparable by Ed Wood, so you can go from there.

Oh, this is so bad. The second half of the movie should have just been left on the cutting room floor. The first half is interesting and looks like it will build up to a pretty good story. A mad scientist experiments on humans and insects. Since the female is superior in the insect world, his women are super strong babes. The men in his experiments are evil little dwarfs. So by injecting human female growth enzymes into spiders, we have giant tarantulas.

No doubt you've heard of the seductive and ultra sexy dance performed in the bar by Tandra Quinn . It is not over-exaggerated. For it's time it's probably the hottest bit of celluloid from that era. Clearly it is the high point of the movie.

Well, that's about it. A plane and its party are hi-jacked and are forced to land on the mesa top of the evil scientist's lab. From here on out it's a waste of time. The director was not trying to build suspense, he was trying to eat up film and time so this would be a movie and not a half hour Twilight Zone episode. The back and forth begins across the set begins!

The `nurse' decides to explore in the dark by himself and is killed by a spider and screams.

After much ballyhoo and useless dialog, everyone decides to investigate. They walk across the set to the dead nurse. Then they head back.

The girl lost her hair band, bracelet, or whatever the heck it was, and the `Man Friday' is sent to look for it. Of course he is working for the mad scientist and gets killed by him when he descends into the lab.

Now there is more walking around the set (Meanwhile we have a romance building up between the girl and the pilot). The girl's fiancée get's killed by a spider's stomach, and finally they make it down to the lab. OK let's see, the super strong female (who is immune to bullets by the way) is held easily by an ordinary girl. They escape and wrap up the film conveniently with an explosion (what else)? The film ends with a super girl on the side of the cliff, watching and waiting.

The worst part of the movie by far is the music (yes, it's worse than the not-so-special effects). It's this piano/guitar thing that just plays over and over and over and over.

Watch with caution, but don't expect much. When you say you'd rather watch Cat Women on the Moon instead of this, that's really saying something.

When I first picked this movie I thought the title was MENSA of Lost Women. I thought it was about a group of female scientists and economists who get misdirected on the way to the Nobel Prize ceremony. Boy was I wrong!!!

Ha-ha, ok now that I've gotten that out of my system let me review the movie for you.

No matter what anyone says, especially the narrator of this film, this movie is primarily about titillation, 1950's style. All the talk about man playing God, or thrills and chills is secondary. The film features scantily clad women who look like they do things, bad things (You know what I mean), and plenty of them. Everything else is built around that. So at the same time you have June Allison and Doris Day warbling around about being good girls, you've got Tarantella here doing her infamous wanton Spider Dance. Does that tell us anything about the 50s? I dunno I'm too lazy to think about it.

Anyhow there's this mad scientist (Union Local 757) in the Mexican desert who is injecting human pituitary juice into spiders and turning them into spider/human hybrids. At first you might wonder why it would even occur to anyone to do this, but think about it. The Prof. has an army of indestructible spider-babes who not only obey his every command but who are also probably pretty good at keeping the fly and mosquito population down around the Mesa. It really doesn't make sense NOT to create an army of exotic female spider/human hybrids.

A varied group of travelers accidently runs across the mad scientist, and for dramatic purposes conflict ensues. The doc wants to kill some of them and use the others for experimentation. Now these travelers are some of the most knuckle-headed and unlikable characters ever to trudge across the screen in a z grade movie, yet they still manage to escape from the clutches of a brilliant scientist and his enclave of deadly spider woman, who were bred with the predatory instincts of killer spiders.

The highlight of this paean to incompetence is the infamous Spider Dance, performed by the Head Spider Woman, Tarantella, in a little saloon referred to by one of the characters as "a dump!" The actress who plays Tarantella, Tandra Quinn, is a sexy woman and does her best to elicit that angry, lustful yet detached attitude that you know a spider-woman hybrid would have. I'm sure she was trying to deliver an expression that the director was sure a female spider would show if you could see her tiny little face, except with fewer eyes and fangs. Instead of a look of wanton ferocity, Tarantella looked more ticked off, like you just stole her parking space at the mall while she was coming down off a latte bender. The Spider Dance was supposed to be dangerously alluring, which I suppose it would be if you managed to avoid throwing up from the motion sickness it causes. Still, she's an attractive woman and one of the best things about this movie.

The real star of the show here though, is the massive ineptitude displayed by everyone involved. You'd almost think this film was produced by a Congressional Committee it's done so poorly. And that's what makes it so watchable. It's just so utterly terrible that you can't take your eyes away. You'll actually marvel at the awkward execution of it all. This movie isn't amateurish. It's the work of professional bunglers.

The bottom line is that this is a classic b movie of the "so bad it's good" stable.

Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space" has nothing on this amateurish attempt at science fiction. Widely available in the public domain, "Mesa of Lost Women" (1953) isn't even good for laughs. However, it does offer the most grating score in film history. Recommended for viewers dying to see Jackie Coogan as a mad scientist.

I guess this one must be an aquired taste (judging by the other reviews). Of COURSE it's awful - that's what makes this 1953 film so good! The cantina/'Tarantula Dance' scene alone is worth the price of admission. The voice-over narration is also great: "The Muerto Desert...the desert of death!". If you enjoy the films of Edward D. Wood ('Plan 9 From Outer Space', etc.), you'll love this one! (trivia tidbit: Ed Wood's 'Jail Bait' uses the same soundtrack/score)

Before "The Addams Family" TV series, Jackie Coogan surfaced in this unabashed turkey. Bad movies make we collectors of schlock cinema quiver. Coogan is a mad scientist whose lab is located in the remote Mexican desert. The forbidden mesa, shunned by locals, is fraught with danger. An over-sized marionette passing as a clumsy monster spider threatens innocent victims. (A separate point to ponder is the frequency of spiders as monsters in cheesy movies). Coogan is injecting tarantulas with human female hormones, if we followed the ersatz science correctly. Hence we have spider women that look human except for their elongated and poisonous black fingernails. The exotic dance by one of the spider girls is worth viewing, but don't get too excited. It isn't that type of movie. The catalyst of our little story is a polite mental patient. This guy goes around spouting phrases that sound as if they are misquoted Holy Writ while holding a gun on people. As if this isn't enough, Wu the manservant also spouts succinct homilies grounded in Scripture. The voice-over narration by Lyle Talbot introduces the movie and serves as an endnote. Put it all together and you have an enjoyable "reverse-entertainment" romp. The DVD sound and picture quality are average. This is good old Saturday matinee disposable piffle. Of course, this type of entertainment is not for sensible viewers. Those with the acquired taste can have fun. ;-)