User Reviews

Where to begin? The plot is so convoluted that I don't know if I can do it justice. I'll give it a brief try. Dr. Leland Masterson, intrigued by the work of Dr. Aranya, visits his secret underground lab to gain an insight on the work he is performing. He is shocked to learn that Dr. Aranya is injecting spider fluids into humans and human fluids into spiders. The result – indestructible spider-women (or dwarfs in the case of the men) and giant, deadly spiders. Masterson is attacked and goes insane. He later escapes from the asylum and hijacks a plane carrying a couple on their way to be married, an Asian servant, Masterson's nurse, and the pilot. The plan crashes on a deserted mesa not far from Dr. Aranya's hideout. Can anyone escape alive from the Mesa of Lost Women?

I thought about doing one of those reviews I've done in the past where I list what worked in the movie and what didn't work. It would look something like this:

What Works: - Nothing.

What Doesn't Work: - Everything.

Mesa of Lost Women is so inept that it would take pages to cover it all. Acting, plot, pacing, special effects, dialogue, and everything else you can think of are as bad as anything Ed Wood ever made. Here's a laundry list of just a few of the things that didn't work:

1. The voice-over narration. The narrator tries to be clever but just comes off as ridiculous when none of his jokes hit their mark. 2. The relationship between the pilot and the woman. This bride-to-be is way to quick to dump her frumpy husband-to-be once the hunky pilot shows up. Their kiss is nausea inducing. 3. The spider-women. Are these things supposed to be menacing? 4. Dr. Aranya. The movie tries hard to let us know that Dr. Aranya is evil. Just take a look at the guy. He's got a bad eye, a wart, and seems more interested in his high school test tube rack than in human life. 5. The Asian servant. His double cross of the others on the plane would make the team of Mission Impossible proud. The fact that he not only knew the plane would crash, but that he knew exactly where the plane would crash obviously took some incredible planning. 6. Tarantella's dance. I suppose it's meant to be seductive, but to whom, I'm not sure. 7. Do I really need to go any further?

None of this is meant to imply that there aren't moments in the movie to enjoy. This is one of those movies that I do not hesitate to call "so bad it's good". For those in the right frame of mind, there's a laugh to be had around almost every corner of Mesa of Lost Women.

"Mesa of Lost Women" has two early hooks that make it seem that the movie is actually going somewhere. Even before any opening credits roll, there's the seductive scene with Tarantella (Tandra Quinn) using her nine inch nails on a hapless victim. The nails are never seen again. While in a mountaintop surrounded by desolation, Dr. Arana (Jackie Coogan) explains he's isolated the growth hormone of the anterior pituitary, the substance that controls the growth pattern of humans. The writers must have been so impressed with this line that they used it practically verbatim twice.

You can turn off your player right there. The rest of the film implodes in a veritable nightmare of nonsense and head scratching goofiness. With monotone voice over narration complemented by inane dialog, and a soundtrack composed of an incessantly strumming Mexican guitar, the viewer is challenged beyond physical endurance. Hey, here's an idea. Maybe someone could develop a video game based on the concept of the dwarf heads that pop into view every few minutes to eyeball the stranded group on the mesa.

At least Dr. Arana had the right idea. His experiments were successful in staffing the mesa laboratory with a bevy of Miss Universe contestants. Wow, didn't Tarantella's anterior pituitary go into overdrive during that dance at the Mexican cantina? I was mesmerized until the guy on the phone says - "Sheriff, the body just got up and walked out of here."

Contrary to all leading indicators however, this movie does NOT make my Worst Ten list. For that, a film has to be so egregiously bad that you can't even make fun of it. "Mesa of Lost Women" at least qualifies as feature of the week at the Muerto State Asylum.

Like another reviewer said, this movie is bad, but still worth making fun of. The premise actually is pretty good: mad scientist mutates crawly things in an underground lab in the Mexican desert. Mixing hot babes with dwarves is weird; but given the ersatz-logic of the evil scientist's experiments, it makes just a bit of sense. The device of dying people wandering in the desert isn't a bad idea either; it sets up an expectation that they'll have a tale to tell.

Instead the obnoxious narrator tells us what we can easily see, or subsequently hear from the surviving pilot. And, as we eventually discover, the actual science fiction here is a sort of parallel consciousness allowing one guy to know what two or three have experienced individually.

Maybe the real nemesis is the folk music that bites into half of the scenes. The cantina scene took on a life of its own. Dancing that's somehow both erotic and robotic, combined with the lobotomized Dr. Masterson terrorizing the place, is too cruel a spectacle for the viewer to endure for very long.

But then we not only get a change of scene, we're literally fly into a different sort of movie. The pilot becomes the lead, as the kidnapped gang has to camp out, conveniently for the plot, on the dreaded mesa. The plane crash itself was fairly well done. But the expendable Asian servant is sent to his doom on a stupid errand. "There is a day to be born, and a day to die" he stoically remarks. Fortunately, the doctor recovers his senses in time to destroy the nasty nut scientist and his lab. But then we end up with the narrator again. Yes, we know that the beanbag spiders are still out in the desert, so don't tell us...

What I expect in a monster movie is something menacing. Even a guy in a rubber suit, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, or James Arness's otherworldly Frankenstein-monster from The Thing, can sustain suspension of disbelief with their palpable terror. But Mesa of Lost Women doesn't give us anything extraordinary, except the pleasure of its unintended mash-ups. 3/10.

MESA OF LOST WOMEN is a legendarily bad B-movie that would make Ed Wood proud. It's a tacky science fiction epic about a mad scientist and his sinister plan for world domination which involves injecting a bevy of women with spider venom in order to turn them into an army of femme fatales. Of course it's up to the good guys to thwart his nefarious plans and restore peace and order to the world.

While the plot sounds fantastic, in reality MESA OF LOST WOMEN is pretty disappointing. It raises a few laughs here and there but overall the effect is subdued. One of the reasons for this is the lack of budget which means there are hardly any special effects to enjoy, just endless talk and back-and-forth stuff. Some evil dwarfs are the best the film has to offer. Jackie Coogan has fun in his mad scientist role but this is an example of so-bad-it's-average rather than so-bad-it's-good entertainment.

This movie is all kinds of terrible, awful, wretched waste of time. It possibly competes with Ed Wood movies in inadequacy and sheer lack of professionalism in every level imaginable, and to put it in one phrase, 'Mesa Of Lost Women' either is the greatest piece of torture or comedy, depending of do you get the kick out of bad movies or not.

Before any other comment I have to say a word about the music of this film. Dear god in heaven. It is the most annoying piece of cinema music ever written, it must be. And, the best part, that same "song" is played throughout the whole film, guaranteed to drive you insane.

The rest of the beef: bad acting, poorly written, logical like ape in a pool of grape juice, biggest difference to this and any Ed Wood film is, that they actually used some props in the movie. What else? Ah, the plot...

A mad scientist (like the case usually is) is doing some heinous experiments in his lab, deep in the desert of Mexico. That loon has successfully combined the DNA (though the movie doesn't mention DNA, wasn't trendy in the 50's, but if the movie would be a couple of decades newer it would be that) of women (for some skin of course) and spiders. And that's about it. The rest of the plot is left for pompous narrator and your typical the man hero.

I'd give this movie a lot of camp humour points IF the sound track would be different. Now I can't, because the music distracted me from laughing in some key points. But I got a giggles out of this, so my final verdict goes here: Serious movie score: 1 of 10, camp movie score: 4 of 10.

Another candidate for the worst movie ever made. It comes from that dark hinterland of film inhabited by the likes of Phil Tucker, Ed Wood and Tom Graef, that no longer really exists any more. Although some of the people involved were professionals (the actor Jackie Coogan and one of the cinematographers, Karl Struss) it gives an overall impression of having been cobbled together by rank amateurs.

For all its manifold deficiencies, the one that most baffles me is the weird ineptitude of the screenplay. Other commentators have remarked on the impossible flashback structure, with nearly half the narrative being the recollections of a character who could not possibly have been witness to the events described, but there is another element of the screenplay that is also worth a comment.

Professor Masterson arrives on the mesa where Arana seeks to rope him into his plans to create a race of super women with spider juice. He refuses and is tortured into madness. He escapes but is locked up in an asylum. He escapes again and turns up in a cantina where he latches onto a financier and his fiancée who have been forced to land in this little town because their private plane has developed a fault. Masterson is totally ga-ga. A warden from the asylum turns up and joins them. One of Arana's spider women launches into a wild dance. Masterson shoots the spider women and forces the financier at gun point to take him to his plane. He decides he wants a plane trip and forces the pilot to take off even though the navigation equipment is still on the blink. They go off course and have to crash land - on the very mesa where Arana is up to no good!

After hanging about the campfire for a while and losing a couple of people to Arana's giant spider (including the servant, Wu, who is in Arana's employ), they are captured and taken to his secret laboratory. Masterson briefly recovers his sanity and cooks up a bomb. The hero and heroine escape, Masterson explodes his bomb and Arana is killed. But one of the spider women has survived!!

This brief synopsis pretty much covers all the action and fairly represents the complete inconsequentiality of this piffling little movie. It is a simple enough story, but has one amazing mistake. Why have Masterson go mad? Given the story he has to tell, it would be plausible for people to think he is mad and have him locked up, but if he were actually sane it would have been so much easier to plot the movie. As it is, the story stumbles forward through a series of accidents and coincidences. It is a pure luck that Masterson turns up at the cantina, that the spider woman is there, that he takes a shine to the financier and his fiancé, that Wu is employed by the financier, that Masterson decides he wants a plane ride, that they they go off course and that they happen to land on the mesa of lost women.

If Masterson had been sane it would all have been so much easier. Masterson is locked up because people think he is mad. Arana sends a spider women to the town where he is incarcerated in order to keep an eye on him. The financier lives locally and is a governor of the asylum, so Wu is inveigled into his service as back up to the spider woman. Masterson escapes with the intention of going back to deal with Arana. He overhears that the financier has a plane and latches on to him. He spots the spider woman and shoots her. He forces the financier to fly him to the mesa. There he explains himself and fills in his story by means of a flashback.

I hesitate to say that it makes so much more sense this way, because 'sense' is a word that hardly applies to this trivial, stupid little story. It should not have been told in the first place. But given that it was, why choose the most improbable and convoluted way to tell it? When it is as cheap and easy to get it right, how could anybody get it so badly wrong?

I am continually staggered by the monumental self-deception that enables someone to embark on a project in an area in which they have absolutely no facility. It is like a complete illiterate deciding to write a novel.

Many things in life are strange, but the cinema is stranger than most!

PS:

On re-reading this, I realise I have tried to rewrite one of the worst pictures ever made. How sad is that?

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.