Mesa of Lost Women (1953)

Mesa of Lost Women is regarded as one of the worst movies ever made and with a good reason; it's an extremely incompetent piece of cinema. It is so inept that the "Lost Women" of the title are fairly incidental to the actual plot of the movie. This is the IMDB synopsis of movie:

A mad scientist named Aranya is creating giant spiders and dwarfs in his lab on Zarpa Mesa in Mexico. He wants to create a master race of superwomen by injecting his female subjects with spider venom.

This isn't entirely incorrect, except that Aranya has probably less than ten minutes of actual screen time, despite Jackie Coogan's top billing.  When we first meet Aranya, he is showing off his experiment to fellow scientist, Leland Masterson. He hopes to make a race of superwomen by injecting them with a venom taken from a giant spider. This venom has made these women almost indestructible, yet unfortunately, it has transformed Aranya's male test subjects into dwarves.  Dr. Aranya hopes that Masterson will join him in his quest to make a species of super women, but Masterson denounces him. Disappointed, Aranya has his mute, sexy assistant Tarantella inject Masterson with a serum that transforms him into a raving lunatic. After this brief scene, Aranya completely vanishes from sights and doesn't reappear until the film's climax.

The film is told in the flashback from the point of view of pilot Grant Philips...or is it? Just as soon as Grant begins tell his story, an omniscient narrator (Lyle Talbot) hijacks his account and begins to fill the audience in on how it all really began. The narrator is extremely condescending towards the characters in the movie, often mocking their bravery and intelligence. Other times, the film will go to a close up of a character and the narrator will tells us their thoughts. When Grant starts talking about the Spider Women, there is a close up of the character of Pepe (who is has heard tales of such monstrosities), and the narrator starts chiding him for keeping his mouth shut.

The movie opens on a medium close up of man, just then a pair of hands (with claw like finger tips) crawl into frame and grab the guy's face. The camera pans over to reveal an attractive brunette. She pulls the man in for a kiss and he (understandably) doesn't offer up any sort of resistance. However, his immense joy is short lived as her kiss proves to be lethal and he falls down dead. Just then an off screen voice asks,"Have you ever been kissed by a girl like this?" Then the opening credits roll. Initially, I thought that this was a flash forward into the story, considering that man being kissed reappears a few minuter later. I was wrong.

This opening scene is disconnected from the rest of the story; it only serves to set up how dangerous the Spider Women really are. It leads you to believe that the plot will revolve around Spider Women luring unsuspecting (and extreme dense) men to their dooms. However, the Spider Women prove to a complete non-threat to our protagonists; their role consists mainly of close ups as they stare on, from afar, at our hapless heroes. Even Tarantella, the main Spider Woman, turns out to be a rather inadequate villain. She shows up long enough to do a "seductive" dance at a complete dive of a bar, only to be shot for her effort.  Earlier in the film, Dr. Aranya says that Tarantella is virtually indestructible and could live for hundreds of years, yet the film never properly explores this idea; we get a brief glimpse of it when Tarantella literally walks off her bullet wound. After her apparent "resurrection," she disappears from the proceedings (she briefly reappears at the movie's climax). This is rather a wasted opportunity as Tandra Quinn actually has great screen presence and could have made for one memorable vamp, instead she is absolutely wasted in relatively small role (even though she graces all the movie posters).

Tarantella's dance reminds me greatly of Salma Hayek's seductive snake dance in Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Til Dawn. Tandra Quinn and Hayek play fairly similar characters; there's an aura of mystery surrounding both women due to their silent nature (though Hayek has a few lines in From Dusk Til Dawn), and both of them strut their stuff at a sleazy bar while the male protagonists leer on, much to the disgust of the sole female in the group. Of course, Hayek is much more scantily clad than Quinn and her character has an actual function to the story, while Tarantella vanishes from sight. Tarantella's dance is the highlight of the film and, once seen, is extremely hard to forget.

The real "heart" of the film are the characters Grant Phillips and Doreen Culbertson, who develop a budding romance as the film progresses. Grant is a handsome, individualistic pilot, while Doreen is an insecure, gold digger. She is set to marry the nebbish (and significantly older) businessman Jan van Croft, however, fate, taking the form of insane scientist Dr. Leland Masterson and a downed airplane, intervenes. Masterson, after having shot Tarantella, abducts Jan and his soon to be trophy wife and forces Phillips to fly him to safety. However, the plane crash lands on the very same mesa where Aranya is performing his experiments. It turns out that this crash landing is no accident as it is revealed that Jan's servant, Wu, is really Dr. Aranya's lackey. His sole mission was to bring Masterson back to Aranya. How Wu was able to track Masterson's whereabouts is never revealed; he just happened to be at right place at the right time. Character development is fairly slim in this movie and even that doesn't occur until that last fifteen minutes of the movie; Grant and Doreen have a heart to heart while everyone else is asleep. The two share a passionate kiss, but Grant pulls away and apologizes to Doreen for taking advantage of the moment. Then the film jump cuts to a long shot of the two star crossed lovers as Doreen tries to persuade Grant that she has heard a noise coming from the woods. That is an extremely jarring edit; the audience never hear the noise Doreen is shouting about and it happens on mid sentence. I don't if it's just a poor print of the movie or complete incompetence on the part of the filmmaker, though I suspect the latter. The brief interlude between Grant and Doreen was probably shot later on in production (as a pick up) and the editor haphazardly spliced it into the film, hoping the audience wouldn't notice the jarring edit.

Other than Tandra Quinn, the most memorable thing about Mesa of Lost Women is its extremely repetitive score by Hoyt S. Curtin; which consists mainly of a flamenco guitar and a piano. Legendary schlockmeister, Edward D. Wood Jr., like it so much that he later recycled it in his crime film Jail Bait. However, this is not the Mesa's  only ties to Wood, it is narrated by his frequent collaborator, Lyle Talbot, and his (then) girlfriend, Dolores Fuller, can be briefly glimpsed as one of the Spider Women. Great minds think a like!

It's often hard to explain the appeal of bad movies like Mesa of Lost Women, after all, they are the absolute nadir when it comes to the cinema, but their disjointed nature often gives them a surreal quality that is often lacking in movies that are intentionally campy. Mesa of Lost Women often plays like a nightmare; the juxtaposition of beautiful women and dwarves (not to mention a giant spider) gazing directly at the camera is positively unnerving at times.

Credits

Cast: Jackie Coogan (Dr. Aranya), Tandra Quinn (Tarantella), Harmon Stevens (Dr. Leland Materson), Robert Knapp (Grant Phillips), Paula (Mary) Hill (Doreen Culbertson), Nico Lek (Jan van Croft), George Burrows (George), Chris-Pin Martin (Pepe), John Martin (Frank), Allan Nixon (Doc Tucker), Richard Travis (Dan Mulcahey), Samuel Wu (Wu), Dolores Fuller (Blonde Watcher In Woods), Katherine Victor (Car Driver Spider Woman).
Narrated by Lyle Talbot.

Director: Ron Ormond, Herbert Tevos.
Screenplay: Herbert Tevos, Orville H. Hampton.
Running Time: 70 min.