Mesa of Lost Women

source: 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.

You can't blame poor ol' Ed Wood for this one. Mesa of Lost Women is a dirt cheap, ridiculous grade Z flic, filled with grimacing dwarves, spider women with long fingernails, and T.V.'s Uncle Fester as a "brilliant madman". Harmon Stevens plays a reasonable scientist lured into the "Muerto Desert" by Uncle Fester; he won't aid in the creation of a race of super spider women beings, so he escapes, gets his brain boiled by the desert, and then leads a plane-load of 1 dimentional character actors back to the Mesa. Stevens shows off his non-existent acting ability, which ranges from over the top ("No, no, you're evil, you and your race of super fiends!!") to lithium-induced ("I like it up here....we're close to heaven"). Don't miss Wu, the token wog, who gets to say things like "the black curtain of night fell and veiled every eye: nothing could be seen". The script is ludicrist beyond belief; the spider women are silly and perform odious dances; the "giant spider" is dull and can barely move one leg. Stevens blows up the "lab" with a beaker of boiling water. To add icing on the cake, this movie sports one of the most irritating incidental music in recent memory - in fact, the horrible, constant strumming guitar was later used by several films, including Ed Wood's Jail Bait (you knew there'd be a connection!). Don't give in to temptation and fast-forward through the howlingly bad dialogue, its one of the few charms this wretched movie has. MooCow says this Mesa is a Mess-a cow flops!! :=8P

Great title, yeah? I saw this on a double bill back in 1988. It's not the 'bad' movie everyone calls it. Cheap maybe. A pre "Uncle Fester" Jackie Coogan, complete with fake facial hair, runs a lab in the desert. He turns females into spider creatures. This was also before Coogan's big weight gain. As far as films go, it's a typical Mad Scientist drama. The dialogue can be laughable at times and it was obviously filmed on a couple of simple sound stages, but it was worth a few looks. The women, including Ed Wood's wife, were attractive enough. And the flamenco score was OK too, if a little overplayed. And keep your eyes open for Angelo Rossito (Freaks) in a small (ouch!) role.

Really, a terrible film. But it's well worth watching/owning. This movie was included in a 50-film Sci-Fi pack from Glory Days Ent. The highlight of the film is beautiful Tandra Quinn's cantina dance (she's still alive, by the way, and her name's not Tandra Quinn), where as Tarantella, she seductively moves to Hoyt Curtain's soundtrack of flamenco guitar/piano. She's very sexy, but certainly no professional dancer. We're holding a TANDRA QUINN FESTIVAL in July at the Muerto Desert Palms featuring a Tarantella dance contest, a Lyle Talbot sound-a-like contest, live music, giant spiders, and featuring George the Nurse. Tickets on sale at the Amer-Exico Field Hospital and the Muerto State Asylum. Bring your 9-inch black fingernails.

Ah, yes… "Mesa of Lost Women" – the quintessential "piece of worthless crap". I believe that it was in the early 80's when I saw this the first time. I tortured myself a second time (a few years later), as well. Funny thing is, when I decided to look this, indescribable load of puke, up (on IMDb), I had almost hoped that there were not any viewer comments. I so much wanted to post how that incessant flamenco guitar (the first time I saw this) almost drove me beyond the state of madness… so much so that – at the midway point of this "thing" – I literally went to my window, opened it, and leaped out. It just so happened that my apartment, at that time, was a first floor, garden style unit. I leaped from my apartment window – not to commit suicide, but because the window was closer, to where I was sitting, than was the door, and I HAD to get out of there, but quick!! But seriously, I've seen most of Ed Wood's movies (we must use this term "movie" loosely), and it is widely regarded that they are the worst ever produced… "Plan Nine From Outer Space" is the depths to which he climbed, but even "Plan Nine…" had a plan… a theme. Nothing about "Mesa…" made any sense. It was almost impossible to tell heads-or tails here. I'm sure that I am not the only one who would have liked to peek inside the heads of the clowns who produced, wrote, and directed this monstrosity. It makes me wonder if they even had the ability to do something like this, on purpose. Most of the others, who commented, covered the vital ground – concerning this waste of perfectly good film, but the one area that can't be stressed too much is that astounding, invaluable, score. That score, alone, is worth the price of "submission". The "original" score is what sets this apart – bad writing, acting, direction, and production not withstanding – from anything else, that you could possibly ever hope to see. Jackie Coogan – the "big" name star – must have been the icing on the cake that the producers were looking for; Dolores Fuller, the Ed Wood protégé, was another catch. This, piece of dog snot, gets 3 thumbs down. On a scale of 1 to 10, this gets minus (-) 9.

Bad acting and laughable makeup with the spider girls displaying what appears to be long black fingernails really makes you want to say "cut them." The premise of human growth hormones causing physical changes in people actually is believable but then this movie goes down hill fast. Dr. Aranya played by Jackie Coogan experiments mostly with women because the men turn into dwarfs so he decides he needs a partner. So Dr. Masterson is called in to help. Masterson refuses to help and is injected with a serum which causes madness. The film then centers on a crazy Masterson but ends up with Masterson given another serum which restores his sanity, really this does happen. The only halfway believable person is the only one you don't see, the Narrator as played by Lyle Talbot. There are no mistakes on Talbot's part probably because we never see him. The worst part of this flick among many candidates is the consistent guitar playing which if I had the fingernails of Tarantella I would bite them from the frustration of listening to the guitar music.

This movie is just plain fun. I consider it a budding cult classic. I say "budding" only because it seems to be relatively unknown. Jackie Coogan, who rocked as Uncle Fester of The Addams Family TV series, rocks as a mad scientist. Harmon Stevens is just as much a hoot as the insane doctor. Tandra Quinn, who plays Tarantella, is a major babe and her dance number shows it. Samuel Wu, who oddly enough plays the character Wu, speaks only in what sounds like an ancient Chinese proverb dialect and comes off as ludicrously funny. The deadly spider-girls are all pretty, the dwarfs are actually all dwarfs, the voice over is cool and crazy, and parts of it are over the top in ways reminiscent of Plan 9 From Outer Space. I love this thing. Its in a class of its own and ought not be compared to other films. It is what it is and needs to be viewed that way. Its a gut buster. Want your own personal cult classic that no one else knows about? Adopt the Mesa of Lost Women.

This may appear late night on a station that does not play infomercials. Ron Popiel trying to sell his new oven or air mattress is more entertaining than this. In my humble opinion, "Mesa of Lost Women" is the worst movie of all time. Yes, I say this is even worse than "Plan 9 from Outer Space." "Plan 9" could at least be mocked with a bunch of your friends. It is so terrible that you probably can not have fun by mocking it. And it may have the worst movie score of all time. I just want to smash the guitar of whoever is playing the flamenco music unrelentingly throughout this entire movie.

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.