31 Days of Cheese: Day 24 - Mesa of Lost Women

Oh my. I really didn’t want to watch this one again. I saw it three years ago and it still haunts me.

The experience of watching this film is like being struck about the head and shoulders with sticks while being forced to watch random images while a chorus of lunatics chant poetry that has been translated from Welsh to Chinese and then back to Welsh again by babble fish, meantime a tape recording consisting of random sound effects, out of tune trumpet solos and bits of opera being played backwards supplies the sound track.

Yes this 1953 film is so bad that for a while rumors were that Ed Wood either wrote or had a hand in directing it. Turns out he didn’t but Lyle Talbot supplies the narration and Ed’ girlfriend at the time Delores Fuller was in the film so the speculation is not without some logic. Also George Barrow, who played the Ro-man in Robot Monster is in this film. Really all this film needs is Bela and the world would be sure Ed did it.

The film starts with a rambling narration that goes on and on and on while folks wander the desert. They are rescued from the desert by a passing jeep from an oil company. And as they recover they begin to tell the story. But the narrator won’t let them. He focuses in on this guy named Pepe with a sombrero who, in a fairly unique cinematic technique, has someone else’s flashback a Doctor Masterson to be exact. This doctor arrives at the Mesa to meet the scientist living there.

There we meet the sinister Dr. Arana (Spanish for spider I am told) played by Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester in the 1960’s Addams Family TV series) He had been one of the biggest child stars in the silent era (staring in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid among other things but his parents had spent all the money by the time he reached adulthood so he ended up, before the Addams Family, playing roles like this.

Dr. Arana is busy popping the pituitary gland in and out of people and putting in and out of Tarantulas. Why? Science that’s why. We briefly meet Tarantella a spider woman hybrid in a halter dress and a big fake spider with a bandage. We are told that the women will live for hundreds of years and the men are, like spider males puny and insignificant. In other words dwarfs. Of which this film is full of. In fact, this film seems to follow the rule, when in doubt, cut to a close up of a dwarf.

Arana has a big mole and an eye that is either missing or sort of damaged. Depends on the shot.

Anyway what Masterson sees drives him mad. Much like I felt watching this film.

We flash forward and then pick up the story of the folks we saw at the beginning of the films. Dr. Masterson breaks out of the asylum and after we watch a long dance from Tarantella after which they end up back at the mesa then several folks are killed by spiders and the women and the dwarves shadow the other survivors and then after the Doctor regains his sanity and he causes the lab to blow up. Much like we would want to do to this film.

Aside from the bad acting, the fake giant spider, the random close ups of dwarves and the fake cave were spider/woman hybrids labor over microscopes (?) what really makes this film special is the sound track. Most of the music for this film consists of someone playing some flamenco style guitar strums over and over and over again while an orangutan on cough syrup bangs on a piano while wearing mittens. This is repeated over and over and over and over again until you beg for mercy but realize the film isn’t over yet. Then you give up hope. It’s easier to watch then. Yes you die inside, but it limits the damage somehow.

Never Watch this film. Not even Mystery Science Theater 3000 would touch this one.

Enjoy, if you must, with massive doses of your favorite sedative.