"In fact, it's so bad you have to ask yourself, is it actually evil?"
(Critic Nigel Honeybone on Mesa of the Lost Women.)
(Spoilers — not that it really matters.) A mind-blowing bad-film anti-classic on par if not "worse" than anything Ed Wood Jr ever made, the overall anti-style of this pasted-together and unbelievably inept project often has the feel and aura of that anti-auteur's fingerprint, and not just because Wood Jr purloined this movie's outrageously annoying and surreal soundtrack for his own lesser disasterpiece, Jail Bait (1954), which also shares some faces and voices. (Wood-stalwart Lyle Talbot [8 Feb 1902 – 2 Mar 1996], for example, is never seen in Mesa of Lost Woman but supplies the film's inane, almost Glen or Glenda (1953 / trailer) like narrative pontification, and Wood's girlfriend of the time, Dolores Fuller [10 Mar 1923 – 9 May 2011], is both credited and seen all of three seconds as a woman watching in the woods.)
"Strange, the monstrous assurance of this race of puny bipeds with overblown egos; the creature who calls himself 'man'. He believes he owns the earth, and every living thing on it exists only for his benefit. Yet, how foolish he is. Consider, even the lowly insect that man trods underfoot outweighs man several times. It outnumbers him by countless billions. In the continuing war for survival between man and the hexapods, only an utter fool would bet against the insect."
(Lyle Talbot's opening narration)
But, no, the directorial chores of Mesa of Lost Women are pretty solidly credited to the mysterious and unknown Herbert Tevos [20 Sept 1896 – 4 Mar 1988] and the legendary Ron Ormond [29 Aug 1910 – 11 May 1981]. (That's him below.) Tevos, a Munchausen-like fabricator born in Germany as Herbert Schoellenbach (often adding the aristocratic "von" to make Herbert von Schoellenbach, thus implying that he belonged to the noble German Schoellenbach family), wrote and directed but, arguably, never "finished" the movie. It obviously killed his non-existent directorial career, in any event, for he was never able to bamboozle anyone else into letting him make another movie.
"Hey Everybody! Listen! This man is an insane killer! He's loco!"
George (George Burrows*)
* Another busy and usually uncredited background filler, George Burrows (7 Feb 1914 – 17 Oct 1994) has over 90 films and 70 TV credits to his name. He often played a gorilla, as in the "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" Tarzan and His Mate (1934 / trailer) and/or the less significant Gorilla at Large (1954 / trailer), Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967 / trailer), Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966 / trailer) and Black Zoo (1963 / full film). His true claim to fame is surely his important role as the titular gorilla-bodied and bad-and-horny alien of Robot Monster (1953 / trailer).
Tevos's version, a bare-boned and short fiasco titled Tarantula — not to be mistaken with the classic Tarantula (1953 / trailer with Mara Corday & Leo G. Carroll) — was deemed unreleasable by its distributors, who sold the film to Howco Productions, a lowbrow distribution company* co-run by Ron Ormond. Allegedly, Ormond pulled in Orville H. Hampton (21 May 1917 – 8 Aug 1997) — the scribe of such classics as The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959 / trailer), The Alligator People (1959 / trailer), The Snake Woman (1961 / full movie), the truly good One Potato, Two Potato (1964 / trailer), Detroit 9000 (1973, with Marilyn Joi) and Friday Foster (1975 / trailer) — for "dialogue supervision", which resulted in the shooting of new scenes and filler using both new actors and some of those from the first version of the movie. The result is an oddly disorienting and nonsensical non-narrative that defies every concept of narrative logic and continuity but offers prime examples of thespian and directorial and scriptwriting inability. It is a memorable experience, but one best enjoyed in a group.
* Among the lowbrow "movies" they were to release or re-release are Jail Bait (1954), The Night of the Strangler (1972 / full movie), Night of Bloody Horror (1969 / trailer), Women and Bloody Terror (1970 / trailer), Teenage Monster (1958 / trailer), Untamed Mistress (1956 / full film), Creature from Black Lake (1976 / trailer), The Undertaker and His Pals (1966 / trailer), The Naked Venus (1959 / trailer), Louisiana Hussy (1959 / full movie), that movie that Russ Meyer should have remade, Girl with an Itch (1958 / full movie), and tons more trash.
Once or twice a huge, usually immobile spider appears in the movie, one that looks about as convincing as the one in Horrors of Spider Island (1960) and which, on occasion, is evidenced in the background by a single hairy arm swinging about, very much in the fashion of the singular alien-creature arm that swings about in Antonio Margheriti's mildly less painful (and thus less memorable) Alien from the Deep (1989). But the spider is a minor aspect of the overly stretched out, nonsensical and disorienting movie which, among its many notable features, even has a flashback within flashback as one of the characters, pilot Grant Philips (Robert Knapp [24 Feb 1924 – 17 May 2001] of Hot Car Girl [1958 / trailer]), tells things he has no way of knowing about as he wasn't even present when they happened.
"Sheriff! The body just got up and walked out of here!"
Bartender (Fred Kelsey*)
* Mesa of Lost Women has a plethora of unknown and forgotten faces of the past who had long, busy carriers as background fillers or two-line actors, including brown-haired character actor Fred Kelsey (20 Aug 1884 – 2 Sept 1961), a man with over 375 movies to his known acting and directorial credits, who appears in the film all of ten seconds (suddenly replacing the movie's original grey-haired bartender) to call the police. Forgotten today, he was once familiar enough that he was caricatured in Tex Avery's 1943 MGM cartoon Who Killed Who? Even if you don't blink, you won't see him in, for example, Three Strangers (1946) and Flaxy Martin (1949) or the great Paul Leni's last finished film, the part-silent part-talkie horror mystery known as The Last Warning (1928)...
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Trailer to Paul Leni's last finished film,
The Last Warning:
The final Ron Ormond version of Mesa of Lost Women concerns a typically crazed scientist, Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan* [26 Oct 1914 – 1 Mar 1984]), who, at his secret cave hideout on a mesa in the desert of Mexico, is injecting glandular fluids between spiders and women to create a race of at-his-command superwomen, midget men, and huge spiders with which he plans to conquer the world. He calls in noted scientist Leland Masterson (Harmon Stevens [19 Nov 1910 – 20 Apr 1992]), whose initial fascination quickly turns to horror. Injected with a substance that renders him a murderous simpleton, Masterson ends up in an insane asylum, whence he escapes for a drink at a bar, hotly pursued by the asylum nurse George (Burrows)...
* Jackie Coogen, as everyone knows, gained fame as Charlie Chaplin's discovery in The Kid (1921 / full film). He had a good run up until around Tom Sawyer (1930) and Huckleberry Finn (1931), after which his career declined. Once an adult, he sued his mother and stepfather for some of the money he made as a child, something that led to the protective California Child Actor's Bill (a.k.a the "Coogan Act"). A lengthy career in B-films and exploitation followed, including his only directorial credit, the possibly lost Escape from Terror (1955), High School Confidential! (1958 / beat poetry reading), The Space Children (1958 / trailer), The Beat Generation (1959 / full movie), Sex Kittens Go to College (1960 / trailer), Human Experiments (1979 / trailer) and The Prey (1983 / trailer). For most people, he remains fondly remembered as Uncle Fester on the classic TV series, The Addams Family (1964-66 / theme song).
Okay, a lot more happens, none of which truly makes any sense or is filmed in any way that might render it interesting, but the plot is a bit aside the point as it is pretty much all-over-the-place and completely nonsensical. What makes the movie stand out, makes it special, is how terrible everything about the movie is — even though some truly professional names are involved.
The dark and turgid cinematography of the forever stationary camera, for example, is abysmal, and that despite having the Oscar-winning Karl Strauss* (30 Nov 1886 – 16 Dec 1981) and massively experienced Gilbert Warrenton* (7 Mar 1894 – 21 Aug 1980), the latter being the cameraman of Paul Leni's visual masterpieces Cat & the Canary (1927 / full film) and The Man Who Laughs (1928 / full film), behind the camera lens.
* Strauss's Oscar was for the cinematography of one of the most visually fascinating love stories ever made, F.W. Murnau's silent classic Sunrise (1927 / full film). Both Strauss & Warrenton did their best work when young and working for master directors and, with age, slowly slid into the Bs, lending credence to the concept that talent fades and/or that the directors had a bigger influence on their work than their abilities.
Equally noteworthy in its inspired terribleness is the unforgettable and utterly grating and disturbing music to the film, a flamenco-tinged and out-of-place free-jazz concoction cooked up by cartoon-jingle specialist Hoyt Curtin (9 Sept 1922 – 3 Dec 2000): headache-inducing and annoyingly repetitive, the WTF music never fits to anything that occurs onscreen and serves above all to make the Mesa of Lost Women seem even more feverishly unreal. Curtin, who the previous year had delivered a fairly decent score for Paul Henreid's directorial debut For Men Only (1952 / full movie), either dropped the ball spectacularly or was truly inspired when he composed the music, for seldom has there ever been a score that alienates the viewer as much as this one. One gets the feeling Curtin hated the job and channeled all his creative energies into creating music that would above all intensify the displeasure and pain of anyone who bothered to watch the movie.
Mesa of Lost Women:
Other pleasures of Mesa of Lost Women include a one-note Chinese valet named Wu (the unknown Samuel Wu), a wisdom-spouting stereotype who underscores the trope of the untrustworthy Asian — he proves to be a henchman of Dr. Aranya, despite the fact that his boss, businessman Jan van Croft (Nico Lek [16 May 1901 – 19 Dec 1983]), had no prior contact or knowledge of the evil doctor and his mesa of lost women. Van Croft's attractive but gold-digging fiancée, Doreen, as played by Paula Hill* ([15 Feb 1926 – 15 Feb 2000], billed as Mary Hill, of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms [1953 / trailer]), manages to occasionally show some minor thespian talent but is greatly hampered by every aspect of the movie, not just her insipid dialogue and sudden attraction to pilot Grant Philips.
* An unknown and forgotten actress, artist Stephen Whatley has the following to tell us about her: "A minister's daughter born Paula Mary Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, she suffered very early losses of her father and protective older brother [...]. Despite numerous bit parts in both classic and B-movies [...], she only got one major break as a leading lady on the big screen ironically in what is now considered one of the worst films of all time, Mesa of Lost Women (1953). [...] Heartbroken by a series of career disappointments, newspapers reported she attempted suicide with pills in 1954 — but ever the fighter, having survived her early bereavements, she fought on in the Hollywood jungle. […] But by 1960, she had departed to New York to become a lounge singer […]. Nothing is recorded of her life in the 1970s and 1980s — but at the end of that decade, she was re-discovered by the film producer Steve Burrows, who just happened to be living in her Los Angeles apartment building. He gave her two cameo character roles which she played to the hilt, in his films, Soldier of Fortune (1991 / trailer) and Chump Change (2000 / trailer); the latter of which she sadly did not live to see released."
Another female of note to briefly pop up in the new scenes added by Ron Ormond is Katina Vea* (18 Aug 1923 – 22 Oct 2004), making her feature-film debut as the woman who drives Leland Masterson to the evil doctor's desert hideout. And lest we forget the silent little men, the inferior male byproducts of Dr. Aranya's experiments: the one with the least screen time, Dr. Aranya's diminutive assistant in his lab, is the cult actor Angelo Rossitto (18 Feb 1908 – 21 Sept 1991), also found in Dracula vs Frankenstein (1971), the surreal classic Dementia (1955), Scared to Death (1946), The Spider Woman (1943), The Corpse Vanishes (1942), Freaks (1932 / trailer), The Big House (1932) and Paul Hunt's The Clones (1973 / trailer); the other one, who continually skulks about with bad hair, is the less-familiar John George (20 Jan 1898 – 25 Aug 1968), born in Syria as Tufei Fatella, of The Unknown (1927), Island of Lost Souls (1932), Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934 / fan-made trailer) and The Unearthly (1957, with Allison Hayes). They are part of the movie because — well, just because. What says mad scientist better than stature-challenged henchmen?
* Born Katena Ktenavea and also sometimes credited as Katherine Victor, she later became convinced that she lost her opportunity for a viable acting career by starring in too many Jerry Warren no-budget film projects, including the threadbare Teenage Zombies (1959). One of her last film appearances is found in Fred Olan Ray's Fugitive Rage (1996 / trailer).
If there is a saving grace to Mesa of Lost Woman, it would be the memorable Tandra Quinn (27 Mar 1931 – 21 Oct 2016).* Just a dive-bar murder victim in Herbert Tevos's original movie, in Mesa of Lost Women she is the forever silent but deadly Tarantella, the deadly and mute dancing "lost woman" who possibly has the most screen time of anyone in the movie. (Whether or not anyone in the film knew that "Tarantella" is also the name of Italian folk dances from the province of Taranto that supposedly grew from cases of dancing mania caused by the bite of the Italian wolf spider is open to conjecture.) Her dance is interminably long and wonderfully hilarious, but she gives it everything, and her tightly dressed shapely figure implies that had the movie been made a decade or so later she would have had at least one nude scene. Exotically beautiful, she never utters a word but glares and stares a lot — and gets up unharmed after being shot dead to show up at far-distant places so quickly she must have a Star Trek transporter.
* Born Derline Jeanette Smith, her extremely short film career includes the movie not featuring Allison Hayes, Girls in the Night (1953 / full movie), in which she stands in the same beauty queen line-up that Hayes does not, and two of Ewald André Dupont's final and most ignoble projects, Problem Girls (1953 / full movie) and The Neanderthal Man (1953 / full movie), after which she left the biz too early for love and family life.
Despite its saving grace, Mesa of Lost Woman remains a truly terrible movie of the kind that defies logic and reality to become an almost surreal exercise of incoherency and insipidness. Disjointed to the point of illogic, the events instead follow an almost dreamlike logic. Despite the guffaws that diverse aspects of the movie engender, Mesa of Lost Woman is almost painful to watch until the end, but thereafter almost becomes a fond memory — like any act of idiocy that one manages to survive and talk about.
Thus, though heartily recommended by a wasted life, we would be derelict in our duties not to warn you that watching Mesa of Lost Woman will truly be torture to both your retinas and sanity.
Addendum: Over at Tapa Talk, "B movie guru Tom Weaver", who actually read Herbert Tevos cum Herbert Schoellenbach's original script and explains that "the main difference [from Mesa of Lost Women] is that in Tarantula, Leland Masterson (Harmon Stevens) is 'a schizophrenic homicidal maniac' who sets the whole thing in motion. The story starts with his arrival at the cantina, plopping himself and his gun down at the table of Van Croft and Doreen, etc. (footage we see in Mesa). They all watch Tarantella dance, and then Masterson shoots and kills her for no reason. Then Masterson makes Van Croft, Doreen and male nurse George take him to Van Croft's plane, where they meet pilot Grant and Van Croft's servant Wu; at the point of Masterson's gun, they're forced about the plane and it takes off. The plane crashes on the mesa (here called Tarantula Mesa) where we get all the familiar scenes of bickering, 'Where's the comb?,' on and on. George wanders off and gets killed and then (unlike Mesa) Wu does too. [...] Really, pretty much the ONLY footage we DON'T see in Mesa is the conclusion, where the surviving folks race toward an arriving rescue helicopter as several man-sized tarantulas chase them, and then the end where Doreen gives Van Croft the brush and clinches with Grant. [...] The spider-women, the midgets, Dr. Aranya, the framing scenes in the mining office, the scenes establishing Masterson as a scientist, alllllll that stuff must have been shot and added to the movie by Ormond. Tevos' Tarantula is just the too-simple story of a bunch of folks (plane-jacked by nutjob Masterson) who crash on a mesa, contend with weird unseen stuff for a while, and then get chased by big tarantulas at the very end as the helicopter [...] is arriving.
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