You have to look pretty hard to find a “bad” 50’s monster movie, but once in a great while you do run across one. MESA OF LOST WOMEN, directed by Ron Ormond and Herbert Tevos, was from pretty early in the decade, and is exactly the sort of hokey, poorly-written, threadbare production spoofed by critics. The main bulk of the film concerns a plane crash atop a remote mesa where a mad scientist is turning giant tarantulas into human women. Or some such.
I really intended to screen the film again to refresh my memory and I forgot to. Former child star Jackie Coogan stars as the evil Dr. Aranya (which is Spanish for “spider,” although that really doesn’t mean anything. One character notes this toward the climax and that’s the end of it. I guess it’s just coincidence that a scientist named Aranya has a thing for spiders). One wonders if his fellow Addams Family members ever brought the film up a decade later… Another problem is that the film features an annoying, single-instrument score (though one slightly less irritating that that used for THE THIRD MAN). It was later used for Ed Wood’s crime thriller JAIL BAIT.
Depressingly, this music was cut by none other than the great Hoyt Curtin! What saves the film are some incredible visuals involving the giant spiders creeping around the dark sound-stage jungle atop the mesa. These scenes are amazing. Though the spiders are pretty stiff, they look truly nightmarish under these conditions. That alone makes the film a perfect Halloween picture! Reportedly, these scenes were actually added after the fact, as the original cut of the film wasn’t really a monster movie!
About the author
Rock is a pencil jockey by trade. He's done work for AC Comics, Main Enterprises, and Moonstone, among others. Some of the strips he's created include Dinosaur Girl (AC Comics, creator, writer, pencils), Crissy Carrots (Main, creator, writer, pencils), and Betsy the Bookwriter (Main, co-creator, writer, pencils). His specialty is cheesecake cartooning (what they call "good girl art" these days).
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