Slumming/'tis the Season: Mesa of Lost Women!

Every so often, you see a movie that is just, there’s no other way to put it, bad. It’s a wretched non-construct of script, acting, and direction. Every so often, you come across one, though, that calls you to question if that’s not the very point of the film. 

I love - that's right: love - Mesa of Lost Women. It is. deliriously bad. And yet, and yet, if you venture into it with the right approach, it can prove to be a challenging work of avant-garde cinema, interrogating plot structure, characters, the passage of time, and interspecies/environmental relationships. Does that sound like a stretch? You bet it does! But look what happen when we take that approach. C’mon down!

Let’s start with the opening of two people trudging across a desert with rambling narration that stops when the couple, a man and woman, find safe haven, and resumes when they are surrounded by other characters who may or may not have parts to play in their narrative. When the camera dollies in on one, Pepe (Chris Pin Martin), for a moment it appears he can actually hear the voice. Can he? But the voice seems to use Pepe as a point of departure for the narrative (already begun). Already we have a kind of deconstruction of the place of narration in cinema; the narrator may not even be unreliable, he might not even understand what his function is. He might even be mad, and I’ll explain why momentarily. 

But who is the narrator? Is it Grant, the pilot and hero of the movie? Or is the narrator Pepe’s memory when we move from the initial milieu of our couple in recovery to Pepe’s memories of a year prior. The nature of time itself comes under scrutiny. Indeed, there are moments in the film where time seems to stretch on. And on. And on. Now, that might sound snarky, but not completely. There is a scene where the survivors of a plane crash decide to investigate a sound on the mesa in the pitch darkness of night and then return to the plane. There is an almost studied indifference to filmmaking at this point: I kind of want to take that sequence, remove it from the film, slow it down even more and see what can be done with it as an abstract study in time passing.

I should add that the film begins with a cold open of a woman kissing a man who then collapses and that voice that will guide us throughout the film asks us, “Have you ever been kissed by a girl like this?” Setting aside if I’ve ever been kissed like that by a girl or whether a girl like that has ever kissed me, I would likely have to say, “no, no I have not.” The girl in question, Tarantella is played by Tandra Quinn, who was nineteen at the time the film was shot by Herbert Tevos aka Herbert von Schoellenbach, one of the shadowiest figures ever to helm a feature. According to Ms. Quinn, he was her wannabe Svengali who wanted to do for her what he did for Marlene Dietrich. Which turned out to be nothing. 

He had told Tandra and any who would listen that it was he who made Dietrich and who filmed Der Blaue Engel/The Blue Angel. I’m sure this would have been a shock to von Sternberg, to say nothing of Marlene, but here we are. Aside from Quinn’s memories of Tevos, I haven’t found anything else on him except what’s in his IMDb page and it is glorious. 

All of that said, what makes Mesa amusing despite itself is the lore around it, much of it to be found in Tom Weaver’s interview with Tandra in his book I Talked with a Zombie. Tandra’s (or Jeanette, to use her preferred and given name) memories of the shoot itself are amusing. She paints herself as a fairly silly kid who, perhaps, thought showbiz would be her path, but as she recounts, she never developed the thick skin needed to deal with rejection. 

The movie that Tevos shot, Tarantula, was deemed unreleasable by the producers and it was buried for a year or so, before Ron Ormond was brought in to make something of it. He had his start as a cameraman at Monogram and before long, was shooting a lot of oaters and eventually, exploitation cheapies, and country music movies with stars like George Jones, Bill Anderson, and Skeeter Davis. At some point, I do want to check out his other work (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some already); no one would confuse Ormond with Orson Welles, but honestly, I’m continually fascinated by the output of these very often colorful characters.

After making more exploitation films, Ormond survived a single-engine plane crash and converted to Christianity and his religious films sound every bit as bat-shit insane as his pre-conversion oeuvre. I kind of want to read Jimmy McDonough’s biography of the family, if only because I’m curious about the guy, but also because it seems to have been published by Nicholas Winding Refn. Color me enticed.

As it happened, for the reshoots and additional footage, Ormond called in none other than Jackie Coogan, whose heyday from the silent era had long passed and who had hit the skids hard after returning from Burma at the end of World War II. Diana Serra Cary sums up Coogan’s nadir in Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Star:

“Jackie was now thirty-eight and had begun seeking work from Hollywood’s greatest nemesis—television. Stars under contract to major studios were not allowed to even appear in a scene with a television set as part of the furniture, let alone work for the studio system’s mortal enemy. But Jackie no longer had anything to lose. What he had mistaken for a second honeymoon with Hollywood when he returned from Burma had not been a comeback after all. His two Monogram films and The Mesa of Lost Women (a science-fiction bomb that made the list as a classic all-time “worst movie”) had barely kept the wolf from the door.”

I suspect that Coogan probably didn’t remember or care to remember much of Tevos/Ormond’s opus.

So all bullshttery aside, is Mesa of the Lost Women worth watching? Why, no, of course not! With one qualification: look, I personally love bad, shitty movies like this for their ambition, not their execution and for what lies outside the the text as opposed to the text itself. Sometimes, it’s true, you may find a diamond in the rough. You might be lured in by a random strong performance out of a high-school play level ensemble. And sometimes, a crap movie might actually be very well shot, so much so that the work might be visually rewarding.

Coogan plays Dr. Aranya, by the way. He’s a crazed entomologist who has somehow developed a formula for developing a race of spider-women (why? Why would anyone want to do this?) The women turn out to look like Tandra in some cases, Delores Fuller in others (the sole survivor of the extermination that occurs at the end) and the   two males develop into dwarfs. Both men who play them - Angelo Rossitto and John George, by the way, had extensive and even illustrious careers.

I feel for the ensemble, I really do. At least, Lyle Talbot lucked out, being the narrator and offscreen (to be sure, the turkeys that litter his filmography are many, but still). 

Aside from Aranya and his goal of creating an army of what, amazon arachnid women with superhuman strength, regenerative limbs, the instinct of spiders and the intelligence of humans to rule the world, who do we have? Frank and Dorren we’ve met wandering in the desert. Pepe we know because we have to travel back a year to get the whole story, and that leaves Doreen’s pain in the ass fiancee, businessman Jan van Croft. Most of all, though, we meet Dr. Leland Masterson who had been recruited by Aranya to help him with working out the kinks (the dwarfism in males, and developing human intelligence in the tarantulas/tarantuala-people). Masterson denounces Aranya’s blasphemous and mad plan and past the price when Aranya injects him with a drug that reduces him to an imbecile. Honestly, though, so glad he did, as Masterson-as-Simple-Jack is highly entertaining.

Oh, man, he escapes from the facility where he’s under supervision, cops some cash and a gun and heads to the nearest cantina where he kicks back a whiskey (“your finest”) and proceeds to watch a remarkable performance compliments of “Tarantella” (Tandra Quinn). Jan de Croft, Doreen, and George - a nurse from the facility come to collect Masterson. - are already there, Everyone but George is somewhat entranced by her “performance” (Quinn said she just made up whatever on the spot; she’d taken dance lessons, but admitted she wasn’t sure what she was doing; that said, credit where it’s due, she improvised as best she could and it’s not as embarrassing as some similar scenes you come across in these things). Anyway, Masterson has been spouting some strange, random stuff, snaps out of his haze when he recognizes Tarantella and shoots her. Dead. Apparently. 

Masterson takes George, Doreen, and de Croft hostage and flee to de Croft’s private plane where we meet Grant and de Croft’s servant Wu are now added to the hostages and he forces them to fly despite the airplane’s dodgy shape (I forget what’s wrong with it and I’m not going back to find out.) Meanwhile, back at the cantina, Tarantella regenerates/resurrects and splits.

Our crew crash lands on Zarpa Mesa and in short order, are beset by Aranya’s spider-folk. Wu turns out to be a plant and is murdered by the spider-women (so much for loyalty!), de Croft is blamed for Wu’s death (Wu left the group to report to Aranya and was presumed dead) and goes to pieces, eventually being consumed by a giant tarantula. Eventually, Doreen, Grant, and Masterson are in Aranya’s lab, Masterson’s faculties are restored and he sabotages the lab to blow taking all the spider babies with him and Aranya, giving Grant and Doreen time to escape. 

The we come full circle to where Frank and Pepe pick them up wandering in the desert. Only Pepe believes Grant’s story and we discover that one spider-woman has survived (as mentioned, Ed Wood’s squeeze Dolores Fuller!)

None of the spider-women have any lines. I mention this because Tandra Quinn I don’t think ever had a role where she spoke. (She played a deaf-mute in her next role in The Neanderthal Man. I haven’t seen Problem Girls, so I can’t say for sure, but her other two credits have listed as “uncredited”, so I’m guessing she was more background actor.

What of our hapless ensemble, though? Mary Hill (Doreen), Robert Knapp (Grant), and Chris Pin Martin (Pepe) all had fairly long and diverse careers. I elided Allan Nixon as the doomed “Doc” Tucker who was attacked by Tarantella at the opening, but you get the idea. This is Samuel Wu’s only credit and you wonder if he figured it was just wiser to cut his losses and consider another line of business.

I’ve already owned up to loving this flick. HOLD UP! I’m writing this in a Starbucks and I’m getting chills because The Addams Family TV show's theme song is playing. Is Jackie Coogan looking over my shoulder? Is Uncle Fester going to haunt my dreams? One can only hope; I think he’d be a good hang; he had a hard life, but he’s an icon, after all.

Back to loving this movie. Again, it’s about ambition and just the fact that someone somewhere thought it could be salvaged. There’s a weird honesty in the self-duplicity of filmmakers like Tevos who think they’re making a masterpiece and something to be said for a workhorse like Ormond who’s tasked with trying to mold the incomprehensible into something somewhat…entertaining, at least, for masochists like me.

Afterwords: do, by all means, hunt down Tom Weavers I Talked with a Zombie. Tom's work across the board is worth reading; he's been interviewing filmmakers that would otherwise continue to be overlooked and writing about the kinds of films I grew up watching late at night on UHF channels and even on screen at various revivals from the seventies on. 

Also, a note on the cinematographers. As these things go, and as mentioned above, sometimes the photography can make the experience a little more bearable. Here, aside from the cantina portion, the camera is woefully static and the frame clogged up by people/objects/both. This comes as a shock, not because this is par for the course for these pictures, but because one of the DPs was Karl Struss who had worked on Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and Chaplin's The Great Dictator. He was one of the early developers of 3-D and even after Mesa, lensed Chaplin's Limelight and later The Fly (1958).

The other director fo photography? Yeah, not a chump: Gilbert Warrenton shot The Cat and the Canary (1927) and a ton of earlier silents. His career isn't as illustrious as Struss's (he did shoot a lot of stuff for poverty row studios like Monogram and bunches of B's, but he wasn't a total hack. He shot Panic in the Year Zero! directed by and starring Ray Milland, a thoughtful look at human behavior during the onset of a nuclear war. Just see it. It's harrowing and well-done.

Do you have a favorite bad film? Feel free to let me know here or hit me up on Facebook or on Bluesky at @reactionshots.bsky.social.

A photo selection as random as the movie’s plot:

Jackie Coogan, Tandra Quinn, Harmon Stevens.

Tandra Quinn showing off some crazy nails.

From top: Jackie Coogan, Robert Knapp, and Tandra Quinn.

Mary Hill as Doreen

Tandra/Jeanette Quinn busting out the moves in the cantina.

Dolores Fuller, the sole survivor. I have to think Ed Wood was pleased as punch with his gal pal.

Maybe not the most convincing giant tarantula (with Tandra Quinn/Tarantella).