“Have you ever been kissed by a girl like this?” a disembodied voice asks at the start of 1953’s Mesa For Lost Women as a pair hands with claw-like fingernails caresses the face of someone who is later identified as being “Doc” Tucker (Allan Nixon).
Things get stranger from there. A couple is found lost and dehydrated in the Mexican desert. Grant Phillips (Robert Knapp) rambles about “super bugs” out in the desert and how they have to be destroyed. American land surveyor Frank (John Martin) assumes that Grant must be delirious but Frank’s assistant, Pepe (Chris Pin Martin), knows differently. We know that Pepe knows differently because the narrator tells us that Pepe had heard all about the monsters in the desert but Pepe keeps that information to himself….
Who is this narrator and why is he so condescending? (For the record, he’s actor Lyle Talbot, who split his career between major, Oscar-winning productions and stuff like this.) Have you ever noticed that a narrator usually just leaves you feeling even more confused by what you just watched? There’s a trailer playing right now for a film called Ella McCay that opens with Julie Kavner saying, “Hi, I’m the narrator!” and whenever I hear that line, I’m just like, “Oh, this film is going to be so bad!”
I think it’s because most narrators are added after the fact, in an attempt to give some sort of uniformity to a badly constructed movie. The narrator is there to tell us stuff that a good movie would be able to show us. For instance, in the trailer for Ella McCay, Julie Kavner tells us that “I’m nuts about her,” as a way to assure us that Ella McCay is someone worth making a movie about. Now, ideally, you wouldn’t have to have someone tell you that. You would just watch the movie and say, “Hey, Ella McCay! She deserves all the happiness in the world!” But when your trailer is a bunch of scenes of Ella McCay acting a bit immature for someone who is destined to become “governor of the state you were born and raised in,” you need that narrator to say, “No, she’s likable, I promise!”
By that same logic, Mesa of Lost Women was apparently a mash-up of several different films, none of which had a complete script. Narrator Lyle Talbot is here to tell us that, despite what we’re seeing, Mesa of Lost Women is an actual movie with an actual story as opposed to just a bunch of random scenes that were haphazardly crammed together. We get a flashback of a scientist named Masterson (Harmon Stevens) traveling to the laboratory of Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan) and discovering that Aranya is creating giant tarantulas and transforming human women into mind-controlled slaves with the instincts of a spider. Masterson doesn’t think that’s ethical so Aranya’s assistant, Tarantella (Tandra Quinn), gives him an injection that turns him into a simpleton. Masterson ends up in a mental hospital, though he later escapes. Meanwhile, an American businessman and his girlfriend (Mary Hill) come to Mexico and witness Tarantella dancing in a bar. Masterson shows up and shoots Tarantella and then takes everyone hostage so that he can force Grant, who we now discover is a pilot, to fly him to the mesa of lost women …. or something.
Despite the best efforts of the narrator, the film is impossible to follow. A big problem is that Dr. Aarnya’s plan never makes much sense. How is creating a giant spider and a bunch of women who think that they’re spiders going to help him conquer the world? The other problem is that the film had two directors, one of whom was an enigmatic German named Herbert Tevos who got the job by claiming to have directed Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Tevos’s footage of Dr. Aranya, the giant tarantula, and the “lost women” was not enough to secure the film distribution so a second director, Ron Ormond, was brought in to shoot a bunch of new footage to make the film more commercial. Tevos’s film became an extended flashback in the middle of Ormond’s film and the whole thing is a big mess.
In fact, the film is such a mess that some people insist Ed Wood must have been involved. It is true that narrator Lyle Talbot also appeared in Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. Plan 9‘s Mona McKinnon appears as a spider woman. So does Dolores Fuller, who was Wood’s girlfriend at the time. Wood later “borrowed” Mesa of Lost Women‘s score for Jail Bait. Mesa of Lost Women was definitely Wood-adjacent but, by all accounts, Wood didn’t actually do any work on the film. This mess of a film belongs to Tevos and Ormond.
And it is a mess. It’s a watchable mess, in much the same way that a nuclear meltdown would probably be watchable. But, nonetheless, it’s still a mess and the incoherence of the plot really does get on one’s nerves, despite the best efforts of Lyle Talbot. Talbot can’t sell the viewer on Mesa of Lost Women. Maybe he would have had better luck with Ella McCay.
Through the Shattered Lens 