Watch Mesa of Lost Women For Free

Simply Perfect

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I've got a suggestion for the CIA. Are you having trouble breaking down terrorist suspects at Guantanamo? Then, just make them watch this hour of movie loony tunes, and I guarantee they'll confess to anything. If the surreal story doesn't get them, that crazed guitar strumming will. I still can't figure out how anyone outside an institution can plunk the same note over and over and over. At one point, the movie's mad scientist insists "… their nerves will soon break". Now I know he meant the audience, not the movie.The cast is an all-star line-up of bad movie vets— especially, Talbot, Fuller, and Nixon. And I love the way Knapp keeps looking skyward as he recites his dreadful lines. It's like he's expecting the wrath of god at any moment. And what's with dancer Tarentella whose horizontal squirming turns her into a human floor mop, even if she does look like Liz Taylor's older sister. However, for sheer weirdness, nothing beats Dr. Masterson. He just stands there grinning idiotically the whole time. It's like giving Mr. Rogers a gun to make nice with his neighborhood. Happily, it's an easy payday for Hollywood's plucky dwarf colony. All they have to do is leer into the camera, laughing at us I guess for maybe paying actual money to see this mess.Still, watching this hour of sheer goofiness is a lot more perverse fun than 90% of old Hollywood's prestige productions. You know, the kind with Liz and Dick that are faster acting than a load of Sominex. No chance of that here as we wait for the next slice of serious silliness. Here's a big load of Golden Turkeys to Tevos and Ormond for a truly inspired bad movie.

Anyone expecting a film Terrence Malick or Mike Figgis might make has stumbled over the wrong toadstool. Hijacked and mutated by Ron Ormond, the crazy man's Kubrick, this is 68 minutes of just plain wrong. Cult movie precious dialog reciters have a goldmine here. This amalgam of beautiful, dangerous women, evil dwarfs, unnerving soundtrack music, bizarre images and "huh?" dialog are too reminiscent of David Lynch to be a coincidence. Just the scenes with Tandra Quinn as "Tarantella" are enough to make this a must see, especially the extended Mexican cantina scene where "Tarantella" dances "The Tarantella." Also notable are Jackie Coogan and Harmon Stevens who play, respectively, a mad scientist and a scientist who's been driven mad. Stevens plays his character tweaked and bug-eyed, like W.C. Fields traded booze for methamphetamine.

In what was supposed to pass for a suspenseful scene in Mesa Of Lost Women the principal characters are seen precariously edging along a narrow ledge to get past a pit that looks like they could have easily walked around it on the other side. The no name actors playing these parts need not have worried about falling into the pit. They were already at the bottom of the pit when they signed up to appear in this excruciatingly awful movie. Awful script, terrible sets, irritating score, laughable special effects. You name it, this movie had it at its worst.Mesa of Lost Women is not the worst movie I have ever watched all the way to its wretched end. But close (see my review for This Is Not A Test). The actors for all their cosmic distances from stardom turned in fairly competent performances, considering what bad lines they had to say, and that in a super cheapo like this they probably didn't get more than twenty seconds per scene to rehearse. Tandra Quinn, the sultry, buxom lass featured on the DVD jacket, does as good a job of showing off her hot body as was allowed in 1953, but she never speaks. Probably just as well considering the hammy facial expressions she displayed. This was apparently her first movie, since the credits list her as "Indroducing Tandra Quinn." Being introduced in a movie of this quality would be like a débutante having her coming out party in the garage of a tire shop. Though no threat to Rita Hayworth, Tandra's dance scene fairly early on is the high point -- or I should say the least low point -- of this travesty of a movie.I've always wondered why anyone would want to produce a picture as bad as Mesa of Lost Women. But some people did. If you must know who the guilty parties were, look at IMDb "full cast and crew" section. I don't have the heart to blacken their names, good or bad, by revealing them here. Jackie Coogan and the rest of the actors should likewise be ashamed to admit they ever appeared in a dud as bad as this one. Come to think of it -- what am I doing reviewing it, when I should be ashamed to admit I have watched it? Ugh!

Maybe it's a stretch, but in trying to find something worthwhile in what is otherwise a film disaster, I'll go with the opening narration. Bear with me here.In VO, the narrator says in an angry tone: "...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". Not bad as an environmental statement, and quite extraordinary for the 1950s.That said, "Mesa Of Lost Women" is pretty awful. The script's opening Act is terribly garbled. Most of the story is one long flashback, but it's an open question as to whose flashback is being recalled. We're told the mesa is supremely isolated, yet the mad scientist still manages to have electricity in his lab. And where does he get his food supply? Or maybe he and his malevolent creatures don't need food.Then, as the innocent survivors from the plane crash seek out a lost teammate, there's that little let's-all-hold-hands-in-the-dark sequence that consumes almost ten percent of the film's entire runtime.The film's direction is laughable. Even a high school thespian probably could spot directorial mistakes, including a spider that makes its appearance from behind a dressing curtain. Shy spider? And Masterson, with that laughably evil smile, is a hoot.Production values are cheap looking. Sound quality is bad. There is no wide-angle perspective in outdoor scenes on the mesa, so I think we have to assume these "outdoor" close-up shots were actually filmed in some studio, with fake trees and rocks. Conveniently, these scenes take place at night, which is helpful, given budget constraints.But despite a poorly written script and other cinematic transgressions, the worst element for me was that horrible score. Consisting of guitars, the "music" starts out loud and grating, and keeps coming back loud and grating, over and over and over. Was this the work of those giant "hexapods", in an attempt to torture the film's viewers? Surely no human would foist on us those "fingernails against chalkboard" sounds.I still think there are other 1950s films that are worse than this one. But "Mesa Of Lost Women" certainly is a cinematic train wreck, its opening environmental message notwithstanding.