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Classification: Bad Originally Published: Movie Poop Shoot, 6/25/03 |
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THE MESA OF LOST WOMEN sounds exotic to me. It should be filled with sexy, tantalizing images of women running around going “I’m lost! I’m lost! And what the hell is a mesa?” But I guess that’s my own perverse fantasy because the actual MESA OF LOST WOMEN has few women in it, lost or otherwise; mostly, it’s a giant spider movie, and a rather crude, boring one at that. There are bad movies and then there are excruciating ones. And to call THE MESA OF LOST WOMEN excruciating is almost too huge an understatement to calculate. I almost feel like a new word needs to be created to express how utterly worthless it is. I mean it is just "excrushitating." Oooh, I like the sound of that.
In The Muerto Desert a.k.a. “The Desert...of DEATH!” a disheveled man and woman wander aimlessly while a disembodied voice (provided by Lyle Talbot) talks about how stupid they are, as if the fact that they’re wandering the desert without water would make us wonder “Gee, they seem brainy - what’s their secret?” They are rescued and brought to an oil company office where the dopey male of the group, Grant, recounts their horrific ordeal. Grant is played by Robert Knapp in the most generic way possible - his character might as well be called Brown H. Mann, with the H. standing for “Haired.” Anywho, Grant starts to explain how he wound up there when that Voice returns to explain that, no, Grant does not have the whole story, and proceeds to supersede that narration and give his own. So, in essence, the entire framestory is worthless. But it pads out a 70-minute movie by a good six or seven minutes, so we look the other way. The “real” story takes places months earlier, when a Dr. Masterson (Harmon Stevens) visits a correspondence, Dr. Arana (Jackie Coogan) who lives in the vaguely titled Desert of Death. Arana (with that little squiggly line above the n which I can’t seem to replicate on my word processor) means “spider” in Spanish, so wouldn’t you know it, the guy takes brain juice from spiders and sticks it in women and vice versa. The results make the spiders grow rather large, and the women into normal-sized mutes who enjoy showing off their legs. This drives Dr. Masterson mad, and a year later, he escapes from a mental institution, purchases a gun (hooray for laws that allow escaped mental patients to purchase firearms!), hijacks a plane that includes Grant and an assortment of other losers, which inevitably crashes in the mesa of lost women with no women and large spiders which are only seen as a single fake giant leg which shows up in the corner of the screen whenever the crew could cobble together enough people to lift it and wave it around. The dialogue ranges from the innocuous to the unintentionally silly (“Dr. Arana? Aye caramba!”) and the score consists of a few bars of flamenco guitar that is repeated over and over in every single scene regardless of its tone. Accordingly, it pops up just as frequently in love scene as it does touching scenes of spider disembowelment. To quote MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, the music’s terrible, but at least it drowns out the dialogue. According to my calculations, there are roughly 100,800 frames of film in THE MESA OF LOST WOMEN, and not a single interesting one in the lot of them. What are the odds that you could create something of that size without at least one being good? I’ve seen movies that were more offensively bad, that upset my concept of right and wrong more, but few that bored me so completely in such a short amount of screentime. In my notes from the picture, which usually include lines of dialogue I want to quote, important plot points, or contributions from the crew, there is actually a line that reads simply “Boooooooring.” That sums it up pretty well. |