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 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!
No comments:
Post a Comment