Spider women, Angelo Rossitto, Dolores Fuller, and Uncle Fester: add them together with random disregard for audience sanity and whadda you got? The Mesa of Lost Women! A film by the amazing Ron Ormond, whose tentacles, the Astounding B-Monster notes: "tap into everything from 'adult' sex-dramas, like Please Don't Touch Me, to a string of Lash LaRue westerns released by PRC in the late forties." I've seen Mesa millions of times and don't remember a single thing about it, except that it rocks, like the flat-topped tower of stone from which it gets its name. I forget the writer, but someone wrote of the Rolling Stones' 1972 album, Exile on Main Street: "It kicks ass though it can barely stand." Mesa of the Lost Women is like that: It can't walk, though it has eight legs. It's got no bite, yet oozes tasty venom.
The Image DVD is apparently sourced from the film's only surviving source print, laden with aesthetically pleasing emulsion damage, jarring "missing scene" scotch tape splices, jumps and scratches at a level of near Brakhage-style abstraction. Am I giving too much credit to a film with a score consisting of the same few seconds of Spanish guitar and dissonant piano chords, looped over and over? That crazy score is just perfect, for it mirrors the film, with the piano parts seemingly recorded in a different era and spliced in with enough random atonal frisson to make even John Cage wince in agony. The "music" is so pervasive, so repetitive, and so grating, it becomes good enough that Ed Wood re-used it for Jail Bait. Is Mesa bad-brilliant or just bad? Mesa of Lost Women needs no justification! C'est un meisterwerke!
The story begins with a couple found wandering in the scorching El Muerte desert. A "we dont need no stinkin' badges"-style Mexican brings them into police headquarters where they relate a tragic saga that begins, oddly enough, with the arrival of Dr. Leland (Hammon Stevens)--alone and unwitnessed by said couple--at the mesa of the mysterious Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan). Now right there you're in heaven not just because Coogan was in The Addams Family, but because he was the "H" dealer in High School Confidential.
Years or days later, Hammon escapes the Mexican insane asylum he's been residing at, and gets a very clean drink at a local cantina where a spider woman named Tarantella (Tandra Quinn) does the "Tarantella" for our besmitten heroes. Leland shoots her, interrupting her performance and leaving the audience aghast --though no one makes a move to help her, and she dies lonely and forlorn while actors stand around and the director presumably sways drunken in a corner. Why is he Leland hostile to black-haired beauties with gigantic finger nails? Was he mad that the film, for a few brief minutes, was actually genuinely fascinating, thanks to Aranya's undulations? What's this weird guy's deal? Michael Weldon calls him "a lobotomized scientist doing a weird Elmer Fudd impersonation." It's not really a Fudd impersonation, but having read and re-read the review many times as a kid before actually seeing the film it's tough to think of Leland any other way. Fudd/Leland also becomes the dispassionate existential core of the film, enunciating his words in such a bizarre way the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks would probably take one look at him and shrug. One mis-accented Leland quote which always pops into my head at odd moments, is: "Now we will all fly!" He says this while hijacking Allan Nixon's plane, which comes replete with bored millionaire, trophy wife, Asian houseboy, and sanitarium worker George (George Barrows), who runs around making sure no one tries to take the gun from "dangerous maniac" Leland even though they have plenty of easy opportunities.
While in the air, Leland's eerily vacant grin never waivers as he looks at the clouds and notes "So beautiful... so close to heav... en." Once crash landed on the mesa, the gang all have a stiff drink (which when you're drinking alone while watching is a great cheery moment), then they wait around by the fire, exploring strange screams in the darkness one at a time so they can get killed off by mismatched cutaway shots of leering dwarfs, a giant leaping tarantula, and blank-eyed beauties culled from the dustiest of Hollywood casting couches. Each time they return to the fire and drink some more. Each time it is a great cheery moment to be drunk and watching this alone at five AM. The dwindling survivors wish they had some food, and Leland seems to think he's still at the hospital with a tray of dinner due to arrive any time soon:
"George will bring it. (wearily)
He always does."
One of the finger-nailed beauties on the mesa is allegedly Ed Wood girl Dolores Fuller though I can never find her! George Barrows is played by the same heroic guy who trudged all over Bronson canyon in a weighty gorilla suit and diving helmet for Robot Monster, made the same year! Lyle Talbot is even on hand as the doctor who tends the surviving couple and narrates. See it at least four times in one evening for proper effect, alternating with Spider Baby and Dr. Strangelove. Now we will all fly!
Read my NIGHT OF THE GHOULS piece on Bright Lights
and the Cinema Styles Ed Wood roster here
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