Les Créatures du docteur Aranya

I'm not usually an all-caps person, but the incessant guitar strumming will drive you mad long before you realize how awful the movie is otherwise. It's almost like an endurance test!

This is one of the zeniths of bad films. We often hear about movies that are so bad they will make you laugh. This film is just one of those films. It's awful! A doctor has hidden himself away in the interior of Mexico on some huge mesa...way up in the sky that can only be reached by plane. His name is Dr. Aranya(that's spider in Spanish). Jackie Coogan, later to be rolly poly Uncle Fester, plays Dr. Aranya. Coogan looks and acts like a madman with his huge black mole and his incessant barking of orders. His performance is achingly bad. But soon he is supported by a horde of very bad performers. It seems that Dr. Aranya makes spiders into humans. The serum he uses only works well on girls and many of his female tarantulas turn into scantily clad females with big bosoms while the male spiders turn into hunchbacked, ugly midgets. Hmmm. Anyway, Aranya has a quarrel with a fellow doctor who has been hypnotized somehow, placed in a mental institution, and later found in a bar where he takes a group of five people with him in a plane that suspiciously lands on the mesa of the lost women. The actors start to die and we see midgets(one of which is famed Angelo Rossitto!) and more scantily clad women(one of which is Delores Fuller no less!) jump in and out of the light of the fire or a flashlight. The acting is just sooo bad and will have you laughing in no time. Harmon Steven plays Dr. Masterson, the fella who is hypnotized. He has an expression on his face that looks so corny and his dialogue made me wince with glee. The film ends as it begins with the two survivors telling the tale of how they escaped. The plot is like a bad serial from the forties. Easily the most annoying aspect of the film is the musical score of a guitar that plays almost throughout the whole film. It is repetitive and loud. I actually had trouble hearing what the characters were saying because that music would not stop. It had my hairs(what few I have left)on edge! The film even has a narration by Lyle Talbot of Ed Wood fame in the beginning. This is one of the most fun bad films I have ever seen. The acting, the direction, the script had me rolling with laughter. I don't know if anyone else caught it, but the name of the mental hospital was Muerto Hospital...Death Hospital. One major plus performance-wise is the sight of Tandra Quinn. She is breathtaking as she does her spider dance and exudes sex appeal. If you want to watch a real, real bad movie that will make you laugh...watch Mesa of the Lost Women. For my money it tops even Plan Nine From Outer Space as a truly inept in every fiber of its being film.

I guess this one must be an acquired taste (judging by the other reviews). Of COURSE it's awful - that's what makes this 1953 film so good! Tandra Quinn's eerie and erotic 'Tarantula Dance' in the cantina scene alone is worth the price of admission. The voice-over narration is also great, not to mention such trenchant dialogue as "And they threw her down, and her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and he trod her underfoot"! If you enjoy the cinematic misfires of Edward D. Wood ('Plan 9 From Outer Space', etc.), you'll love this one! (trivia tidbit: Ed Wood's 'Jail Bait' uses the same soundtrack/score)

One of the best of the so-bad-it's-beautiful movies. MESA OF LOST WOMEN tells the story of a mad scientist (Jackie Coogan with a wart the size of a Roosevelt dime!) who creates beautiful dancing girls out of spiders. (most likely to help out the struggling Rockette industry!) I absolutely loved the scene with the mad doc's victim, a scientist driven insane by a spider-woman encounter. He goes around bars, quoting something close to the Bible, in a silly Elmer Fudd voice.

What I really loved about this movie was Tandra Quinn, as Tarantella, the mad doc's best spider to mucha-cha creation. She's something like a brunette Jayne Mansfield with a little bit of Vampirella thrown in. Ms. Quinn, you made film history with your really strange spider dance.

The amazing, and as yet unmentioned, stroke of genius about this film is that it invents a totally new and, as far as I know, never again used narrative device: best described as "Someone Else's Flashback"

At the opening of the movie a man and a woman staggering across the Mexican desert are rescued from certain death by handsome hunk Frank the surveyor - thus setting him up as the hero but, as the couple start to recover in the oil exploration company's base, he goes back to work and he's never seen again - so he isn't.

As he recovers the man starts to tell his story - a strange garbled tale of crashed aeroplanes, monstrous Spider women and a man called "Dr. Aranya" - the camera focuses in on Pepe, the Mexican driver who, on the surface, looks like he's going to be the funny foreigner comic relief of the flick but doesn't appear again after this opening scene - so isn't.

As the camera dwells on Pepe listening to this tale there is a fade to a wide shot of the desert and a car driving towards the camera. The narrator says something to the effect of - "Yes it's an interesting tale isn't it Pepe? You could tell them more about this mesa and the strange things your people tell about it couldn't you? But this isn't where the story starts, a month before, doctor Leland Masterson..." and we're into the 'story' at last.

The whole film is then played out as a flashback - but whose? It starts before the pilot has arrived on the scene so it can't be his flashback. Because of the focus on Pepe and the fade it looks like it should be Pepe's but he wasn't there! So it must be the Narrator's. If it was the Narrator's flashback why go to all the trouble of setting up at least two false starts to the film?

You are so busy pondering the meaning of this multi-layered, layers within layers, Like an Onion!, Russian Doll of an opening that it takes some time before the simple truth reveals itself. Sheer unmitigated incompetence! This movie is so bloody awful and lacks any structure whatsoever... It's hilarious. I especially love the bit where after surviving the air crash they traipse off into the jungle to rescue George all holding hands like school children crossing the road. Into the darkness they creep - on and on and on and on till they reach the studio wall (and George's body) then they turn around and all creep back again on and on and onzzzzzzzzzzz. Not one second of shot footage was wasted. It's totally surreal. The best boring, zen-like, creeping through the jungle holding hands scene in the history of the movies.

Other highlights include the huge spider leg coming out from behind the screen in Dr Aranya's lab. What was that spider doing behind the screen? Getting dressed? - another movie first! a modest giant mutant spider!

This film also contains a candidate for the worst excuse for sending someone off to their certain death ever - "Where is the comb I gave you?" asks the rich man of his wife. "It is a family heirloom! Wu, take the only flashlight we have and leave us huddling in the dark around this pathetic fire and go into that monster infested jungle and find it!" (Wu it should be explained is Chinese and a bit creepy therefore falls into the "People who are't going to make it to the end of the movie" category. If he had been a Chinese happy scared-cat cook he might have made it).

So Terrible it's worth watching.