Mesa of Lost Women (1953)

How Uncle Fester created a race of busty spiders.

Mesa of Lost Women (1953)
Director Ron Ormond
Written by Herbert Tevos

The story of a homicidal simpleton who saves the world from evil Jazzercize instructors, Mesa of Lost Women features a more stellar cast of has-beens and never-weres than usual. Headlined by Jackie Coogan, the supporting players include George Barrows, who played “Ro-Man the Ro-Man” in Robot Monster, Dolores Fuller, who played Ed Wood’s angora donor in Glen or Glenda? and “Introducing Tanda Quinn,” who observes an old Hollywood tradition by immediately returning to the obscurity from which she was introduced, never to be heard from again.

Our movie begins in the “Muerto Desert”—which narrator Lyle Talbot, another Ed Wood alumnus, calls the “MOO-ee-AIR-toe” desert, setting an unfortunate precedent for the rest of the cast. We’ve caught Lyle on a bad day, and he spends the first ten minutes of the film sneering at the audience because we’re not nearly as fecund as spiders. “In the continuing war for survival between Man and the hexapods,” Lyle says with undisguised contempt, “only an utter fool would bet against the insects.” Hmmm. I was about to take some of that action when it dawned on me that Lyle was laying it on pretty thick, and might have bribed the insects to throw the fight.

Meanwhile, two ragged figures are seen wandering the desert: Captain Grant Chincleft and Sharon Stone. On the verge of collapse, they are rescued by sombrero supermodel Pepe, who notes their near-fatal state of exposure and takes them to an oil company office for first aid, since their HMO won’t pay for a hospital visit.

Once he regains consciousness, Grant reveals that they were prisoners of “Dr. Aranya.”

“Dr. Aranya!” Pepe exclaims. “Ay caramba!”

Captain Chincleft starts to recount the tale, and the camera slowly zooms in as we prepare for a flashback. Then Lyle barges back in and sneers, “That’s quite a story he’s telling. Isn’t it, Pepe?” Pepe looks pensive, and the screen goes fuzzy as he and Captain Chincleft race to flash back first. They’re neck and neck, until Lyle suddenly announces, “Actually, it all really started over a year ago.” And then he flashes back...

Phil Harris is dropped off in the middle of the desert by Vampira, and greeted by Bozo the dwarf. Inside the Mesa, Dr. Aranya (Uncle Fester) introduces Phil to Tanda, who’s playing a half-human/half-tarantula with really big fun bags. He mentions in passing that he wants to use his homo-hexapod hybrids to rule the world, then tries to freak out Phil by pulling back a curtain and showing him a giant tarantula puppet wearing a diaper.

Phil objects to Uncle Fester tampering with nature. Fester takes a cue from Lyle, and contemptuously mispronounces the word “gibberish.” Tanda shoots up Phil with a speedball, which causes him to montage badly, and a spinning headline informs us that Phil has been confined to the MOO-ee-AIR-toe State Hospital for the Criminally Dull. But he’s escaped!

Cut to a coffeehouse full of Mexican beatniks. Phil Harris appears, and now we see what the newspaper didn’t say: That the injection produced a hideous metamorphosis, causing Phil to dress like W. Averell Harriman and talk like Wimpy from the old “Popeye” cartoons. Tanda, who still hasn’t had a line, is sitting at a corner table, smoking a cigarette and waiting for someone to come into her parlor.

Suddenly, Sharon Stone arrives, accompanied by Mr. Mooney. After some snappy patter stolen from other movies (Sharon looks around and says, “What a dump.” Really. She does), we get to the boring exposition: It seems that Sharon and Mr. Mooney were en route to be married in Mexico when their plane broke down.

Wimpy comes over to compliment Sharon on her Bette Davis impression and ask if she’d do that leg-crossing thing, but he’s interrupted by Tanda, who has succumbed to the tarantula’s deeply ingrained instinct to perform modern dance. She proceeds to wow the crowd with her act, which consists of standing barefoot on peanut shells while cupping her left breast, then reaching up to massage a crick in her neck.

Wimpy pans Tanda’s performance by pulling a gun and putting a bullet in her bullet bra. Then Wimpy hijacks Mr. Mooney’s plane and demands to be taken to Havana, which is a pretty bad movie, but still not as crappy as this one. Captain Chincleft is afraid to take off, because he just finished putting the plane together and the glue isn’t dry. But Wimpy insists, and the whole gang takes to the sky in Mr. Mooney’s Cox Mustang. Within seconds the control string gets tangled up in some telephone wires, and they crash-land atop the Mesa of Lost Women. Or onto a Ping-Pong table trimmed with sphagnum moss. You make the call.

Now the action really heats up. Wimpy’s male nurse Ro-Man wanders into the jungle and is mauled to death by a giant pipe cleaner¹. Captain Chincleft grabs the flare gun and tries to summon help by firing a slide whistle into the air, then we get to watch the opening credits of Love, American Style. He salvages a bottle of brandy and passes it between Sharon Stone and Mr. Mooney. Then he turns to Wimpy and says, “What about you?” The music reaches a sudden, ominous crescendo, and Wimpy’s response is symbolized by a cutaway to Uncle Fester, who is glumly contemplating urine specimens.

Wimpy and Mr. Mooney fall asleep. Sharon Stone and Captain Chincleft share a tender moment, as they quietly confess their deepest desires to one another. Sharon’s dream is to take Mr. Mooney for everything he’s worth, while the Captain wants a woman who is “real,” having tired of the inflatable kind.

Mr. Mooney obligingly runs off and gets killed by the giant tarantula puppet, which is larger and more fearsome-looking now that it has outgrown diapers and graduated to pull-ups. Meanwhile, Captain Chincleft, Sharon Stone, and Wimpy are captured by the Bangles.

Back in the lab, Uncle Fester gives Wimpy another speedball, which transforms him back into Phil Harris. Oh, and it turns out that Tanda was only mostly dead, and now feels well enough to have a Roller Derby-style cat-fight with Sharon. Phil takes advantage of the confusion, and makes a bomb by dropping a piece of dry ice into a glass of Country Time Lemonade. He tells Chincleft and Sharon to leave, because “You belong living. We belong deaaaaaad.” Then he detonates his lemonade, starting a fire that kills Fester, Tanda, Bozo the dwarf, the Bangles, and for some unexplained reason, Sigmund the Sea Monster.

Now we’re back at the oil company office, where Captain Chincleft is wrapping up his recitation. Which finally answers the biggest question posed by the film: Exactly whose flashback were we watching, anyway? Meanwhile, Pepe is sitting beside Sharon Stone’s cot, telling her his story, and asking if she’d do that leg-crossing thing. Then Lyle returns once more to tell us that we’re all scum, and that he scorns our infertility; but I think it’s just sour grapes, because nobody wanted to watch his flashback.

Even though Dr. Aranya’s scheme of genetically splicing a tarantula with Martha Graham didn’t really pan out, he was still a visionary, being among the first to join the great postwar migration of mad scientists from the cities to the suburbs. But unlike so many of his colleagues who were content to conquer the world from a three-bedroom rambler in Levittown, Fester went even further, pioneering the use of topographical features as secret lairs, a trend that reached its zenith with the headquarters-cum-spaceship-hanger-in-a-volcano in You Only Live Twice. Unfortunately, Uncle Fester was on a budget, and even with double coupons and a loan from his brother-in-law, he could only afford a two-room mesa. Conditions were cramped (the giant spider didn’t have a room of his own, just an alcove, despite the fact that he had begun wearing Huggies training pants and was becoming more body conscious) and the plumbing and wiring were below code, with the result that the blaze touched off by Wimpy resulted in a death toll unmatched since the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The subsequent public outrage spurred legislation requiring all secret laboratories to install smoke detectors and sprinklers; and many lives were saved as a result, although the pace of certain movies has suffered, since super villains are periodically required to interrupt their lasering of Washington D.C. or their lowering of James Bond into a pool of piranha in order to conduct a fire drill.

1. Point of parliamentary privilege here or whatever, but Wimpy broke out of the mental hospital with his nurse? I’m telling you guys, that’s a Lifetime movie waiting to happen. It just needs a title. Something like… Mother, May I Sleep with Danger and Then Administer His Morning Enema? Eh, we’ll workshop it.