Thanks for the memories!

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Like another reviewer said, this movie is bad, but still worth making fun of. The premise actually is pretty good: mad scientist mutates crawly things in an underground lab in the Mexican desert. Mixing hot babes with dwarves is weird; but given the ersatz-logic of the evil scientist's experiments, it makes just a bit of sense. The device of dying people wandering in the desert isn't a bad idea either; it sets up an expectation that they'll have a tale to tell.Instead the obnoxious narrator tells us what we can easily see, or subsequently hear from the surviving pilot. And, as we eventually discover, the actual science fiction here is a sort of parallel consciousness allowing one guy to know what two or three have experienced individually. Maybe the real nemesis is the folk music that bites into half of the scenes. The cantina scene took on a life of its own. Dancing that's somehow both erotic and robotic, combined with the lobotomized Dr. Masterson terrorizing the place, is too cruel a spectacle for the viewer to endure for very long.But then we not only get a change of scene, we're literally fly into a different sort of movie. The pilot becomes the lead, as the kidnapped gang has to camp out, conveniently for the plot, on the dreaded mesa. The plane crash itself was fairly well done. But the expendable Asian servant is sent to his doom on a stupid errand. "There is a day to be born, and a day to die" he stoically remarks. Fortunately, the doctor recovers his senses in time to destroy the nasty nut scientist and his lab. But then we end up with the narrator again. Yes, we know that the beanbag spiders are still out in the desert, so don't tell us...What I expect in a monster movie is something menacing. Even a guy in a rubber suit, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, or James Arness's otherworldly Frankenstein-monster from The Thing, can sustain suspension of disbelief with their palpable terror. But Mesa of Lost Women doesn't give us anything extraordinary, except the pleasure of its unintended mash-ups.

MESA OF LOST WOMEN is a legendarily bad B-movie that would make Ed Wood proud. It's a tacky science fiction epic about a mad scientist and his sinister plan for world domination which involves injecting a bevy of women with spider venom in order to turn them into an army of femme fatales. Of course it's up to the good guys to thwart his nefarious plans and restore peace and order to the world.While the plot sounds fantastic, in reality MESA OF LOST WOMEN is pretty disappointing. It raises a few laughs here and there but overall the effect is subdued. One of the reasons for this is the lack of budget which means there are hardly any special effects to enjoy, just endless talk and back-and-forth stuff. Some evil dwarfs are the best the film has to offer. Jackie Coogan has fun in his mad scientist role but this is an example of so-bad-it's-average rather than so-bad-it's-good entertainment.

When I first picked this movie I thought the title was MENSA of Lost Women. I thought it was about a group of female scientists and economists who get misdirected on the way to the Nobel Prize ceremony. Boy was I wrong!!!Ha-ha, OK now that I've gotten that out of my system let me review the movie for you. No matter what anyone says, especially the narrator of this film, this movie is primarily about titillation, 1950's style. All the talk about man playing God, or thrills and chills is secondary. The film features scantily clad women who look like they do things, bad things (You know what I mean), and plenty of them. Everything else is built around that. So at the same time you have June Allison and Doris Day warbling around about being good girls, you've got Tarantella here doing her infamous wanton Spider Dance. Does that tell us anything about the 50s? I dunno I'm too lazy to think about it. Anyhow there's this mad scientist (Union Local 757) in the Mexican desert who is injecting human pituitary juice into spiders and turning them into spider/human hybrids. At first you might wonder why it would even occur to anyone to do this, but think about it. The Prof. has an army of indestructible spider-babes who not only obey his every command but who are also probably pretty good at keeping the fly and mosquito population down around the Mesa. It really doesn't make sense NOT to create an army of exotic female spider/human hybrids. A varied group of travelers accidentally runs across the mad scientist, and for dramatic purposes conflict ensues. The doc wants to kill some of them and use the others for experimentation. Now these travelers are some of the most knuckle-headed and unlikable characters ever to trudge across the screen in a z grade movie, yet they still manage to escape from the clutches of a brilliant scientist and his enclave of deadly spider woman, who were bred with the predatory instincts of killer spiders. The highlight of this paean to incompetence is the infamous Spider Dance, performed by the Head Spider Woman, Tarantella, in a little saloon referred to by one of the characters as "a dump!" The actress who plays Tarantella, Tandra Quinn, is a sexy woman and does her best to elicit that angry, lustful yet detached attitude that you know a spider-woman hybrid would have. I'm sure she was trying to deliver an expression that the director was sure a female spider would show if you could see her tiny little face, except with fewer eyes and fangs. Instead of a look of wanton ferocity, Tarantella looked more ticked off, like you just stole her parking space at the mall while she was coming down off a latte bender. The Spider Dance was supposed to be dangerously alluring, which I suppose it would be if you managed to avoid throwing up from the motion sickness it causes. Still, she's an attractive woman and one of the best things about this movie.The real star of the show here though, is the massive ineptitude displayed by everyone involved. You'd almost think this film was produced by a Congressional Committee it's done so poorly. And that's what makes it so watchable. It's just so utterly terrible that you can't take your eyes away. You'll actually marvel at the awkward execution of it all. This movie isn't amateurish. It's the work of professional bunglers.The bottom line is that this is a classic b movie of the "so bad it's good" stable.

Man, what a piece of work this is. Written by jaded monkeys hammered on bad tequila, apparently directed by a 14 year old who saw a Hammer film once, and edited with a weed-whacker, this is the kind of movie you think of when you think of Grade Z, bottom-of-the-barrel sci-fi from the "Bad Old Days" of drive-in triple features and Saturday night "Creature Feature" shows.Even for sympathetic and easy-to-entertain bad movie fans,it's hard to get a handle on the screenplay. Narrated by Lyle Talbot in his most portentous and hammy voice stylings, the story line makes no sense - it's told as a flashback, but the whose flashback is it supposed to be? The movie doesn't seem to know, and we never find out. There's no coherent,logical answer to that question...nor anything else in the screenplay. I think the endless flamenco guitar loop on the soundtrack is meant to distract the audience from this, or at least fill in some of the dead space in the acting and the blocking and the dialog. Even for such a lame premise, the movie has a bone-thin plot that requires endless padding and extra footage - apparently from another movie - that doesn't really jibe or blend with the footage about Coogan and the party of adventurers who get stranded on his Mesa.Meanwhile, poor Jackie Coogan tries to salvage his dignity while playing a mad scientist who unleashes the forces of darkness on the party of adventurers/kidnappees, only to have everything go wrong in, what else, a lab fire. I added two extra stars to the score out of sheer pity for him.This isn't actually the worst movie I've ever seen, since a few scenes would have actually have worked if the tempo was snappier,and the basic premise of the screenplay holds some interest in spite of its hamhanded execution. Also of interest because it makes the work of Ed Wood Jr. look good by comparison, and I didn't think that was possible.