Great Film overall

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

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

Mesa of Lost Women follows a scientist who creates spiders and dwarfs at his secret lab on Zarpa Mesa in Mexico. He also plans on injecting women with spider venom to potentially turn them into female super spiders to fulfill his plan of world domination.The pacing is dreadful. It's so bad that it makes a 68-minute film feel like 3 hours or an eternity for that matter.Not to mention this has quite possibly the worst soundtrack in film history. It repeats the same flamenco guitar music throughout most of the film and combined with the terrible pacing it's just horrible.Well at least it's not as bad as Manos but it's close... very close!

Like other movies, old B movies can still stand out for one reason or another. Maybe there are some unique special effects. Maybe the story is actually rather engaging. Or maybe everything that could go wrong did, and the movie was still released.This movie seems to fall into the latter category. As I watched it, I thought it seemed as though ideas were thought up and squeezed in somehow to make themselves fit and to justify other parts of the movie. It turns out I was right. If the trivia listed on IMDb is correct, the original concept was abandoned and the original movie had footage added to give us what we have now. A meaningless, senseless, illogical rambler of a movie.As the narrator sets the stage, we're introduced to a some individuals who wind up becoming an unlikely group. It's hard to explain exactly how they come together only because the pieces don't quite fit. Let's just say it was a matter of convenience. A short plane trip turns into a scary night on the mesa, made scarier by dwarfs and women who seem to only communicate with glances. It's downright peculiar that not a single one of them ever spoke. Throw in a trip into the forest on the mesa and a finale in the doctors laboratory, and you have about an hour or so that you'll never get back.In short, if you need something on in the background as white noise, this would do nicely. If you want a sensible, well assembled movie, move on. This ain't it.

There is only one reason to watch this really bad film: hunchbacked dwarf John George. George worked in films from the late 'teens to the early 1960s. He had some nice roles in silents but his heavy accent limited him in sound. He usually played news vendors and the like. As such he appeared in many big films: Picture of Dorian Gray, Bride of Frankenstein, The Killing, A Streetcar Named Desire, Around the World in Eighty Days and Ocean's Eleven. In each of these his appearance can be measured in seconds. It's a treat then to see him in Mesa of Lost Women where he gets a number of glowering close-ups. Once you've noticed him you'll see him everywhere: Mark of the Vampire, The Black Room, Tower of London, The Black Cat, Man of a Thousand Faces and so on. Keep looking for him but look fast!

Maybe it's a stretch, but in trying to find something worthwhile in what is otherwise a film disaster, I'll go with the opening narration. Bear with me here.In VO, the narrator says in an angry tone: "...the monstrous assurance of this race of puny bipeds with overblown egos, the creature who calls himself man; he believes he owns the earth, and every living thing on it exists only for his benefit. Yet, how foolish he is". Not bad as an environmental statement, and quite extraordinary for the 1950s.That said, "Mesa Of Lost Women" is pretty awful. The script's opening Act is terribly garbled. Most of the story is one long flashback, but it's an open question as to whose flashback is being recalled. We're told the mesa is supremely isolated, yet the mad scientist still manages to have electricity in his lab. And where does he get his food supply? Or maybe he and his malevolent creatures don't need food.Then, as the innocent survivors from the plane crash seek out a lost teammate, there's that little let's-all-hold-hands-in-the-dark sequence that consumes almost ten percent of the film's entire runtime.The film's direction is laughable. Even a high school thespian probably could spot directorial mistakes, including a spider that makes its appearance from behind a dressing curtain. Shy spider? And Masterson, with that laughably evil smile, is a hoot.Production values are cheap looking. Sound quality is bad. There is no wide-angle perspective in outdoor scenes on the mesa, so I think we have to assume these "outdoor" close-up shots were actually filmed in some studio, with fake trees and rocks. Conveniently, these scenes take place at night, which is helpful, given budget constraints.But despite a poorly written script and other cinematic transgressions, the worst element for me was that horrible score. Consisting of guitars, the "music" starts out loud and grating, and keeps coming back loud and grating, over and over and over. Was this the work of those giant "hexapods", in an attempt to torture the film's viewers? Surely no human would foist on us those "fingernails against chalkboard" sounds.I still think there are other 1950s films that are worse than this one. But "Mesa Of Lost Women" certainly is a cinematic train wreck, its opening environmental message notwithstanding.