Mesa of Lost Women (1953) is an odd film that incorporates a mad scientist into a new setting: a Southwest desert that may broach other environmental issues, including water rights and oil exploitation but falls short. To underpin these possible themes, the film opens on a couple seemingly lost in a large Mexican desert. An oil surveyor watches them with binoculars and declares that in this desert of death, “produced by roasting the human eye” they will not be living things for long. The desert will convert them into dead things. They are taken to the AmerMexico Hospital. The man wakes up in the oil company office and tells them to blow them up before they scatter without explaining what “they” are. Firebombs are the only things that scare them, he claims as he mutters about super monsters or bugs as big as we are and bite, and claims they come from an underground lab where Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan) does something to their glands. Only the Mexican assistant Pepe (Chris Pin-Martin) believes him when he talks about the misshapen women that do not die.
The film flashes back a year before to fill in the gaps. Women and a male assistant are in an underground lab. Another scientist, Dr. Masterson (Harmon Stevens) is visiting Dr. Aranya, who is studying the arterial lobe of the pituitary gland and producing “things” through experimental transplants. The women in the lab have braided hair, suggesting a change, and another woman is lying on a lab table, presumably ready for an experiment. Aranya explains that he has isolated the growth hormone of the pituitary and will transfer it into the body of another creature, a hexapod, a tarantula, and transfer the glands from the insect back into the human body, so the woman is indestructible. According to Aranya, they can grow a new limb if lost. Only women are chosen because, as Aranya declares, “in the insect world the male is puny is insignificant,” as is the doctor’s male assistant. The women are spiders with thinking brains subject to the doctor’s will, we are told.
Masterson is disturbed by the doctor’s plans, but Aranya now cannot let him leave. Instead, Masterson becomes another experimental subject. He looks around in a montage of memories. Eventually Masterson escapes from the hospital and ends up at a bar near the old lab where Tarantella (Tandra Quinn), one of the spider women, dances. Masterson shoots Tarantella, but because she is now “indestructible” she recovers quickly. Masterson and his tablemates end up near the underground lab when their plane flies off course, and only the pilot and a woman with a weak fiancé escape. They are the couple picked up by the oil surveyor. The pilot is telling the story, and the woman awakes. Only Pepe believes the story. He wants to burn them because nothing will survive fire, but the film ends with ambiguity, since the man may be an unreliable narrator.
Ultimately, Mesa of Lost Women argues against the genetic transformation Aranya successfully attempts in his lab, but it leaves the resolution to the conflicts such transformation provides unresolved. Other environmental issues, including water rights and oil exploration, become mere setting and plot devices in this peculiar mixed genre film. By combining a big bug movie with a sexploitation theme and dropping it into a Mexican setting, however, Mesa of Lost Women stands out. Eric Kurerston perhaps puts it best:
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? What would Warhol say? What would Godard say? They'd just shake their heads at you contemptuously for not getting the modernist cosmic joke. Mesa of Lost Women needs no justification! C'est un meisterwerke!
No comments:
Post a Comment