Sadly Over-hyped

As Good As It Gets

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

For most of this movie I was completely confused.There's a narrator, then a guy tells a story and by the time the plot kicks in, you have no clue what is happening. A mad scientist is mixing women with spiders which somehow makes the women impossible to kill while at the same time producing weird spider babies wearing wigs and midget men. Then a random crazy guy tries to kill a spider woman,who was dancing in a bar for some reason.The crazy guy manages to kidnap a rich guy and his servant,a pilot and a random woman and makes the pilot fly them away until the plane has problems and crash lands on a mesa. You never see anything on the mesa except the crashed plane.It seems like they want us to believe it's a jungle,because jungles exist in Mexico. There's a twist at the end that explains some stuff but it doesn't help the movie. The best thing about this movie is that it wasn't boring.That earned it an extra star.

An unfinished film has been re-imagined with Coogan's ostensibly unrelated scenes clumsily grafted into the tale of a plane crash atop an unforgiving mesa inhabited by a giant spider. Faithful servant Wu (Samuel Wu) spouts prophecies like "there's a time to be born and a time to die", while Doreen (Hill) and All-American pilot Phillips (Knapp) trade provocative glances, struggling to keep their animal attraction at bay. Somewhere amid the plane wreck, a giant spider hunts the survivors, while mad scientist Dr Aranya (Coogan) creates spider-women in bizarre experiments in the caverns below.Knapp is essentially the leading man doing an earnest job with inane material, George Barrows as the stocky male nurse trying to re-capture escaped nutter Dr Masterson (Stevens), and sultry Tandra Quinn dancing up a storm in a revealing negligee. A little person and some scantily clad "lost" women bearing no relation to the plot, appear in meaningless cutaways, among them familiar names, Margia Dean, Katherine Victor and Mona McKinnon.An incoherent muddle consisting of a bland, repetitive Latin-guitar inspired soundtrack, pages of dumb dialogue and a totally inept climax that ruins any chance of cult cred. Devoted performances from a capable cast, but otherwise, this is premium grade trash video, courtesy of Joy N.Houck whose progeny Joy N.Houck Jnr gave us "The Brain Machine" and "Night of Bloody Horror".

Thanks to IMDb's kindness, I watched this for free. Thank you, IMDb!!! I watched it after spending most of a day doing family bookkeeping on my laptop. This may have left me in an especially appropriate mood. I'm 80 years old. Truly inept, minimal-budget movies are a new experience for me, and I love them. I sit back speculating how they could have built their sets and animated their monsters at the least possible expense.Despite what other reviewers have written, the actor who portrays the visiting scientist and who is transformed into a ... well, to avoid any spoiler, make it "a different sort of person" does a lovely job. I mean that seriously. The brunette who dances seductively does so well --- though even in my long-vanished youth she'd have terrified me, and the (admittedly repetitive)loud guitar music is generally superior to the dialog. The blonde who serves as Heroine is perhaps the nastiest person in the film, though this doesn't seem to be intentional. And actually the admittedly inexpensive monster was pretty good in its brief, brief appearances. So, in their brief appearances, were the dwarfs, midgets and poor scantily-attired young ladies.Logic? Sensible behavior in dangerous situations? Competent acting by all but one of the cast? Of course not: that's part of the fun.

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.