Mesa of Lost Women

Poster tagline: THEY WERE ALL A MAN DESIRED! BEAUTIFUL – KISSABLE – LOVABLE! BUT DEADLIER THAN A BLACK WIDOW SPIDER!!! This is one of those films that it’s better to read how it was made than actually watch it. Ed Wood Jr. was not the biggest hack of his time, he merely acquired the status of the most famous in later years, and the director of this piece would give him a serious run for his money. It was originally supposed to be a horror film with a killer spider named "Tarantula" (the same name as Jack Arnold's classic), but the result was so gruesome that a new director was hired, Ron Ormond, who cut out a lot and added midgets, wild dancers and a mad scientist. It's a wonder what a terrible product was made, because the rest of the crew was certainly not to be sniffed at. The cinematographer was an Oscar winner for Munrau's classic Sunrise, the absolutely awful soundtrack (a cartwheeling guitar motif, that will burn a hole in your brain after five minutes) was the work of the author of the catchy theme song for the then popular TV series The Flintstones, one of the actors would later go on to be the screenwriter of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series, etc. The film lacks logic, the scenes do not follow each other, the plush giant spider on wires, the main attraction on the posters, only appears for a few seconds, and the last half hour is absolutely unbearable, with actors just wandering around the studio forest in total darkness, so you can't see anything, and a brief shot of the face of one of the "evil" midgets repeated about ten times. I don’t give many Boo! ratings, but I couldn’t resist here. (09/15/2013)