As far as cinematic values goes, it's hard to sink lower than Mesa of Lost Women, a bottom of the budget horror flick directed by Herbert Tevos and Ron Ormand (King of the Bullwhip, White Lightnin' Road, The Grim Reaper -- Ormond has 27 director, 42 producer, 36 writer, and 6 acting credits on IMDb) . Tevos had written a number of unfilmed (and unfilmable) scripts and managed to get one script credit for 1951's Tarantula (not to be confused with the Jack Arnold 1955 film of the same name), which was so bad that it never got released. Enter low-budget specialist Ron Ormand ( ) the following year, who filmed new material, edited it into Tarantula, and came out with Mesa of Lost Women, now recognized as one of the worst movies ever filmed. Tevos claimed to have been a famous director in Germany and that he directed Marlene Deitrich in The Blue Angel, but that appears to be pure puffery; there is no record of him directing anything in Germany and Mesa of Lost Women remains his only known credit. It turns out that Tevos was really Herbert von Schoellenbach, who was an employee of the film manufacturing company Agfa; Agfa sent him to the United States, where he worked as head of the paper testing department in Agfa's Rochester, New York, facility. The script for Mesa of Lost Women was by Tevos and Poverty-Row scribe Orville H. Hampton, although Hampton got screen credit only for dialogue supervision.
Former child star and latter-day Uncle Festus Jackie Coogan stars a the reclusive Dr. Aranya (the Spanish word for spider), who "is creating giant spiders and dwarfs in his lab on Zarpa Mesa, Mexico. He wants to create a master race of superwomen by injecting his female subjects with spider venom." One of these women is Tarantella (pin-up model Tandra Quinn -- perhaps born Derline Jeannette Smith -- , featured in Problem Girls, The Neanderthal Man, and as an uncredited fourteen-year-old schoolgirl eight years earlier in Week-End at the Waldorf, who has spider-like claws on her feminine hands.
the film quickly moves from the very sub-sublime to the overtly ridiculous in just 109 minutes.
Narrated by Lyle Talbot and also featuring Allan Nixon, Richard Travis, Delores Fuller, Katina Vea, Paula Hill, and Robert Knapp, and if you look closely you might notice Angelo Rositto as one of the dwarfs.
The film is so bad that it has become a minor cult classic. How bad? you ask. Harken to some of the film critics; "lapses in judgment that boggle the mind," "a dull, tepid mess," "incoherent," "muddled and misguided," "incompetent [and] awkward," "ridiculously complicated plot hides the fact that nothing really happens," and "so bad you have to ask yourself, is it actually evil?"
You have been warned. Now dive in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs3OIggg334
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