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 Dr. Arana is "conducting bizarre experiments in the forbidden Mexican desert of
Zarpa Meas." He has made some "rabid super-women" by giving them some spider
venom. It is a derivative that is "so powerful and perverted that it
transforms them into deadly sexual predators!" They gleefully tell us that the
guy who made this was a "close associate" of Ed Wood and that it stars Jackie
Coogan who also was in Chaplin's The Kidand played Uncle Fester on The Addams Family." 1953, 69 minutes, DVD
Whenever I hear the voice of a hyper-serious narrator begin one of these "so
bad they're tedious" movies with a long-winded and not very informative
explanation of what is transpiring, about to transpire, or transpired off
screen because they didn't have the budget to hire more than four people to
shot that scene, I start scrounging around underneath my couch for a lingerie
catalog or a pizza ad or something because I know that medically speaking, it
would be best not to attempt to devote all my attention to what is about to
follow. I've seen it before in The Beast Of Yucca Flats and The Astounding She-Monster to name a couple that I'm still smarting over, and I know that the narrator
can only add to the trauma the viewer will suffer when he starts doing his
impression of my tenth grade biology teacher (you know the type - his lectures,
and they are always lectures, are exactly the same as they were when he angrily
took the job twenty-five years ago because he got his girlfriend preggers and
he had to ditch his dream of his garage band someday making it big). The real
problem with the narrator position in such debacles is that it allows the
screenwriter to exercise what he believes to be his "writing chops." This is
where they try to write "important" stuff and make some kind of point about
love, death, existence, and the meaning of it all and whatever else
self-absorbed goobers think people want to read, watch, or listen to (hint to
aspiring writers: we want to hear about stuff like babysitters, serial
killers, and talking dogs and it would probably be advisable to somehow combine
two out of the three). This leads to embarrassingly amateurish
pontificating that always involves unnecessarily big words. Such is how I
actually heard the word "bipeds" to describe human beings at the beginning of a
movie that is ostensibly about giant spiders or murderously indestructible
women or male nurses (that's another thing we like to see - nurses, but this
movie is such a dang misfire that they fudge it up by making the nurse a male nurse). I always mean to take notes during these narrations for two reasons:
one is that I want to report their abject silliness here and the other is
because they usually say the kind of stuff that pass for wit and wisdom at a
high school graduation speech and once I finish my GED (only 12 more credits to
go!), I'm aiming to salute the Prairie View Vo Tech class of '06 with my
valedictorian speech (or maybe salutatorian., depending on how my birdhouse goes
in Industrial Arts class).  What exactly was the booming voice from above (God, is that you? Oh, it's just
Lyle Talbot from Plan 9 From Outer Space? Okay, carry on.) yakking about for close to three and a half minutes (wuss -
Beast of Yucky Flats went longer)? I couldn't make heads or tails of most of
it, but it involved the usual themes - you know - we suck and insects and
spiders are da bomb and they're going to kick our booties all over this planet
once they get tired of doing important stuff like laying eggs on caterpillars
and hiding under my fridge whenever I turn the kitchen light on. To prove this
guy's point, we get to see a man and women tromping through the desert of death
or whatever it was called. This was the kind of movie that used a few Spanish
words once in awhile in names so that it would seem really foreboding and alien.
That's how you get stuff like Dr. Arana (that's Spanish for spider -egads!)
and Zarpa Mesa (that's Spanish for "cheap California location"). I suppose
that if they were trying to go for that low-grade Mexican horror movie feel,
they achieved it pretty well, though I think I would be speaking for most of us
when I say that the male nurse probably should have been replaced by a masked
wrestler of some sort. So these two gringos (I'm trying to give my review that
"low-grade Mexican horror movie review" feel) are rumbling, stumbling, and
tumbling through the desert and end up getting rescued by some heroic oil
workers
(this movie underwritten with a generous grant from Exxon) that are there to
show the Mexicans how to despoil their lands so that I can crank my heat up to
eighty during the spring and drive my 1975 AMC Sportabout to Omaha whenever
Alyssa Alps is dancing at that nice place out by the airport (it's either
called The Runway or The Pilot's Lounge). The girl is pretty much unconscious,
but luckily for us (we've still got 65 minutes of screen time to fill) the dude
is just cognizant enough to start spinning the tortured, confusing, and
ultimately pointless and nitwitted tale of how a hunky airline pilot like him
got beat up by some Mexican desert. Because this is one of those movies that
is notorious (I'm going ahead and using my new color coded rating to issue an
Orange alert which means their is an elevated risk that this movie is going to
smell like one of my grandpa's farts after he's put away about five Hamm's -
from the land of sky blue waters, indeed!) in its ineptitude, this dude's story
doesn't start with his role in things, but with a memory of what some other guy
was up to (it turns out that this pilot knows a bunch of stuff, he
shouldn't).  One of the first things we learn that would be doubtful the pilot ever had any
knowledge of is that some fancy pants scientist from the States is paying a
visit to the secret and inaccessible lair, I mean lab or Dr. Arana. Dr. Arana
is famous because back when he was somebody instead of a has-been, he was known
to the movie going public as Jackie Coogan, a famous child actor of the early
part of the twentieth century. He was known for his pioneering in work in such
areas as having his no good mother and father steal all his money from him and
refusing to give him anything but a small fraction of what he earned on the
numerous films he delighted America with. California would later pass a law that
prevented parents from ripping their child actor kids off without at least a
manager or an agent. Proving that once you're a has-been, anything that
ain't mad-scientist roles in poverty row thrillers can be called a
comeback, he
starred as Uncle Fester on The Addams Family, the show about the monster family that wasn't The Munsters. In this role, Coogan is hidden behind some bad eyeglasses and a receding
hairline and you would never guess that any law would be passed on his behalf,
except one preventing him from embarrassing himself in stupid efforts like
this. Arana doesn't do much the entire movie except write down a few
calculations (probably was really just Coogan writing out how much he hated his
parents over and over), and holding some beakers. He is one of those
scientists that is trying to play God and as is de rigeur for films of this
sort, it all involves the pituitary gland, hormones and a giant spider. I was
never too sure where Coogan got himself a giant spider that just laid around
waiting for mad scientists to extract it's venom or whatever, but Dr. Arana
quickly shows this other doctor (I think his first name was Leland) that his
giant spider is just behind this dressing screen that he has in the secret lab.
He moves the screen and we see a really huge spider with bandages around its
neck or head or maybe it was wearing a diaper or was just really modest (that
explains the screen). Leland kind of freaks out (what kind of scientist freaks
out when he sees a big spider? Didn't Dr. Arana put that in his numerous
important treatises that Leland gushes about when he arrives?) Arana and his
women drug Leland and the next thing we know, Leland is escaping from a mental
hospital (no time for explanations about why he was drugged or how he got away
- there's big spiders and ugly broads to worry about). Before Leland gets a
case of the limber tail, we learn that Arana has injected some ugly girls with
the spider juice and that makes them invincible. He also tried it out on ugly
men, but in the movie's only decent twist, it turns them into dwarves! 
Well, as you might have guessed, they haven't built a insane asylum that can
hold the likes of Leland Masterson (okay, I'll admit it - I looked his name up)
and
once the male nurse, George, sees the bedsheets tied into a rope ladder leading
out the window, he knows that he should take a trip south of the border because
that's where most of their escaped mental patients end up. Next we find
ourselves at some local watering hole, where Leland has decided to drop by for
a drink. He shows us a touch of continental sophistication when he pulls out
his own shot glass from it's special leather pouch and uses that instead of the
house shot glass. Then he sees a couple of Americans that have also shown up
to kill some time while they're plane is being fixed. There is a young woman
who looks like the hard-bitten tarts that usually show up and pass for leading
ladies in movies like this and an older guy that is bald and is not destined to
be a leading man, but probably the jerky coward that the rough and tumble pilot
will have to slap some sense into later on in the proceedings. These two are
supposed to be married but their plane is broken down so they're killing time
here. Leland likes the looks of this woman so he sits down at their table and
we all are then treated to a dance from a woman that was one of Dr. Arana's
experiments. Her name is Tarantella. Get it? She does what the filmmakers
probably considered a real saucy and seductive dance, but just made you want to
tell this woman to go back to her day job, rounding up shopping carts in the
Wal-Mart parking lot. Just because you jump around, and run your hands up and
down yourself, all the while having this look on your face like you're pumped
full of Thorazine doesn't make you the salsa version of Jennifer Beals. For
some reason Leland pulls out a gun and shoots her. Did I also mention that
before he did that, George the male nurse arrives and hangs out at the table
with them? Most of the movie, he stands around telling everyone not to try and
disarm or capture Leland and that he's a trained professional and can handle
it. He does all this while Leland shoots a dancer, holds about five people
hostage, hijacks a broken down airplane, and then stands around a campfire with
the guy up on the lost mesa while everyone is wondering when help will arrive.
For all you Tarantella fans out there, dry your eyes, because she'll be coming
to a roadhouse near you soon. Since she's got the super powers of a really big
spider, the gunshot didn't kill her. I always kind of thought that the super
powers of a giant spider would be different than being invulnerable to gunshots
and dance instruction, but who knew, right? Once George the male nurse lets Leland hijack the plane, it crashes (remember
this is the plane that broke down on that couple earlier) on the lost mesa.
Everyone stands around knocking back some of the emergency brandy that the
pilot has in the cabin for just such occasions and then George the male nurse
takes his little penlight (he says that's what he uses in the nuthut, so it
should be just fine out on the lost mesa) and goes snooping around the bushes
for some reason. He gets killed and then everyone else decides they should go
see what trouble male nurses get themselves into when they're off screaming in
the
bushes. They find his carcass and decide to go back to the plane. There we
have one of the stupider exchanges in cinema where the pilot and the girl talk
about what they want out of life (she's marrying the old goat for his money and
he wants a women that will be with him for who he is, not what he has, i.e.
broken down plane). Inevitably this results in one of those really aggressive
kisses that would be terribly uncomfortable in real life. Then her groom to be
comes out and demands to know what happened to the comb he gave her. What
comb? The comb that was a family heirloom, you slut! She's gone and lost it
in the bush when they were checking on George the male nurse, so this dude
sends Wu out to retrieve it. Who is Wu? Wu are you? Hahaha. Wu is the
oriental servant of the old goat, but it turns out he's really working for Dr.
Arana. Naturally, none of this makes any sense whatsoever, but I think
a movie of this type demanded an oriental manservant that turned out to be
a
traitorous dog (I prefer the whacky Asian sidekick in She Demons myself), so
here's Wu. In the end Leland gets his sanity back through an injection from
Dr. Arana. Why? I don't know. Why did he make him insane in the first place?
Why didn't he turn him into a dwarf? Why weren't those dwarves fed to the
giant spider? Anyway, with Leland sane, he burns the secret lab up (spider
super powers, do not it seems, extend to being fire retardant) and the girl and
the pilot escape. A suicide-inducing melange of cruddy recycled horror
cliches (A mad scientist? A giant spider? Ugly women that can't dance?), mixed
up with a story that proved as impenetrably smelly as the bowel obstruction
watching this movie gave me. There is yet another one of those famous bad
movies that only turns out to be bad. There's nothing funny in the action or
the characters on screen. You merely sigh when a character bumps into a tree
and it almost falls over. The movie is short, the story appears to be made up
as it goes along, the people involved are about as interesting as the people in
line at the grocery store and everything is shot in an unimaginative muddy
style that is so commonplace in movies like this, the technique should have a
name. "Film merde" is probably what the French would call it.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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