TANDRA QUINN WITH PAULA HILL IN 'MESA OF LOST WOMEN'

Tandra Quinn in MESA OF LOST WOMAN Year: 1953 Rating: **1/2 Camp Value: ***1/2

Sometimes really, really bad, really, really low-budget movies almost have to be commended for having been completed at all... and MESA OF LOST WOMEN is one of the very worst, with an annoying soundtrack consisting of a flamenco guitar lunging into those peak dramatic chords that would usually end a song, stuck in a nightmarish never-ending loop... but there's also one of the most effectively gorgeous starlets here, and she should have been used a lot more...

By the time Tandra Quinn's perfectly-named tarantula-woman Tarantella does a sexy dance to actual flamenco players in a seedy little tavern, there's already been a few plot-lines, and timelines, awkwardly established...

Paula Hill in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

The frame story involves primal brunette Quinn's contrary blonde sophisticate Paula Hill, along with standard-handsome pilot Robert Knapp, having trudged from the desert into a makeshift rural hospital... then (along with a bizarre narration) we go back a year where some random old doctor's visiting one of the most bizarre mad scientist liars ever created...

Enter Jackie Coogan as Dr. Aranya (spider in Spanish), who meets this renowned would-be colleague in his rural laboratory, built into a cavernous jungle terrain within the titular Mexican MESA...

Jackie Coogan, Tandra Quinn and Harmon Stevens in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Initially seeming like a benign octogenarian who'd die within minutes of being introduced, it's Harmon Stevens, not the wicked, underused Coogan (almost seeming game for a Vincent Prince style over-the-top performance), that's the strangest, most important character herein...  

Eventually, with a possessed, childlike countenance... and having just escaped an insane asylum... the old-timer winds up (after going forward in time) at that Flamenco bar and, having already met Tandra Quinn's sexy Tarentella at the desert lab (along with Coogan's other LOST WOMEN), he does what both ends and begins a surreal patchwork that already seems endless in its initial 20-minutes...

Tandra Quinn in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Right when Tandra Quinn's set up as a potentially vibrant, antagonistic fatale, she's shot and (seemingly) killed by the old man... who winds-up a gun-wielding passenger on a small plane flown by the frame story pilot...

Where five characters, now seeming part of an ensemble plane-crash-survival-picture from the 1930's, wind up at the murky, darkly-shot outskirts of Coogan's lair... while a budding opposites-attract romance ensues between the rogue pilot and classy Paula Hill...

Jackie Coogan, Robert Knapp, Paula Hill and Tandra Quinn in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Who, for a token leading lady, is actually not that bad... but she's hardly intriguing or energetic enough to cover for otherwise scene-stealing/mesmerizing tarantula-girl Tandra Quinn...

Not only adorning the posters, but as a downright smoking-hot b-starlet, she deserved more than this obscure cult curio — that's almost too complicated to review being nearly impossible to explain.

Tandra Quinn in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Tandra Quinn in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Tandra Quinn in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Harmon Stevens and Paula Hill in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Harmon Stevens and Paula Hill in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Robert Knapp in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Paula Hill in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Paula Hill in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Paula Hill in MESA OF LOST WOMAN with George Barrows

Tandra Quinn in MESA OF LOST WOMAN with Robert Knapp and Paula Hill

Tandra Quinn and Paula Hill in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

From MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Tandra Quinn in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Tandra Quinn in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Paula Hill in MESA OF LOST WOMAN

Dabbs Greer and Paula Hill in HOT CARS

Harmon Stevens and Paula Hill in MESA OF LOST WOMAN