Mesa Of Lost Women

Year releasted: 1953

by Nathan Rabin
June 11th, 2003

As 1953's Mesa Of Lost Women opens, narrator Lyle Talbot rails against "the monstrous assurance of this race of puny bipeds with overblown egos, the creature who calls himself man." Talbot goes on to predict that "in the continuing war for survival between man and the hexapods, only an utter fool would bet against the insect." That statement just might be construed as foreshadowing. As Talbot mocks the arrogance of puny man-animals, a creature who calls himself man (Robert Knapp) is staggering through the menacingly named Muerto Desert with a female biped. Arriving at an oil company's office, Knapp warns his hosts about "super-monsters... who can kill you with one bite." The oil-company employees are understandably not convinced, but a sombrero enthusiast named Pepe responds with a startled "Ay caramba!" The rest of the film unfolds in flashback, as the "world's foremost organotherapist" (Harmon Stevens) meets a brilliant but reclusive scientist (Jackie Coogan) at his mountain lair in the Muerto Desert. There, amid ungodly creatures, Coogan calmly tells Stevens about his experiments: He's interbreeding humans with hexapods to create a super-race he can control telekinetically. Stevens understandably raises ethical objections to this mad science, but when he returns to civilization, skeptics confine him to the Muerto State Hospital. When an apparently lobotomized Stevens reappears at a Mexican bar, he kidnaps a couple at gunpoint, then hijacks a small plane piloted by Knapp. In spite of Stevens' comforting assertion that "birds fly without motors and so will we," the plane crashes on a mesa, where the bipeds knock back a few shots before settling in for the night. After a pair of grisly deaths, the survivors are brought to Coogan's laboratory, where Stevens reverts back to his sane self long enough to destroy Coogan and at least some of his creations. Sunburned but grateful to be alive, Knapp escapes the titular mesa, content that in the ongoing war between man and the hexapods, man has won at least a minor victory.