Chapter 20
Schlock: n. N. Amer. colloq. Inferior goods; trash; of low quality.
Paul Blaisdell’s cucumber-shaped Venusian from It Conquered the World has entered the annals of ’50s low-rent sci-fi movies as the screen’s corniest monster. But it has a serious rival in this category — the perambulating tree-monster in From Hell It Came, also designed by Blaisdell. Released in 1957 by Allied Artists, this tale of a radioactive tree stump causing havoc on a Pacific atoll is schlock personified, a glorious helping of nonsense lasting 71 fairly insane minutes; monster action, South Sea action and romantic action all rolled into one, containing a script crammed full of amusing exchanges, a truly bizarre, over-the-top performance from Linda Watkins and that scowling rubbery tree waddling after its enemies. Grade Z trash? A monumental turkey? Well, perhaps, but any 50-year-old horror film that brings a smile to the face, isn’t a bore and keeps audiences watching throughout its running time, with the one thought of “They don’t make ’em like this anymore” predominant, has a lot going for it. Many ’50s cheapies (Robot Monster, The Killer Shrews, Teenage Monster, Killers from Space) are so mind-numbingly dreadful, they can only really be viewed once and that’s it. Once is enough. Dan Milner’s infamous tree-monster movie may indeed, in many eyes, be taken for laughable nonsense but it’s certainly not mind numbing. The picture has genuine moments of cunningly hidden brilliance that can be winkled out after several run-throughs. Let’s find out what these hidden gems are.
First, the credits. The “It” in the title graphics is composed of, not the letters as such, but two elaborate sketches of the tree-monster. Nice touch of detail this, representative of most ’50s monster lettering. Darrell Calker’s drum-laden, Xavier Cugat-type orchestral title score is straight out of a 1930s/1940s jungle feature — we half expect Dorothy Lamour to shimmy on set as the music starts up — and then it’s straight into the South Sea action. Native Gregg Palmer lies spread-eagled and tethered on the ground, awaiting death by sacrificial dagger. He’s been betrayed by his wife, falsely accused of dallying with other women; as a result, Palmer’s shameful infidelities have caused the premature death of his father. It’s a put-up job, of course, the woman carrying on with the tribe’s chief behind Palmer’s back. Moreover, his father’s death, in truth, is attributed to radioactive fallout drifting onto the atoll from A-bomb testing 1,500 miles away. Another factor in this scenario is that the natives (most wearing patterned Bermuda shorts) wish to get back at the Americans who have set up base on the atoll to monitor radiation levels; they blame the “Devil Dust” for causing sickness among their people, mistrust the Yanks and want them off the island. “I promise you all, I shall come back from hell and make you pay for your crime,” curses Palmer, just before the dagger is hammered into his heart. A native dance is performed (Yes — the women do wear grass skirts!) and then his body is placed in an ornate wooden cask, to be buried upright in the ground.
So, we witness a busy first 12 minutes. Professor John McNamara and Doctor Tod Andrews are introduced, the incessant throb of drums getting on Andrews’ nerves. McNamara states, “Drums don’t bother me, Doc. In fact, they have a nice anthropological beat.” Andrews smiles. “Well, maybe we ought to record it. Get it on the hit parade.” But Richard Bernstein’s tongue-in-cheek screenplay rises magnificently to the occasion with the arrival of Linda Watkins, a twice-widowed, man-hungry blonde speaking in a “cor blimey” cockney accent so excruciatingly awful that it makes Dick Van Dyke’s much-derided London dialect in Mary Poppins sound positively Shakespearean by comparison! Was the actress enlisted to provide comic relief in a movie that didn’t need it? Watkins chanced upon Palmer’s murder and wants McNamara and Andrews to know all about it, sparing no lurid details. “The bloomin’ cannibals. They stuck a knife right through ’is ’eart,” she squawks, mangling her vowels and lapsing from cockney accent to pseudo-Australian (the actress was actually born in Boston!). “It was ’orrible. Simply ’orrible.” Andrews tries to soothe her nerves but to no avail. “I’ll have nightmares the rest of me natural life,” she continues, downing one drink after another. “The ’eathens. They ought to drop a bloomin’ hydrogen bomb on ’em all and blow ’em to pieces.”
Andrews, however, has more pressing matters on his mind other than native rituals. Another blonde, Tina Carver, arrives via helicopter to boost the scientific team and he’s got the hots for her, big time. Unfortunately, the haughty Carver doesn’t want to play house or discuss marriage, leaving lovesick Andrews looking as wooden as the monster he will shortly have to combat. “Why, that’s right nice of you, ducky,” chortles the garrulous Watkins when Carver gives her a spare bottle of perfume, sounding suspiciously like Britain’s much-loved actress Dora Bryan. Meanwhile, at the burial site, the ground begins to move ominously over the spot where Palmer was interred and the chief and witch doctor devise a plan to get rid of the Americans, tipping their arrows with poison, the dialogue strictly of the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” variety, spoken in broad New York accents.
At last, a weird woody growth in the cemetery draws the attention of the three scientists. “Could a tree trunk grow out of a coffin?” asks Carver incredulously, but according to native superstition, it can and it’s called a Tabanga. One has turned up before when a chief was buried with seeds — his evil spirit returned as a tree-monster, stalked the island, killed many people and disappeared without trace. Now a native issues a further dire warning: “The Tabanga will soon remove itself from the ground.” McNamara scoffs at the notion. “You mean this wooden zombie’s gonna uproot itself from the earth? Your grandfather must have been quite a storyteller,” he sneers. But Palmer’s coffin has absorbed radiation, giving life to the glowering stump; it has a heartbeat and oozes green blood, the handle of the dagger lodged in its chest. “You know what. I have an eerie feeling that this thing knows what we’re saying,” says Carver, eying it nervously. On orders from Washington, the trio digs the object up and takes it to the laboratory for further scientific investigation.
Back in the lab, the treeman chained to a bench, Carver has ideas on reviving it, but the only thing Andrews wants to revive is Carver’s flagging libido. “Maybe weought to ship it back to the States. It’d make a good scarecrow,” and “Why keep this freak of nature alive,” are his offhand responses to Carver’s morbid curiosity over the creature. Eventually giving in to her demands (no doubt in the hope of getting back into her good books and underwear!), they attach an intravenous drip containing blood and experimental chemicals with the aim of stimulating the monster’s heart, and then retire for the night.
In the morning, the lab has been smashed to bits — Blaisdell’s legendary tree-monster has been revived and is on the loose! The plot and those wonderfully droll asides are jettisoned post-haste; what now follows is standard ’50s “the monster is coming” shenanigans, Milner raising the pace to a more urgent tempo (“You know, I know it sounds crazy, but maybe Tabanga is for real and if it is, we’re gonna need help,” says a worried-looking Andrews). The shuffling menace throws his disloyal wife into a bog and somehow manages to dispatch both the crooked chief and witch doctor, even though it only moves at a steady one mile per hour. Stumbling into a pit dug by the natives who toss in burning torches, the tree-monster emerges slightly scorched and homes in on Carver, all to the sounds of Calker’s strident score, blaring away merrily in the background. Grabbing hold of Carver, who shrieks, faints and then gives in to a prolonged (and irritating) bout of caterwauling (“Do you think that bloomin’ monster got hold of her?” blurts Watkins in full overdrive, stating the obvious), the woody menace is cornered on a ledge overlooking the swamp. Carver breaks free and Andrews fires his rifle, the bullet hitting the sacred dagger, which re-enters the heart; the monster topples backward into the quagmire and sinks, defeated, leaving the natives to grudgingly admit after their foe has met its end that “American magic is the best.” Hero-of-the-hour Andrews finally gets to kiss the reluctant love of his life and, quite wisely, the producers leave the last word to the flighty Watkins. Andrews now spoken for, the sex-starved hussy sets her rampant sights on McNamara. “By the way, Professor, I never asked you. Are you married?” she simpers, fluffing up her hair and making a beeline for the retreating scientist who looks more alarmed at the sight of her than he ever did with the Tabanga. An undisputed cult classic and a hoot of the first order, From Hell It Came (yes, even this was X-rated in England!) wholeheartedly deserves the accolade of being the campiest, hammiest, dopiest yet in many ways the most endearing 70-plus minutes of schlock ever to emerge from a decade notorious for rolling out scores of cheapskate efforts, all of which could be included under this particular banner of moviemaking (Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space runs it a close second). Like a vintage wine, it actually improves with age! Let’s extol the cheesy virtues inherent in the Milner Brothers’ best-ever effort. Long live Tabanga! There is no walking tree in Mesa of Lost Women, only the ’50s worst-looking fake spider, a large puppet on strings wisely kept out of sight behind screens in Jackie Coogan’s sketchy laboratory. Conceived in 1951 by Hungarian writer Herbert Tevos (aka Herbert von Schoellenbach) under the working title of Tarantula, Howco International deemed the results so bad that exploitation producer Ron Ormond, an affiliate of Ed Wood, was hired in 1952 for a re-shoot, the movie completed in 1953. Ormond and Tevos shared directorial credits; Tevos wrote the script and composer Hoyt Stoddard Curtin was enlisted to come up with a suitably bizarre soundtrack to match the similarly bizarre storyboard — and boy, did he succeed, in spades! Their joint endeavors resulted in one of the decade’s most vilified mad doctor movies, 69 minutes of “100% dreck” as one critic succinctly wrote.
But step back a little and view it in the cold light of day. Mesa of Lost Women belongs to an entirely different age of filmmaking to that experienced by audiences of today, a cinematic universe where amateurs, by hook or by crook, managed on peanuts to get their skew-whiff ideas onto celluloid, everyone oblivious to the critical damnation that was sure to follow. No, filmmakers couldn’t get away with it nowadays: 21st-century punters demand mega-bucks big screen excitement with top Hollywood stars to match and anything less won’t do, thank you very much. In a way, films like Mesa of Lost Women, Robot Monster and The Gargon Terror, as well as Ed Wood and Jerry Warren’s efforts, are cinema’s equivalent of fossils. You unearth them, dust them off and treasure every lame minute of them; after all, pictures like these will never be made again, so make the most of what’s available, warts and all.
As the camera pans over Mexico’s arid Meurto Desert (actually California’s Red Rock Canyon), we hear, for the first time but unfortunately not the last, the stentorian tones of another member of Ed Wood’s entourage, Lyle Talbot, who acts as the voice-over narrator: “Strange, the monstrous assurance of this race of puny bipeds with overblown egos. The creature who calls himself man. He believes he owns the Earth and every living thing on it exists only for his benefit. Yet how foolish he is. Consider, only the lowly insect that man treads underfoot outweighs humanity several times, and outnumbers him by countless billions. In the continuing war of survival between man and the hexapods, only an utter fool would bet against the insect…” and so on, and so forth, for a full four minutes. And if Talbot’s droning utterances aren’t enough to contend with, Curtin’s flamenco guitar/piano-based accompaniment jangles away incessantly in the background, rising and falling in volume; the dual effect of Talbot’s narration and Curtin’s discordant notation will have audiences desperately searching for earplugs, and we’re not even into the main story yet! (Ed Wood used part of Curtin’s soundtrack from this movie in 1954’s Jail Bait.)
Oilman Richard Travis picks up Robert Knapp and Mary Hill, found wandering in the desert (“He cannot believe his eyes. Images produced by roasting the optic nerves.”). Taken to a field hospital, Knapp in his delirium mumbles “Blow them up” and “Super-bugs as big as we are. They can kill you with one bite.” Knapp recovers and then, as the shadow of a camera creeps over his shirt, begins to tell his tale (the voice of Talbot cuts in: “Quite a story he’s telling, isn’t it Pepe?” referring to Mexican peasant Chris-Pin Martin. “You heard through your people out at Zarpa Mesa…the mysterious Doctor Aranya.”). However, Knapp’s recollections are rudely interrupted: Tevos and Ormond (for artistic purposes? A flash of inspiration?) opt for a shift in gear by diving into a second flashback and return to the events of a year ago, the action working its tortuous way back to the point where Knapp and Hill were spotted in the desert.
Doctor Harmon Stevens is flown to Zarpa Mesa to meet Doctor Jackie Coogan (“Oh, we’ve arrived,” he says unblinkingly under his panama hat) whose laboratory is situated deep inside the mesa. Coogan, sporting a big black mole under a ruined left eye, is injecting tarantula serum into human pituitary glands, creating, in females, predatory super-women who can regenerate damaged flesh; in males, pug-ugly dwarfs are the by-product. Mercifully, at this stage of the proceedings, Talbot gives us all a break by putting a sock in it; he stops blabbering on for about 10 minutes. Coogan’s lab is home to grimacing dwarf John George, sexy, deadly Tarantella (played with dark allure by Tandra Quinn) and several women assistants wearing black mop-head hairpieces. Seventeen minutes into the picture, a giant spider’s appendage appears over a screen just as Coogan is intoning, “If we are successful, I shall have a super female spider with a thinking and reasoning brain. A creature that someday may control the world — subject to my will.” But that’s not a hexapod, my dear doctor. Hexapods only have six legs! At the sight of the spider and a girl strapped onto an operating table, Stevens gets an attack of medical ethics and decides he’s had enough of Coogan and his crackpot crew. “You can’t do these things. Ghastly experiments! This place must be destroyed.” Quinn stabs a syringe in his neck, Curtin’s cacophonous music breaks the pain barrier and the next we see of Stevens, he’s an imbecilic patient in the Meurto State Asylum.
A minute later, the loony escapes by climbing out of a window. The next scene takes place in Perkin’s Frontera Cantina and, from this point on, we plunge into absurdity (as if we hadn’t done so already!). Allison Hayes look-alike Quinn performs an erotic three-minute dance, flashing her underwear in front of newlyweds Mary Hill and Niko Lek, with Samuel Wu, their shifty looking Chinese servant, in attendance. In walks Stevens holding a gun, followed by his orderly, George Burrows. Grinning like a simpleton and talking in an eight-year-old’s voice, Stevens (a dreadful bit of acting, it has to be said) shoots Quinn and forces the others by gunpoint to board Knapp’s plane (“I command. And thou shalt obey!”). He wants a showdown with Coogan and nothing will stop him (“We fly. Now!”). Even though burly Knapp or hefty Burrows could disarm the idiot in the blink of an eye. Back in the bar, Quinn, negating her fatal bullet wound through the use of her super spider powers, rises from the floor (“Sheriff. The body just got up and walked outta here!”) at the precise moment Knapp and company take off for Zarpa Mesa.
As the mesa comes into view, one of the engines malfunctions, giving rise to another ridiculous quote from Stevens: “Birds fly without motors. And so will we.” Crash-landing on the 600-foot-high plateau at night, they make camp, and Wu chips in with his own Chinese proverb: “The curtain of darkness veils the sharpest eyes.” Burrows goes off to explore and is killed by a huge hairy spider, while the others, all hand-in-hand, are herded into Coogan’s domain by a crowd of circus midgets and women with black nine-inch fingernails (“Who is he?” asks Knapp of Coogan. “He’s a brilliant madman,” replies Stevens). Faced with his nemesis, mad-as-a-hatter Stevens rejects Coogan’s offer to restore his sanity on condition he helps with the experiments. He grabs a bubbling flask full of explosive and throws it at the scientist whose “greatest achievement of science” goes up in flames; the spider, Quinn, the women, the dwarfs and himself, all dead. Knapp and Hill are the only two to make it out alive and we are back where we started.
Mexican Martin believes Knapp’s version of events, even if skeptical Travis doesn’t (“Anybody thinks I’m gonna load one of my trucks with oil and send it up on top of a mountain to burn a bunch of imaginary spiders?”). The last word, as if we haven’t already guessed, is left to Talbot: “Yes, you’re right, Dan (Travis). Commonsense tells you there isn’t anything to his story, doesn’t it? Giant spiders on a desert mesa! Fantastic! Pepe’s just a superstitious native. True, no one has ever been on top of the mesa, but it’s just like any other bit of tableland. Not a thing different about it.” Then we get a shot of a blonde super-woman on a cliff in a revealing dress (cue for Mesa of Lost Women 2? Surely not!), and to the racket of Curtin’s aural backdrop, Talbot ends with “Or, er, is there?” Yes, folks — you can now remove the cotton ball from your ears!
There’s no getting away from the fact that Mesa of Lost Women is a seriously weird motion picture; it’s either the zenith of lousy moviemaking or a mad, bad masterpiece, or both, according to one’s tastes. It virtually defies description, but just simply rubbishing it won’t do; Tevos and Ormond’s almost anti-film is as much a part of the ’50s scene as The Thing from Another World, a schlock howler to beat all schlock howlers, rubbing shoulders with thoroughbred classics, contributing to the rich diversity that was the hallmark of this decade. From Hell It Came and Mesa of Lost Women — the world of fantasy cinema would be a much poorer (and far less interesting) place without them! [Note: Tandra Quinn played a deaf-mute housekeeper in United Artists’ The Neanderthal Man and Tevos was never involved in feature film production after he had left his one and only legendary mark on the industry. Ormond produced a string of exploitation movies, including Outlaw Women (1956) and Untamed Mistress (1956), and Hoyt S. Curtin’s musical output throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was truly prodigious, especially in the world of TV cartoons, composing, among other things, the title theme to The Flintstones.]