Back when Jackie Coogan was playing Uncle Fester on the Addams Family, he had a laboratory in that creepy old house and conducted a whole lot of experiments that inevitably failed. But Fester had nothing on Dr. Aranha on the Zarpa Mesa that well known Mesa Of Lost Women.
This mad scientist who Jackie Coogan is playing for real though with a trace of smirk has got a three track project going in his secret laboratory. He's creating dwarfs, giant spiders, and a race of super women who get that way because Coogan is busying injecting them with the venom from the spiders.
It's one muddled mess of a plot involving Coogan making two tries at getting another scientist in as a colleague and giving him a drug that turns him into a homicidal maniac. We've also got a Chinese valet who talks in fortune cookie riddles, a stalwart pilot a girl going to be married to the wrong guy and a very rich wrong guy all stranded out on Coogan's mesa.
The film gets loonier as it goes along, but I really liked when Jan Van Croft the rich wrong guy sends out Samuel Wu the valet to look for a valuable family heirloom comb that was dropped. Of course the valet goes out there with all that danger around.
This film was the final film of Chris-Pin Martin who certainly played in dozens better films than this, most memorably as the relay station manager in Stagecoach with the Apache wife. Martin also played Pancho, the rather slow witted good natured companion of the Cisco Kid in several films.
I realize that times are hard for former child stars but Jackie Coogan must have been desperate to take this one.
This mad scientist who Jackie Coogan is playing for real though with a trace of smirk has got a three track project going in his secret laboratory. He's creating dwarfs, giant spiders, and a race of super women who get that way because Coogan is busying injecting them with the venom from the spiders.
It's one muddled mess of a plot involving Coogan making two tries at getting another scientist in as a colleague and giving him a drug that turns him into a homicidal maniac. We've also got a Chinese valet who talks in fortune cookie riddles, a stalwart pilot a girl going to be married to the wrong guy and a very rich wrong guy all stranded out on Coogan's mesa.
The film gets loonier as it goes along, but I really liked when Jan Van Croft the rich wrong guy sends out Samuel Wu the valet to look for a valuable family heirloom comb that was dropped. Of course the valet goes out there with all that danger around.
This film was the final film of Chris-Pin Martin who certainly played in dozens better films than this, most memorably as the relay station manager in Stagecoach with the Apache wife. Martin also played Pancho, the rather slow witted good natured companion of the Cisco Kid in several films.
I realize that times are hard for former child stars but Jackie Coogan must have been desperate to take this one.