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Having enjoyed myself writing a tale of a woman who turns into a giant arachnid, I thought it fitting to watch a movie about arachnids turned into women.  Is there such?  Of course there is!  Probably there are many, but one of the most readily accessible is a 1953 oddity called Mesa of the Lost Women.

Told largely in flashback, the core story of on Leland J. Masterson, World Famous Specialist (in what exactly it isn’t clear) who answers a summons of the mysterious but brilliant Dr. Aranya, who’s running a laboratory inside a mesa in a Mexican desert.

A mad-lab, it turns out.  Dr. Aranya has figured out a way to transform tarantulas into beautiful women.  There are a few seconds of half-way decent mad-lab footage.

Dr. Aranya is the gentleman on the left in the white lab-coat.  Do you recognize the actor?  Neither did I.  But a little digging turned up that he was someone genuinely Hollywood famous:

Yes, Jackie Coogan.  “The Kid” in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid.  He would go on to play Uncle Fester in the 1960s Addams Family television series.   Possibly he did not look back on this movie as the high point of his career.

Masterson, upstanding Pillar of the Establishment he is, throws an absolute fit when he finds out what Aranya is up to.  I really don’t understand what Aranya’s problem is:  it looks like Aranya’s work is succeding brilliantly.  His creations are intelligent enough to help him with his scientific research, can communicate telepathically, can regenerate lost limbs (although we don’t see them do this), and recover in minutes from what would be fatal bullet wounds (we do se this).

Oh, and did I mention that some of the female ones are smokin’ hot?  The most successful in this regard is “Tarantella,” played by Tandra Quinn.  She treats us to a dance in  a cantina, which doesn’t really do much to advance the thin plot, but which at least provides a few more minutes of watchable footage.

Since Masterson (played by Harmon Stevens) refuses to help Aranya, Tarantella gives Masterson an injection which turns Materson (temporarily) into an idiot.  In this condition, he looks eerily like a prototype for Peter Sellers’s role of Chance the Gardener in Being There (1979).

I mean, maybe it’s just the power of hats, but the resemblance is sometimes sort of eerie to me.   There are even moments in which the speech mannerisms in Stevens’s performance seem to prefigure those in Sellers’s.

This movie clocks in at 67 minutes and feels overlong.  Such an interesting premise, so little done with it.  Most of the movie has to do with a bunch of very unlikeable characters trying to survive attacks from Dr. Aranya’s characters.  A useless and intrusive narrator appears at the beginning and the end of the movie to warn us that mankind is outclassed by the insects (tarantulas are arachnids, not insects) and “the hexapods” (tarantulas have eight legs, not six).  It features one of the most headache-inducing musical scores to hit my eardrums ever.

Oh, and even if you can pardon the patronizing way this movie treats Mexican people, we get Wu, an Asian valet right out of Stereotype Central:  fatalistic, servile, and prone to communicate primarily in cornball pseudo-Confucian aphorisms.

There are things that I do genuinely miss about old movies, but characters like Wu are not one of them.

Still, I should think this is worth mining for a few minutes of footage for the mad science completist.  It’s public domain and available at the Internet Archive.

Link here in case the embedding doesn’t work.

Quoth Cleo as she walks deeper into the rain forest shedding clothes “You needn’t bother collecting, unless you want it for yourself.  I for one will never be needing it or any other clothing again.  I take a straightforward visual inspiration from Me Me Lai, who would get naked as could be in any number of Italian jungle cannibal movies, including Ultimo mondo cannibale, whence these screenshots come.

If we can tear our attention away from naked jungle frolics for a few moments, we might wish to ask ourselves what on earth is going on here.  The answer, I guess, comes not from the frolics but from the satirical speech Cleo gives to Aloysius and Jireen:  “I would work hard, get some sort of professional degree, then some sort of boring professional job.  Get married to some boring professional guy.  Live in a suburb in a McMansion with a brace of S-U-V’s and perhaps a brace of kids going to soccer practice. “

I suppose that Cleo’s rather astonishing rebellion mirrors ones I’ve had.  Cleo is doing exactly what she should not.  I’m not a huge admirer of David Brooks, but I must say that his Atlantic magazine piece “The Organization Kid” is rather on the mark.   Our elite colleges swarm with compliant, hard-working kiss-asses — and boy do I know, because I taught a lot of ‘em. The last time they rebelled against anything was during potty-training, and since then they have been building their resumes.  They accept the system (easy to do, I suppose, when you have such a privileged place within it) and look forward to their professional degrees and professional jobs.  I taught quite a few of them, and after a while I rather began to long to teach someone with a little fire in the belly for a change.  So maybe Cleo involves a bit of personal wish-fulfillment for me, and not just because she’s so cheerful about getting naked out of doors. I mean, leave college to turn into an immortal spider-goddess?  Talk about rebellion!  You’ll never get a job with Goldman Sachs that way, young lady.

At a deeper level, I suppose, Cleo’s serenity at her own change might reflect another conviction, the one I put in the Thaumatophile Manifesto, which is that if you want a worthy life, you ought to embrace what you are (or have become) rather than trying to suppress what you are, even if other people will think it’s gross.  You’ll surely die with regrets if you live any other way.

There’s a visual inspiration for what happens to Colonel Madder in the end, and also for much of what happens to Cleo Mount over her interesting Gnosis days, and that’s a strange little movie often called Horrors of Spider Island, or sometimes by its original German title Ein Toter hing im Netz, or sometimes by Yog-Sothoth-alone-knows what title under its shifty distributors attempted to market it over the years.

We are talking very simple plot here:  a cast of young women (and one man) are lost on a Pacific island when their plane to Singapore goes down, leaving only them as survivors.  Their situation doesn’t seem so bad, as they have supplies and fresh water, except that there’s some sort of creepy spider-critter who has the ability to turn people into were-spiders (the first example of such a thing I know of).

Not that I can really recommend the experience unless you’re very much into the were-spider thing, but the film is in the public domain, and you can watch it at the Internet Archive.  It probably counts as a good bad movie.  Nothing too explicit that I can remember — there is one unconvincing girl fight and what looks like some skinny-dipping in ill-focused long shot.

The were-spider thing is supposed to be horrible, although as it will turn out, Cleo has something of a different interpretaiton of her fate.

Bonus Dr. Faustus bleg: Many years ago I came across a volume at (I think) Forbidden Planet NYC which consisted of various adult cartoonists doing work showing how they were inspired by cheesy sci-fi. There was at least one section that I’m sure was inspired by Horrors of Spider Island that contained some illustrations that were rather more explicit on the concept of woman/were-spider interaction than anything that shows up in the actual movie.  But at the time I was living on a very meager graduate-student stipend so I reluctantly put the book back on the shelf.  I didn’t regret it as much as walking away from The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, but I still feel sorry not to at least remember the book’s title.  If anyone remembers this volume and can give me some information about it, I’d be grateful if you could let me know, either in correspondence or in comments.

Readers of the EroticMadScience blog in its early days might recall a post on the real-world models for the four studiers-abroad in which I commented that Iris Brockman was a bit more buxom than her model Hedy Lamarr and insisted further that this really was a plot-relevant detail.

See?  It was.  Iris was able to play on the fact that there are certain things for which men (straight ones, anyway) are fools in order to effect the rescue of Cleo.

Well, maybe that all still seems adolescent.  Rather than resist I’ll just play along by throwing in a fake motivational poster that is (I hope) on point.

Found here at Motifake.com.

In celebration of the victory Cleo Mount achieves over national security thuggery using her curious emerging powers, a picture of a body-paint spider girl.

Appears (and, sadly, often disappears) in various places but this one is from here.

Comix footnote: I had been vaguely aware that Marvel Comics had created a slinky and appealing Spider Girl character, but in researching the Spider Girl meme I discovered somewhat to my surprise that there was also a DC universe Spider Girl who appeared briefly in the 1960s.  Her primary super power was…super-strong prehensile hair.

By Cthulhu, that sounds like something out of the Tick’s fictional universe…

One book I was assigned in my freshman English class in college was the then-current edition of The Norton Anthology of  Poetry, the editors of which, doubtless attempting to appear hip to an audience of jaded 18 year-olds like my then-self, chose to include among the works of Shakespeare and Keats and Emily Dickinson a work by one Lawrence Raab entitled “Attack of the Crab Monsters,” which ended with the immortal lines

Sweetheart, put down your flamethrower. You know I always loved you.

Perhaps not “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” or even “My Life has stood – a Loaded Gun – “, (or even “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”) but it will do.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was a homage of sorts to to one of the greatest non-great producers and directors of all time, to wit one Roger Corman, who in fact did create Attack of the Crab Monsters.

Now perhaps Corman has a reputation as something of a schlockmeister, but if so he was a sclockmeister with a difference.  He had an eye for talent and that combined with a directorial imperative of tell a story cheaply and keep the audience entertained made him into the world’s greatest One-Man Film School:  Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme all pretty much got started out by Corman, and that alone would probably be enough to earn him immortality among filmmakers.

But beyond that, Corman made some surprisingly intriguing movies for the thaumatophile.  One which deserves some serious attention here would be The Wasp Woman (1959),  which stands as a sort of ancestress to Invasion of the Bee Girls,  which as readers of the Thamatophile Manifesto know, is a key influence for Dr. Faustus.  And it’s certainly a subject worth revisiting here, for that reason and also for some others as well, such as the fact that at least one woman’s intimate encounter with a giant member of arthropod persuasion and subsequent…changes…plays an important part in the developing Gnosis plotline.

The core plot of The Wasp Women is easy to summarize.  Entrepreneur and model Janice Starlin (played by Susan Cabot) runs what has hitherto been a successful cosmetics business, trading on her own glamorous image.  But 40-year old Starlin’s fears that her looks are fading, so she stops appearing as the spokesmodel for her own business, with terrible financial results.   Not to despair, though, as rather mild-mannered mad scientist named Zinthrop happens in with a supposed way to reverse aging, using the “royal jelly” of wasps.  Starlin leaps at the chance, giving Zinthrop his own laboratory and putting him to work developing what she hopes will be not just a way of reversing her own aging, but also a way of creating what will surely be an absolutely unbeatable product.   Overriding Zinthrop’s objections, she even insists on making herself the first human test subject, even going behind Zinthrop’s back to up her dosage of the miracle substance when it isn’t working as fast as she would like.

And what do you know?  The mad science thing works.  There’s just one little side effect…

Now as reviewer El Santo points out, this plot inverts a standard mad science narrative.  In that narrative, the insane/evil/overreaching mad scientist abducts or suborns a pretty girl and makes use of her as an experimental subject, until perhaps she is rescued by the hero.  It’s a variant of the brave knight rescuing the fair maiden from the evil dragon/ogre or what have you.  But the plot of The Wasp Woman is really about female protagonism.  It’s Janet Starlin who pushes hard for the mad science:  the mild-mannered but eccentric Zintrhop here is more the voice of conservatism and caution than anything else.  Starlin is the one who desires to be the subject of the experiment, and she jumps in with both feet.

El Santo reads this as a part of a bit of subtle (and subversive) commentary on gender relations in the 1950s:  women weren’t taken seriously in their own right and had to trade on their youthful looks, so Janice Starlin had an intelligible motive in pushing things along so desparately.  I think El Santo’s point is correct, but the focus of my attention is elsewhere.

Let me put it this way:  why is this movie the subject of a post at EroticMadScience.com?  It’s pretty buttoned-up 1950s.  No nudity.  No sex.  The answer is this:  I find an amazing turn on in subject protagonsim in mad science.  I do not know exactly why this is, but Nanetta Rector’s bold and unsolicited demand “Make me a liquid girl” or Maureen Creel’s taking a deep breath and turning on the invisibility machine or Aloysius Kim’s “Death or glory here I come” are real payoff moments for me.  So when Janice Starlin inists that she will be Zinthrop’s first test subject, it’s also a special moment in a special movie.

And thanks to the glories of the Internet, you can see for yourself for free, if you’re so inclined.  A magnificent resource called the Internet Archive is making available a lot of old movies for free streaming and downloading, and The Wasp Woman is among them.  I’ve embedded it in the post below, but if that doesn’t work (it’s fussy with some browsers), you can always visit the relevant Internet Archive page here.

Enjoy!

We might feel some pity for Dolly and her fate, but we might feel perhaps less so for Buck.  It would that Cleo Mount came back from her rainforest adventure with both some unusual appetites and some unusual abilities, and Buck is about to find out that sometimes your partner has some unusual plans for your relationship.

That the spiderweb — a complex structure of lines designed to catch and hold living things fast — should show up as a fantasy bondage prop is perhaps unsurprising.  Here is an example:

If you visit the source for this image, you’ll find it’s actually a Harry Potter fanfiction scenario.  It’s a big Internet; I’m sure it’s not the strangest.

Spiders themselves work in quite nicely, playing into a sexual archetype of creatures who lure men to their doom…

…but perhaps do make them happy before the end, as Cleo promises to do to Buck.

The previous two images from the “Spider and other bug girls” board up at Monster Girl Unlimited.  You wantz monstergirls?  They gotz monstergirls.

Like I wrote: big, big Internet.  Or should I say, big big web?

Well, Cleo Mount, little heard from in the last three Gnosis scripts, is about to re-appear in a big way in Where Am I? It might be worthwhile to reflect that way back in Study Abroad Cleo had a rather…intimate encounter with a rather…gigantic spider.  For a good cause, of course.

All good fun.  And I swear at the time I wrote that scene I was not aware of the following image, which appears to be circulating various places around the web.

As I read the caption in the lower-right of the photo (you can click through to get a larger version), this picture is also in a good cause — AIDS awareness, if I read it right.

Who says mad science isn’t good for something? Even if the the spider, while ginormous, does look a little fake. Perhaps a better looking spider could be found in the image to the left, which illustrates a story called “Spider” by Donna George Storey at theeroticwoman.com.  If it appeals, you might want to check out this post at ErosBlog.

I suppose I should ‘fess up that the whole idea of the giant spider was also inspired at least in part by The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist.

This panel is from the same “backstory” page that provided the panel in this post, which contributes to my understanding that both are meant as satire.

The linguistic appropriateness of a name like “Tondelayo” for a young woman from a bumiputera group somewhere on Borneo can certainly be questioned (although we should note that she tells us that it is not her real name).  But I wanted a tribute to a particular steamy namesake, the character played by Hedy Lamarr in White Cargo (1942).

Hedy has gotten tributes in the Gnosis College world before, and she well deserves it.  In Ecstasy (1933) not only did she do a very bold nude scene:

but she also created what might well have been the first depiction of female orgasm in a “mainstream” movie.

But were it just for those things alone Hedy might not deserve the multiple tributes.  What really puts her over the top is that in 1942 she, together with bad-boy composer George Antheil, took out one of the first patents for spread-spectrum radio communications — the technology your mobile phone uses.  (They were supporting the war effort by trying to create a torpedo that could be guided by wireless transmissions.)  The government took the patent and sat on it, but at least in 1997 the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Hedy a special award in recognition of her pioneering effort.

I mean, can you think of any Hollywood sex symbol working today who you could see as an engineer? Talk about deserving tribute from Erotic Mad Science!

And never forget — the sexiest organ a woman has…is her brain.