Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)

This is one of Corman's worst. It's hard to believe that a great professional like Leo Gordon wrote this. If the Cormans butchered his script, he should have taken his name off of it. There is eye candy in it for both males and females. The leading ladies are pleasant to look at, and it seemed that Jan Shepard truly enjoyed planting her chest against Ken Clark's bare, hairy wall.

This is pretty bad, even for a B-film junkie like myself. The most gruesome part for me was imagining "Liz Baby" coupling up with that husband of hers. Yuck! Maybe by swamp people standards he was prosperous and at least didn't smell like alligator poop.I will note that the scene of the leech lurching up to dine on a conscious but helpless Yvette Vickers did have a certain voyeuristic quality to it, but inter-species eroticism is just a bit too much.The creatures were really bad. Totally unconvincing and simply too anatomically absurd to not notice. And when shot, they voiced their displeasure through via a stock recording of what was evidently a very angry Persian cat. I wonder if they purr when content? I don't like giving these old sci-fi movies really low scores, but this one deserves it.

Shot over eight days on a super-low budget - with brothers Gene and Roger Corman as producer and executive producer respectively - Attack Of The Giant Leeches is a typical 50s sci-fi cheapie. The 50s was awash with films like this, brief and often absurd time-fillers made to capitalise on Cold War fears. Here, rocket activity in the Cape Canaveral area is blamed for mutated leeches which grow to human size and drag unsuspecting local yokels into the swamp. Well, it's a plot… of sorts.Local poacher Lem Sawyer (George Cisar) stumbles across a large creature quite unlike anything he has ever seen whilst wandering through swampland in the Florida Everglades. He shoots the creature several times. Later, adulterous woman Liz Walker (Yvette Vickers) and her secret lover Cal (Michael Emmett) are having one of their romantic trysts out in the swamp when Liz's husband Dave (Bruno VeSota) shows up. Dave chases the pair of them with a gun, planning to shake them up good, but to his horror he instead witnesses them being dragged into the swamp by one of the gigantic creatures shot at by Lem at the start of the film. No-one believes Dave when he tries to tell them what happened – everyone assumes he killed them in a fit of rage, and has concocted the story about the creatures to get himself off the hook. Later, some more locals searching for the missing bodies also go missing, and game warden Steve Benton (Ken Clark) heads into the swamp in search of answers. He discovers a pair of human-sized, blood-sucking leeches hiding in an underwater cave, feeding off the blood of the human victims they have dragged away from the water's edge.Cheap, stupid and generally laughable, Attack Of The Giant Leeches is a pretty weak offering in all departments. Much of it is shot in such glum colour that the action is difficult to see. The acting is wooden at best, and the dialogue often borders on the downright ridiculous. It's a surprise to learn the script is by TV and film character actor Leo Gordon, who appeared in countless westerns in the 50s, 0s and 70s. Alexander Laszlo's score is a weird jingling and jangling of instruments which sounds almost as if it's being improvised on the spot. If nothing else the film is extremely short, its running time coming in around the hour mark. It may be nonsense but at least it's brief nonsense. No-one in their right mind would seriously recommend Attack Of The Giant Leeches, but if you're an addict of these low budget 50s sci-fi B-movies you may find some charm in it.

It's sometimes a little hard to review and rate a movie like this, especially as someone who does happen to enjoy a cheesy Z-grade flick now and then. Am I comparing this movie to every other film ever made, or am I comparing this movie to the rest of the 50s drive-in flicks? I tend, personally, to put every movie on the same scale, so naturally this isn't going to compare to The Exorcist or Halloween. Even when comparing to 50s classics this movie is going to suffer in comparison. Let's face it, it's a pretty bad movie. There's no way around that. No matter how much of a chiller theater sort of fan you are, this movie has few redeeming qualities.We can start with the monsters, which are bad. I've seen elementary school kids with better costumes in Halloween parades. Essentially, guys covered in trash bags with some random suckers placed on them. They work somewhat out of the water, even if we can clearly see the actors arms moving inside the bags. Inside the water, they become formless blobs, with no discernible shape at all.Many will point to a "good scene" inside the underwater cave where the monsters are feeding on humans, which does have some slight nightmarish qualities, but again the effects just lack here. There is no blood, no injuries on the people. Even the dead bodies that start floating up to the surface show no injury makeup, at all, despite a sheriff stating "look at what's happened to her face", there are no injuries on her face that the viewer can make out.None of the people in the movie act in any natural way. The interaction between the characters is forced and the situations they are put in don't feel real at all, so the bad acting is put more into focus. If these were believable scenarios (believable in terms of a cheesy sci-fi movie), then bad acting can be somewhat excusable, but the combination is what makes this nothing but fodder for MST3K.