Simply Perfect

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

While this film definitely ranks as a bomb (or should I say reeks), I must admit that I was very impressed by the speech that the hero makes in regards to why they cannot bomb the heck out of the ravine where an apparently giant leeches are living. Having scared the ferocious alligators away, they are spotted looking for lunch.Dealing with a middle aged husband trying to scare his trampy younger wife and her obvious lover, it quickly turns menacing when the husband witnesses his wife and her boyfriend being pulled into the marshes by something terrible. Sent to jail for their apparent parent murder, the husband probably hangs himself, little realizing that deep beneath could not quite so beautiful briny sea, the group of supposed victims are being munched on for a bloody snack for the actual giant creatures who crave fresh blood, leaving their victims with plunger like marks on their face as the way to die from the lack of plasma.Almost impossible to watch when you have to watch these leeches actually remove blood from their still living captives, this just becomes gross. It does happen on screen, giving this little explanation as to why tiny little leeches from the marsh are made huge simply by their reaction from the nearby Cape Canaveral. There are several major continuity mistakes, and the dialog is worse than rotten. Fortunately it is over in the hour, making that aspect of this of dreck all the more tolerable

As a fan of Leo Gordon, I was glad to catch up with this movie on Alpha's excellent DVD. It was never released theatrically in my area, nor was it ever screened on local TV. Leo Gordon's script for this one has been denigrated right, left and center, but I found it reasonably entertaining and the movie certainly held my attention throughout despite its rock bottom budget and the ridiculous giant leeches, all two or three of whom look like the sort of inflated rubber toys you can buy at any dollar and ten cents store. I'm also a fan of Yvette Vickers. She had a solid role here and she played it well. Good girl, Jan Shepard, also deserves a pat on the back. I didn't think much of the men, led by good guy Ken Clark and baddie Bruno Ve Sota. But who's looking at them? They were adequate enough, I guess. However, Bernard L. Kowalski's direction with its nimble pacing and good use of both location and studio sets, I would regard as a definite plus.

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.

This is one of those so-bad-it's-good '50s monster flicks that is as much fun as its title, and stacks up as a quick and easy 60 minutes of monster madness. Residents of a small hick town are plagued by rubbery blood-sucking creatures living in a nearby swamp that kidnap human victims and keep them barely alive in an underwater cave so they can keep sucking them dry. For a movie of this era, it's pretty gruesome in the way the leeches suck their victims' flesh and how this leaves them as stone-faced corpses floating back up to the surface. It's always a treat to see sexy Yvette Vickers (ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN) as the town tramp, who two-times her "tub of lard husband" (Bruno Ve Sota). With Gene Roth as the doubting sheriff. **1/2 out of ****