B-Movies with Marg: Attack of the Giant Leeches



There is no brunette in a bikini in this film.



In a moment of gift-purchasing genius, I purchased a box set of Roger Corman Monster Movies for my boyfriend's birthday. Everyone likes a good (bad) "classic" B-movie, and the first film of the set did not disappoint. Attack of the Giant Leeches has a pretty simple premise: a game warden investigates a series of disappearances in a small swamp-side community after a body is discovered covered in giant sucker wounds. Two of those missing are a wild floozy named Liz and her husband's friend with whom she has been a porkin'.


Obviously you don't need me to tell you that it was giant leeches that were capturing the locals and sucking them dry.

If you are not familiar with Roger Corman (he executive produced Leeches), the gist of his whole deal is this: starting in the 1950s, he's produced literally hundreds of movies. He worked incredibly quickly with minuscule budgets, and his classic movies usually turned big profits, are pretty cheesy, and really fun. He's been called "The King of the Bs" and really embraced being that kind of filmmaker, creating lots of monster movies and exploitation pictures. He is credited over on IMDB with directing 56 projects himself between 1955 and 1990. Basically, epic.


Produced in 1959, Leeches is in so many ways a great introduction to the Corman production experience, simply because it is so absurd. The "giant leeches" really look more like squid - and were in reality, actors wearing sacks of thin black plastic with "suckers" sewn on. Their existence is a total mystery, save for an awkward piece of exposition toward the end of the film where no-lie near-by Cape Canaveral is potentially blamed for atomic exhaust from rocket launches.


One of the stars of the movie was Yvette Vickers, who also in 1959 graced the pages of Playboy as its July centerfold. In Leeches, she plays the aforementioned floozy Liz, who is inexplicably married to rotund character actor Bruno VeSota - it's a sort of Courtney Stodden and her husband if he got fat and also she hated him. Anyway, Liz is running around (of course!) with a guy who looks just like Adam Sandler (of course!), and they are eventually discovered writhing together near the swamp (where a body was seriously just discovered, people!) by her husband. He proceeds to chase them through the everglades, and into the swamp with a shotgun. As they are waist deep in the pond, he is about to forgive and forget when leeches come out and drag the scandalous couple off. It's great.



Yvette Vickers was quite pretty.

I didn't realize while watching the movie, but I'd heard of Yvette Vickers before. In 2011, her body was discovered mummified in her own home after succumbing to heart failure and lying undiscovered for about a year. No foul play was suspected, but that's some gruesome stuff right there... almost (not quite?) B-movie territory? "Attack of the Bombshell Mummy?" Oh my god, I'm the worst person in the world. That poor woman.


Ultimately, Attack of the Giant Leeches is exactly what you'd expect - except you might expect more leeches, rather than squid things. It's a nice introduction to monster movies of the era - fun plot holes to point out, no question that the good guys will prevail but a high enough body count to justify a 62 minute run time, use of dynamite, a naive sheriff who insists it must just be gators. Every movie should have one of those.


-Marg
@acuteinsomnia