10/4/17 – day four of thirty-one days of horror!
I’m not much of an atomic age guy when it comes to horror,
but I do love me some swamp monsters, and Bernard L. Kowalski’s 1959 creature
feature Attack of the Giant Leeches more than fits the bill. I saw this staying
at my dad’s one weekend as a kid (he’d let me stay up and watch late night
horror movies on WLVI 56’s Creature Feature) and it totally freaked me out. For
one thing even as a 7-year-old I knew that leeches were gross, so it stood to
reason that giant ones were that much grosser, and though the rubber monster
suits (clearly worn over scuba divers) look cheesy to my adult eyes, my kid
brain found their tentacled, one-eyed appearance frightening. Something about
the whole production really made my youthful skin crawl, and revisiting it as
an adult I see why – the leeches take an almost sexual pleasure in draining
their Floridian victims (the giant leeches are the result of radiation from
Cape Canaveral!), one of whom is a white trash local vixen played by Yvette
Vickers. This is an AIP picture which means it was produced by loveable
skinflint Roger Corman, though Attack of the Giant Leeches doesn’t seem to hold
the cult cache of some of his later works. It must have had made a pretty big
impression on me as I ended up marrying a Florida girl who’s dad worked at
NASA.
