One of the early victim set-ups for Attack of the Giant Leeches (aka Demons of the Swamp, 1959) has a trampy wife of a fat bubba & his white trash best friend forced at point of a shotgun to wade into the gator swamp, to be attacked not by gators but by giant leeches that had already done away with the gators. That pretty much sums up the whole film, too.

For such a cheap thing, Giant Leeches' outdoor scenes are sometimes surprisingly atmospheric. One or two of the character actors seem to have had careers as background cast in half-hour television westerns, so they're only half bad.

Because the leeches look a bit like big pillow cases made of thin tarps, the film strives for the longest while to show as little of the monsters as possible. And given that the characters & dialogue are no great shakes, this gets pretty frustrating for a viewer with thumb on "pause" trying to get a good look at the idiotic costumes.

But just when it seems the critters are never going to be clearly shown, the production turns all "what the hell, who cares how phony they look," which is great.

The flimsy leech suits are shown in all their lack of glory, occasionally looking almost like cloth dinosaur costumes that won't hold their shape, with the shapes of the guys wearing the costumes showing through the wet tarps.

We see the Giant Pillowcases collecting their human victims & preserving them alive in their cavern beneath the pond. It's wonderfully funny, the sucking mouths giving big hickies to living screaming victims.

Why they keep the humans alive but killed all the gators we won't speculate. The film drags on rather pointlessly after this primary reveal, but fortunately the whole damned thing is over in a little more than an hour, then for a climax the pool is dynamited.

Crap? Sure. But hey, the film is just barely funny enough, & blessedly short enough, to be worth watching at least once without Mystery Science Fiction Theater 3000 puppet commentary.



What if a really bad actor is permitted just once in his life to make his own movie? Well by gum, he was after all the son of wealthy merchants, he could do whatever the hell he wanted! Ah, but when you realize they never let him do it again....

Newscaster Tom Gregory (played by the director), together with a professor (Robert Burton) & his two daughters (Susan Hart & Judee Morton), were left behind after the evacuation of L.A., which was invaded by the titular Slime People (1963). Other characters will enter the tale, none of consequence.

The slimers built an iron-hard wall of smog around the city so they can make L.A. slimier than it already is. They're actually Poop Monsters, as they came from the sewers of Santa Monica, driven above ground by human beings' subterranean atomic tests.

The characters stand around talking about what has happened, with little actually happening on screen.

When we do finally see one of the Slime People, it is a fishy rubber suit, not too badly made considering the rest of the movie's level of dufusity.

The dumber the scenes get, the more fog gets unleashed by fog machines, until you can't see anything. What a way to save money on sets!

The Slime People will have an audience for as long as there are people who enjoy laughing their asses off at the failures of others. If you're not smart enough to come up with your own snotty comments, you might want to go for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, with silhouettes of wisenheimer robots cracking wise.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl