Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)
In the backwoods swamps near a Florida game preserve, something is dragging people underwater and draining them of blood. A game warden connects the disappearances to a nest of enormous leeches lurking in a submerged cave and resolves to blast them out with dynamite.
Produced by Gene Corman for the American International circuit and shot in roughly a week, Attack of the Giant Leeches dressed its monsters in trash bags fitted with suction cups. A long-standing public-domain staple, it reached its widest audience decades later when Mystery Science Theater 3000 took it apart.
Background
Shot under the working title The Giant Leeches in about a week on an estimated budget of $70,000, Attack of the Giant Leeches was produced by Gene Corman, written by Leo Gordon, and directed by Bernard L. Kowalski. American International Pictures released it on October 1, 1959, on a double bill with A Bucket of Blood; in the United Kingdom it was retitled Demons of the Swamp. The script places its monsters, ordinary leeches supposedly grown to monstrous size by radiation drifting out of nearby Cape Canaveral, in the swamps surrounding a fictional Florida game preserve, where a local game warden works to convince skeptical neighbors that something is dragging people underwater.
What to watch for
The leech costumes, the film’s most-discussed feature, were created by dressing extras in black rubber raincoats or garbage bags fitted with rubber suction cups, an effect that reads as unmistakably homemade even by the standards of late-1950s creature features. Yvette Vickers, soon to appear in Playboy, plays one of the swamp-town residents whose affair sets a domestic subplot in motion alongside the monster story. The film found its widest audience decades after release, when Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed on it, introducing the cheap monster suits and swamp-set night photography to an audience far larger than the one AIP’s original double bill ever reached.
