Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Logan Dodd There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

Richard Chatten This early 'roughie' has acquired legendary status as the first really gory horror film to be made in America since the introduction of the Production Code of 1934.Montauk, Long Island provides a suitably desolate and atmospheric backdrop, well-used by director/cameraman Jack Curtis, and which saved on the construction of sets during a production that Martin Kosleck later recalled took place in fits and starts over a three year period. The visual punch of the exteriors also owes a lot to scriptwriter Arnold Drake, who brought his experience in comic books to bear by storyboarding the film in advance; while vivid visual effects were achieved by such low-tech means as scratching holes on the negative with a pin to create the eerie glowing points of light that depicted the creatures in their miniature form. Drake's script also has a dry wit that enhances the far-fetched proceedings, along with Radley Metzger's editing and Julian Stein's score.The four leads are all good (although surely they could have come up with a more original name for the hero than Grant Murdoch?). Barbara Wilkin and Rita Morley satisfyingly metamorphose from figure-hugging dresses into figure-hugging slacks upon arrival on the island, and the latter's performance as drunken diva Laura Winters improves considerably when her character eventually sobers up. It's probably not Ray Tudor's fault that Omar the beatnik has already outstayed his welcome before he even sets foot on dry land, since he was obviously written that way; but it makes his gruesome death all the more eagerly anticipated.The ending, however, comes as a bit of a letdown, since the flesh eaters were ironically a far more interesting and unusual menace while they were microscopically small; when they ultimately coalesce into one enormous and repulsive monster, the film's conclusion becomes disappointingly conventional. The gruesome gore effects that give this film its legendary status derive from the disgustingly intimate nature of the corrosive havoc they wreak on their victims - stripping flesh bare, tearing them apart from inside, and so on - in ways that derive directly from their tiny size.

BA_Harrison Jack Curtis's The Flesh Eaters opens in fine style with a pre-credits scene that reminds me a lot of the first shark attack in Jaws: a couple frolicking on a sailboat end up in the water (the woman minus her bikini top) where they are both devoured by something lurking unseen beneath the surface. Could Spielberg be a fan of this cult flick? I know I am, 'cos it's got virtually everything I could ask for in a low budget 60s monster movie, and then some: a mad scientist, buxom females, a beatnik spouting incomprehensible 'beat-speak', a silly monster or two, graphic violence, and best of all, in the restored version I saw, a spot of Nazisploitation.Byron Sanders stars as seaplane pilot Grant Murdoch, who is hired by beautiful PA Jan Letterman (Barbara Wilkin) to fly herself and alcoholic actress Laura Winters (Rita Morley) to Provincetown. En route, the plane experiences engine trouble, and Murdoch is forced to land at a remote, supposedly uninhabited island where the pilot and his two passengers must wait for a storm to blow over; there, they meet marine biologist Peter Bartell (Martin Kosleck), who is on the island running experiments on a microscopic parasite that lives in the surrounding waters. When a human skeleton is washed up on the beach (holding a bikini top), Bartell claims it to be the work of a shark, but Murdoch is not so sure, suspecting that the shifty looking scientist knows a lot more than he is letting on. Eventually, it transpires that the parasitic organisms in the water are microscopic flesh eaters, the result of Nazi biological weapons experiments during the war, and that Bartell intends to use these creatures for financial gain, and he isn't about to let anyone get in his way.Although the script for The Flesh Eaters is fairly routine for a 60s creature feature, with stock characters and clichéd dialogue, the film stands head and shoulders above most of its B-movie contemporaries thanks to an unusually grim atmosphere, some surprisingly gruesome effects, and its shameless Nazi plot device, which adds a delightfully lurid quality to proceedings. Most monster movies are guaranteed to feature a few characters that won't survive to see the end credits, but rarely do they meet their fate in such nasty ways as they do here, the death scenes including a man having his face eaten away and another being devoured from the inside out leaving a hole in his torso and his ribs and spine in clear view, a bloody gunshot to the eye, and a brutal stabbing. So graphic are these scenes that, even though the film is in black and white, some people still regard this as the first true gore movie, beating H.G. Lewis's splatter classic Blood Feast (1963) by a couple of years (the film was released in 1964, but completed in 1961).Perhaps even more shocking than the gore are the film's Nazi experiments, which predate similar exploitative scenes in films like SS Experiment Camp and Ilsa She Wolf of the SS by over a decade: shot in a documentary style, they depict female prisoners being stripped naked and forced into a test pool teeming with the man-made flesh eaters. The faux realism of these scenes makes them rather uncomfortable viewing despite the silly nature of the experiment itself. Fans of the Nazisploitation genre should definitely give this a watch purely for the sake of completion.The film ends in typically daft monster movie fashion, with the microscopic flesh munchers mutating into a single giant creature that can only be destroyed by an injection of plasma directly into its nucleus. Brave Murdoch risks his life to do so, ending the film with a suitably large explosion.8.5 out of 10, happily rounded up to 9 for the gratuitous scene where Jan takes off her blouse so that Murdoch can bandage his leg.

Tor Johnson-Lugosi I love this film! Well paced and brisk B-movie, incredibly gory for its time. It is NOT a "comedy-horror" as shown in the listing, but it has at least one unique comic relief character: a hippie raft drifter named Omar is warned not to come near the island shore, teeming with Flesh Eaters. "Yeah, gimme the love, man!" But the Hero shouts back, "Shut your big mouth before you end up a skeleton!" Omar is totally befuddled. "Hey, I feel the love dryin' up, man."Martin Kosleck is, as always, a quintessentially sadistic villain, using victims as guinea pigs for bacterial warfare experiments. *SPOILER ALERT*: In the most sadistic scene, Kosleck drops a flesh eater into Omar's drink that chews a hole through his stomach. Kosleck tape records his agonizing death screams, and sets Omar's corpse back onto the raft with the tape playing.My only gripe is that I wish they had restored the deleted scenes back into the original print, rather than show them separately as an extra. Nor does it have the original red-tint color scene, but I've only seen that from old 16mm transfers. This print offered on the DVD is very clean and well worth the price. And that music score - just perfect. Highly recommended for b-movie monster fans.

classicsoncall Just a couple of weeks ago I caught a flick on the Monster HD channel called "The Brain Eaters", so when this one followed I just had to be there. There's just something dreadfully intriguing about pictures this cheesy, and if you watch enough of them, you really get to form a weird perspective and insight. For example, when I first saw the skeleton that washed ashore in an early scene, I couldn't help but wonder if it was the same one that was used at the bottom of the swimming pool in the following year's "Teenagers From Outer Space". You watch enough of these and you can put together all kinds of connections that your friends and relatives will marvel at.Now if I didn't know better, I'd also be wondering if Omar's 'Rosebud' raft was an inadvertent tribute to 1941's "Citizen Kane". Geez, I can't believe I even came close to that one. But you know, this flick has it's share of great lines like the one in my summary above. Or how about Murdoch's excellent analysis of the stranded islanders' situation - "Let's face facts Professor, we've stumbled onto a living horror".Here's what I'm thinking. You take the basic set up, a number of people of diverse backgrounds on an isolated island in the middle of an ocean. Let's say you've got this professor, a washed up actress full of herself, a hot looking assistant that the viewer can immediately relate to. Throw in a rugged good looking hero, and as a foil, come up with a beatnik character for the young set. You might also want to add an eccentric wealthy couple whose money is no good in their current predicament. I guess there's no way of knowing which work came first or which one inspired the other, but in "Gilligan's Island", the laughs were at least intentional.