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I Love the Leeches!
I am as unoriginal as the other reviewers of this movie. Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers (July 1959) is certainly one reason to watch this movie. Actually, I watched the movie for the articles. Oh, wait. This is a movie, not a magazine. Forget what I just said. Yvette was certainly a lovely young lady in this movie (she is older than my mother, meaning she is a grandmother now), but the star attraction is the rubbery-looking leeches that look about as menacing as Barney the Dinosaur. Well, Barney may be more threatening. Anyway, the leeches are a lot of fun and this movie has some moments of genuine tension.

Our story takes place in a swamp (where else would you find giant leeches?). There is a subplot involving a good-looking babe (Vickers) and her boyfriend and her hulkish husband. Forget all that nonsense and fast forward to the leeches practically leaping out of the water to capture the people who foolishly go into the water. Okay, maybe the leeches did not exactly LEAP, but they did float in a sinister fashion, slowly, I might add, and then pulled their victims under to be stored in a cave for leisurely blood sucking.

Nearly everyone else in this movie is clueless as to what is happening until almost the final minutes of the movie, when it suddenly becomes evident that GIANT LEECHES HAVE KIDNAPPED A BUNCH OF PEOPLE AND ARE SUCKING THEIR BLOOD OUT IN A CAVE. Had these people only read the title of the movie they might have had a clue earlier.

This movie could be another Roger Corman film that has so much schlock that it begs to be put out of its misery. However, with the exception of the lust...er...love story, this movie is played like a straight horror movie and turns out to be reasonably enjoyable. Yes, the leeches are a bit humorous when you first see them. Yes, you wonder how anything that moves as slow as these leeches could capture anyone. Yes, the radiation turning the leeches into giant killer monsters is incredibly cliché. Yet, this movie is a better than average mutated creature film.

I enjoyed watching this thing in the 1960's and being at the edge of my seat (I was very young then). Though my perspective has changed a lot in several decades, I still found this movie occasionally humorous, tense for a few moments, and short enough to be eminently worthy of watching once again. Yes, you have to like campy horror and science fiction movies from the late 50's and early 60's to like this movie, but if you do you have found a good addition to your collection.

Enjoy!

Attack of the Giant Playmate, I Mean Leeches
11 out of 12 reviewers (now 12 with mine) are in agreement. 'Attack of the Giant Leeches' is all about the very sexy, kittenish Yvette Vickers in the role of the town tramp Liz Walker. Yvette undoubtedly got the part based on her recent popularity as the July '59 "Playmate of the Month" and all the males out there who were in their adolescence back in the late fifties certainly appreciated her inclusion in the film. She certainly made it watchable for me.

Make no mistake, you're watching this movie for one reason and one reason only. Thanks for the memories Miss Vickers!

Note: Can you believe it, one reviewer actually prefered the leeches over Yvette. Now that's scary.

An all time classic 1950's sci-fi stupidity
It must have been great to live in the 1950's. All you had to really worry about was communists and radiation. The communists were evil soulless people who wanted to take over the Earth with a fleet of Sputniks, and radiation turned any animal into a giant killer.

So goes Attack of the Giant Leeches. Underwater monsters that kill without warning from the swampy deep. Apparantly they have an underwater cavern under the swamp where they take their victims to feed on them later. The leeches themselves are a marvel of 1950's technology. They look more like starfish than leeches. Actually they look like men wearing large, unformed rubber suits. Our hero ends up blowing the swamp with dynamite. Of course he doesn't want to, he's an environmentalist (they had those in the 50's). Before he blows the swamp to hell though, he must show his physique and skin dive for a good ten minutes, giving female viewers a thrill. But to no avail, fighting leeches with spearguns is futile.

Now lets get to why anyone would really watch this movie...drum roll please......Yvette Vickers. Oh she is hotter than a firecracker this one. Beautiful legs, face, and a killer bod that she doesn't mind showing off at all. She's Betty Page and Mamie Van Doren rolled up into one. Look how beautiful as she runs through the swamp. She's all wet and she's breathing hard which accentuates her beautiful bosom. Is she running from leeches? No, from her jealous fat husband with a shotgun. How's that for asubplot? Check this movie out, you can't beat the price.

ONE OF THOSE LOVEABLE FIFTIES HORROR FLICKS
This is one of the zillion Roger Corman horror flicks of the fifties in which normal creatures are turned into monsters thanks to you guessed it, nuclear energy. This time it's the bloodthirsty leech that gets the monster treatment, replete with actors in rubber leech suits. At a mercifully short 62 minutes, one doesn't have too much time to really fault this sometimes howlable horror. Ken Clark (a blond Clint Walker) is hopelessly deadpan and Yvette Vickers camps it up as the swamp slut. If you're an aficionado of the 50s giant bug movies, you'll have fun with this one.