The Flesh Eaters

This film is an updated for the 1960s version of the traditional late 30s-40s mad scientist tale but one with the surprising addition of gore, used very effectively for the time. Martin Kosleck here provides the mad scientist, a Nazi stereotype not uncommon to earlier eras. The Flesh Eaters themselves make for a memorable menace and the early scene with the two swimmers is an excellent bit of film making. The gigantic ones and their showdown with the hero at the end requires much suspension of disbelief but the monsters are also quite nasty-looking which makes for fun viewing if you're into seeing giant monsters. The final showdown actually reminds me a little of the film KRONOS.

Shucks, if you're looking for credibility and good acting, of =course= this is the wrong kind of movie! Myself, I watch a film like "The Flesh Eaters" precisely because it is implausible, even cruddy, and chock-full of overripe performances ... and further, of those delicious moments that "a serious film" or "a Hollywood moom pitcher" would never dare attempt.

And Martin Kosleck is always fun to watch. Check out his mini-bio and see if he doesn't deserve your immediate respect, even if he spent most of his U.S. career acting in junk.

Reviewers have not mentioned the gorgeous cinematography of THE FLESH EATERS, which is the work of the director, Jack Curtis, working under a pseudonym, Carson Davidson. Virtually every scene was shot outdoors in the merciless sun of summertime Long Island, but Curtis's lighting banishes unsightly shadows from the actors' faces; indeed, in many moments the exteriors are shimmering, almost silvery in their beauty. Deep focus and shallow focus are utilized with particular effectiveness. The women in the film are very good-looking, and as captured on film, they appear warm and absolutely delicious.

Another useful note is that THE FLESH EATERS was scripted by comic book writer Arnold Drake (The Doom Patrol, Marvel's Captain Marvel, et al). Arnold storyboarded the film, so every shot has the careful, formalized composition of a well-drawn comic strip. One shot, a sterling example of deep focus, sticks with me: the right profile of the hero dominates the left-side foreground of the frame. In a moment, two or three tiny figures at the far-removed shoreline move left to right, from behind the hero's head, and in perfect focus. Self-conscious? Yes. Striking? Absolutely.

Finally, Curtis & Co. shot THE FLESH EATERS silent, which is NOT apparent.The post-production looping matches flawlessly to the performances, and the voices have weight and presence. (Curtis had experience in the dubbing of foreign films for the American market.)

The gratuitous but not uninteresting Nazi-lab sequence was not shot by Curtis, and has none of the visual beauty of the rest of the film. Its shock value, though, is strong.

I rate THE FLESH EATERS AN "8" not against all films, but against other films of its type. As B exploitation, it is ingenious, nastily amusing, and immensely satisfying.

If you are going to sit down to watch this expecting some top notch special effects, intense acting, and a character driven plot, you deserve to be disappointed. Movies like this cannot conceal what they are or mislead people, so to criticize it for being cheap, hokey, and cheesy is sort like complaining that Star Wars takes place in outer space.

If you are hoping to be entertained, then this movie won't let you down! A reminder of how creepy these old movies can be if you were lucky enough to see it when you were under age 12, movies like this always benefit most when the viewer can suspend their cynicism and imagine they are 10 years old. The lack of any sets used in the film is probably because the actors chewed all the scenery, the gore, for its time, was pretty darn shocking, and the monsters are somehow easily destroyed by the same thing they eat.

Yes, skeletons shouldn't remain whole when the flesh is eaten off them. True, CGI effects blow away the lousy FX. Of course, a woman wouldn't tear off her shirt while the men stood by, still in their shirts and gawking when someone needed makeshift bandages. And I agree, Nazi scientists were not hiding out on Long Island in the 1960's. If you can accept these facts, and forgive the movie in spite of them (and many, many other similar flaws), you won't be let down for one second! Also, the song playing on the transistor radio in the opening scene, performed by a band called "The Teen Killers" is so catchy you won't stop whistling it for weeks!!!

This movie made a major impression on me when I was a kid and turned on the TV halfway though it on a Saturday afternoon. It was right in the middle of the scene where the archetypical cartoon beatnik character is babbling moronically about his diet...within seconds, I was watching a grown man scream like a little girl while being literally devoured from the inside out. That's all I remember from back then, that and how uncommonly UGLY those monsters turned out to be. I mean HIDEOUS (I'm still convinced that the brain-bug in "Starship Troopers" is just a watered down version of these things).

Later I watched it again, and again.

They start out really small, the monsters, so small that you can't see them except as a swarm. They are electrified somehow--electrified carnivorous blood cells, I think, the result of an evil Nazi experiment--and just sort of twinkle at first.

At the end, one gets really, really big. Once they're big enough to see, you realize just how UGLY these things are. These are old-school special effects, the kind that required some EFFORT, even when they were bad, and I miss that.

To add to this, you have a stranded island-load of the most ridiculous, archetypical, two-dimensional characters saying and doing the dumbest things imaginable. A mad Nazi scientist, a drunken has-been movie starlet, a once-successful pilot with a dark incident that ruined his life, and the aforementioned cartoon beatnik. It's like ten bad movies rolled into one. I'm not even convinced it's unintenionally funny. I imagine the people behind this debacle were made jaded and cynical by their hardships in Hollywood and amused themselves during the filming of this hack work by at least making it fun. My favorite part is when the square jawed pilot asks for something to bandage a wound with, and of course the attractive young women immediately rips her shirt off.

Bad special effects, bad writing, bad acting, and, I'm telling you, the ugliest monster I've ever seen. If this doesn't sound good to you, don't rent it, and stay away from my house.