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. Since 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.

Whey 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 it's over in a little more than an hour, then for a climax the pool is dynamited. But hey, the film is just barely good enough, & blessedly short enough, to be worth watching at least once without Mystery Science Fiction Theater 3000 puppet commentary.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl