The Swamp’s Secret : Attack of the Giant Leaches – Film review by Tom Weaver

The Swamp’s Secret : Attack of the Giant Leaches – Film review by Tom Weaver

– [Tom] Hi, I’m Tom Weaver. And we’re about to watch the “Attack of the Giant
Leeches” pre-credit sequence. Pre-credit sequences
weren’t common in ’30s and ’40s
horror pictures, but along about the late 1950s they started popping up
with some regularity, Roger Corman’s
“The Brain Eaters” and especially “Not of This
Earth,” both had good ones. Before we see the title of Roger and Gene Corman’s “Night
of the Blood Beast,” we see the rocket taking off. Even the down and dirty
backyard moviemakers of that era started providing
them regularly: “Astounding She-Monster,
“Giant Gila Monster,” “Hideous Sun Demon,”
“Frankenstein’s Daughter.” “Queen of Outer Space” had a
15-minute pre-credit sequence. It takes so long for the
opening credits to run you’ve completely forgotten
that they haven’t run. This, I’d say, is a
pretty weak opener. We see what has to be an
unoccupied leech costume on the surface of the water with somebody under
it making it undulate. The poacher puts
a few slugs in it and then takes a
slug out of his jug. Not a great beginning,
but that’s appropriate since “Giant Leeches” also
does not have a great middle or a great end. As probably everybody who will buy this
Film Masters Blu-Ray and listen to this
commentary knows, the monster scenes in this movie are nothing to write home about with the exception
of the grotto scenes. For the third time in a
very short stretch of time, ’50s monster kids heard the
upcoming Alexander Laszlo music and watched this movie’s title appear a few words at a time the same way that it does in the then-recent “Night
of the Blood Beast.” Musicologist David Schecter
of Monstrous Movie Music, which is mmmrecordings.com, tells me that he’s
led to believe that Laszlo wrote this novachord
heavy cue for “Blood Beast” and reused it in “Giant Leeches” and “Beast from Haunted Cave.” But we don’t know if
Laszlo wrote any new music from “Giant Leeches.” In a moment, you’ll
see that he gets the kind of onscreen credit
that makes you think he must’ve. Thanks to David Schecter, I was able to say a
lot more about Laszlo on the Film Masters’ “Blood
Beast” lecture track. Other Laszlo credits: “The Amazing Mr. X,”
“Tarzan’s Magic Fountain,” “The Atomic Submarine,”
and “Joe Palooka, Champ.” I mentioned the latter only because Laszlo is
also in it uncredited, playing a character
named Aladar. Me being me, I just had to know what Laszlo does in the picture, what kinda character Aladar is, but it’s not on (clears
throat) that Russian site that, well, you know which one I mean. Walker’s General Store,
where the elite meet to eat, the elite swamp rats that is, “the swamp trash” as
Sheriff Kovis calls them. On the official music cue
sheet for “Giant Leeches,” six of the cues listed
were written by Lou Froman and Misha, like Misha
Auer, Terr, T-E-R-R. The titles are “Cat’s
Meow,” “Riding the Cat,” “Cat’s Blues,” “Rock
and Roll Doggy,” “Blues in 3D,” and
“Nice Evening.” – [Walker] You hear me, girl? (speaker catcalls) (dog howls) – [Tom] Sorry for
the interruption. – [Girl] What you want now? – [Tom] The honky-tonk piano and saxophone music
we’re hearing now, according to David Schecter, it’s a safe bet that
it’s the Froman-Terr cue that’s titled “Cat’s Meow.” Our cast of swamp
rats and polecats includes Bruno VeSota as Walker. – Someday, I’m gonna
give that she-cat the whoppin’ she’s
been asking for. – [Tom] Starting on the
left, Michael Emmet as Cal, Joseph Hamilton as Sam,
and George Cisar as Lem, the poacher from the
pre-credit sequence. All three characters
are going to die the way they were
born, screaming. – [Cal] She’ll be doing it. – [Tom] With the hat, Daniel
White, he’ll also be leeched. – [Speaker 1] Too many people. They go in the swamp,
they never come out. – I put five- – [Tom] Why were there so many ultra-cheap sci-fi horror
movies in the late 1950s? What started this voyage to
the bottom of the barrel? Well, I’ll tell you. I know that you
know that the 1950s started with several
of the major studios turning out some
of the best sci-fi and sci-fi horror
movies of the decade. “The Thing,” “The Day
the Earth Stood Still,” “War the Worlds,” “It
Came from Outer Space,” “Creature from
the Black Lagoon,” “20,000 leagues,” et cetera. But by the mid ’50s, the majors were
backing off a little. Universal’s William Alland
looked at the grosses of arrival studios’
much cheaper sci-fis and realized that
Universal was overspending. Paramount showed George
Powell the door, et cetera. Suddenly most of the
major studios’ sci-fis weren’t a heck of a
lot better than AIPs, weren’t any better than
those of indie producers like Gramercy Pictures. Then came the next step down, the horror sci-fi field
became very overcrowded as indie moviemakers
started shooting movies for very little money,
sometimes almost none. I’m talking to
you, Jerry Warren, Ronnie Ashcroft, et cetera. And movie theater managers,
who could pay XXX dollars for a well-done horror sci-fi, or just X dollars for a cheapie, would wanna pay X and
go for the cheapie. That was the point at which some reliable
sci-fi movie producers, Ivan Tors and Sam
Katzman among them, washed their hands of sci-fi. And other producers
lowered the sci-fi budgets, even more than they already had, even within the sci-fi
universe of Roger Corman. Look at such movies as
“Day the World Ended,” “It Conquered the World,”
“Attack of the Crab Monsters,” okay production values, some good people with
recognizable names in the casts, running times of
70, 75, 80 minutes. But now, just a couple
years down the road, almost everything is
cheap, cheap, cheap, 60-minute running times,
actors you never heard of. (sultry jazz music) Interrupting myself. When Yvette Vickers prepares to go from her Japanese robe down to her leopard-print
undergarments, I believe that it’s illegal to talk on a commentary
about anything else. On the soundtrack, a jazz combo. Sax, piano, bass,
and maybe drums to accentuate Liz
Baby’s sexuality. Talking to interviewer
Barry Brown, Bruno VeSota said about Yvette,
“I loved Yvette Vickers. I think Yvette Vickers
was a better sex symbol than 10 Marilyn
Monroes put together. She was most certainly a
fine actress,” unquote. Well, in the years to come, generations of monster kids
felt the same way about her. For the first couple years
of my interviewing career, (sighs) I stuck to writers,
producers, directors. But then when I started looking
for actors and actresses, Yvette was at the
top of my list. But the earth had
swallowed her up. No one I talked to knew where
to begin to look for her. But finally I got an address. And on a trip to California,
I went to her house. But it was such a
tiny wreck of a house, more like a two-story
shack falling apart, the steps leading up
to it falling apart, tall weeds everywhere. I couldn’t believe that
anyone lived there. I’d beat a hasty retreat. But I wrote a letter
to that address, telling her who I was and
that I wanted to interview her and gave the phone number of
the motel where I was staying. And to my joy, she called, and she said she’d be
happy to talk with me. We got together
for the first time at a Hamburger Hamlet, I think. I could be wrong. And it was genuinely
exciting to meet her and hear her stories. And we stayed in touch for
the entire rest of her life. And yes, she did
live in that house and she died in that house. And maybe the house killed her. When her body was found and the authorities
entered the place, it was the black mold capital
of the US west of the Rockies. More on that later. (door thuds) Getting back to
what I was saying about the late ’50s
monster pictures getting to be
breathtakingly cheap. “Giant Leeches” was
made during this era of tightening the purse strings to the point of strangulation. It was the third of three movies produced by Roger
Corman’s brother Gene and directed by
Bernard Kowalski. The first two were “Hot Car
Girl” and “Blood Beast.” Both “Hot Car Girl”
and “Giant Leeches” were written by Leo Gordon, the formidable-looking
tough guy actor. In our 1985 interview,
Gene Corman told me- – [Gene] Leo was a very
burly, tough fellow, but his background
belied his looks. He was an avid reader, and
he would read on many levels. And he was a very witty,
interesting conversationalist. In many ways, his appearance
in those tough guy roles probably worked to
his disadvantage because to have Leo walk
into a story conference was somewhat intimidating. I remember on “Tobruk,”
having Arthur Hiller, who was really a very
fay, gentle soul, taken aback when he met Leo. It took maybe two or
three story conferences before he could come to grips
with the size and bulk of Leo. The way he presented
himself was intimidating. – [Tom] And while we’re on
the subject of Gene Corman, here are Yvette
Vickers’s memories of working with him
on “Giant Leeches.” – [Yvette] Poor Gene almost died when we were doing the scenes over at the Pasadena Arboretum. – [Yvette] We were there
late one night, in the water, and he got violently ill. He caught pneumonia. Gene was such a nice person. I thought he was so
helpful, so supportive, so caring about the actors. You feel that. I remember being on TV shows where the New York people
would come on the set and everybody would start
shaking in their boots. It was time to shape
up, shoulders back, chin up like we
were in the army. And I thought, “What are we, a bunch of trained
animals or something? We are human beings.” And when a producer treats
you like a human being, they get a lot more out of you. I liked Gene Corman very much. (eerie music) – [Tom] Chowing down
like he’s afraid someone will take the bowl away, Gene Roth, as Sheriff Kovis. Eons ago, I threw away my
collection of Famous Monsters because I really
had no use for them. But first, I went
through each issue looking for anything
of interest. And one of the best things that came out of that
salvage operation was the article
Voltura’s Last Chapter, peppered with Roth quotes. Interrupting myself. Kovis’s deputy Morton, smoking
in the blurry background, is played by Guy Buccola, who played one of this
movie’s two giant leeches. The Roth quotes
in Famous Monsters came from his chats
with, again, Barry Brown. Toward the end of Roth’s life, he had a part-time job
in a Hollywood drugstore and working in a bookstore
across the street, and less than a
block away was Brown. And Brown would occasionally
visit Roth at lunchtime or went on a break. Roth said that he was an extra in the Lon Chaney
“Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Roth would’ve been just
out of his teens then, but didn’t start
working as a movie actor until the early 1940s. Roth was tall and beefy, and a great villain in a lot
of B pictures and serials. In the late ’50s, he
suddenly started popping up in sci-fi and horror cheapies
with some regularity. “Giant Leeches,”
“Zombies of Mora Tau,” “Tormented,” “Earth
vs. the Spider,” and, the creme de la creme,
he was Igor in “She Demons.” In 1976, Roth was killed by a
speeding hit-and-run driver. Bernard Kowalski,
29 years old in 1958 when he directed
“Giant Leeches.” He grew up in the business. Starting at age
four, he was an extra in Warner Bros. movies. And as a teenager, he began
working with his father, who was an assistant director
and production manager. Directing-wise, Bernie
got his feet wet with TV, “Richard Diamond,”
“Broken Arrow,” et cetera. Making the jump to movie
director wasn’t much of a jump. His first movies were for
Roger and Gene Corman, made so quickly and so cheaply that the experience was
probably indistinguishable from directing a TV episode. In fact, Tyler McVey
said that to me. I asked him how he liked the rush, rush pace
of a Corman movie, and he just scoffed
that it was just like TV and therefore no sweat. Regarding “Giant Leeches,”
Kowalski told me- – [Kowalski] We shot
all the swamp scenes at this Pasadena Arboretum, a beautiful refuge
for ducks and geese. The interiors were done
at the Chaplin Studios. The underwater scenes were done in a private
home in Studio City. It had a private pool
with a viewing glass. We would dress it up
with plants and things, then bring the actors in and shoot the
underwater scenes there. – [Tom] 31-year-old Ken Clark
may have been a good choice for his role as a law enforcer being the son of
a deputy sheriff. He grew up in Ohio, married
his high school sweetheart and, against his
father’s wishes, moved with his
family to California in hopes of becoming an actor. He pursued acting jobs
but found little success. The movies didn’t want
him, but the Army did. And afterwards, the blonde,
six-foot-three Clark became a physical culture model appearing in magazines
and advertisements. He got a small uncredited part on an episode of TV’s “Climax!” and that led to a
20th century Fox test and a seven-year Fox contract. But maybe the only halfway
decent part he played was the hunky stewpot
in “South Pacific.” After Fox dropped him,
he did a lot of TV. He had the right look
for an action series guy, but he starred in two
pilots, “Wildcatters” and Brock Callahan, the
latter directed by Don Siegel, and neither pilot flew. He had starring roles in
only two Hollywood pictures, “Giant Leeches”
and another sci-fi, the ultra-boring
“12 to the Moon.” In 1960, he relocated to Italy and tried his fortunes there. In doing so, he kicked all
his relatives to the curb. His wife, three
children, his sisters, and anybody else who
was wrestling around in his family tree. Overseas, he starred in a bunch
of sword-and-sandal movies, spy flicks, and
spaghetti westerns. After a long flurry of
activity, things got sporadic. He was in Rome, just finishing
shooting a TV episode, when he was cut down
by a heart attack, three days shy of
his 82nd birthday. – Do you want some coffee? – [Tom] I’d love some coffee. This horrible, boring
four-minute rowboat scene is putting me to sleep. One of my pet peeves. You sit down to watch a
60-minute movie thinking, “Well, if it’s 60 minutes, it’s gotta be sort
of fast paced,” and you find yourself watching
one dead scene after another. Take out most of the Ken
Clark, Jan Shepard scenes, take out the long no dialogue
posse and bloodhounds scene. Get “Giant Leeches”
down to 50 or 52 minutes and it’d go up one star
in everybody’s book. I guarantee you. Jan Shepard didn’t
really have a hard time getting into the acting biz. Born in Pennsylvania, she
acted in high school plays and, during a trip to
California to visit a cousin, she joined a theater group
and never looked back. Soon she was on TV doing
some religious show. Her roommate, Amanda
Blake did a 1953 movie called “Sabre Jet,”
recommended Shepard for a role, and Shepard got it. And now Shepard was
in the movies too. There were auditions for the
Nan part in “Giant Leeches.” She read for it, and she got it. And then learned that
she was pregnant. She told the
Psychotronic interviewer that Bernard Kowalski said they were going to do
“Leeches” in two months and Shepard thought that
she’d still look fine. She continued, quote,
“Unfortunately, two months became three months. And it wasn’t until
five months later that we started ‘Leeches.’ I was running all over town, finding clothes that wouldn’t
make me look pregnant. I had them fooled until
the director asked me to do a scene in the swamp. The water was completely
stagnant, dirty and non-moving. I finally told Bernie
Kowalski that I was pregnant. He agreed it wasn’t a good idea for me to get in
that filthy water, so he threw out the scene.” An interesting shot here. The fishing poles, or whatever
they are, look like bars, signifying Dave being trapped
in an unhappy relationship. No, I don’t really believe that. But once in a while I like
to show that I can play that horseshit film scholar
game as well as anybody. I asked Yvette Vickers if she enjoyed working
with Bruno VeSota. – [Yvette] Oh, yes, we
got along very well. And he was a fine actor. I loved working with him. And we respected
each other a lot. I was just heartbroken
when he passed away. Barry Brown told me he had died,
and I attended his funeral. I was really sad, because
I felt that he was one of the very good character
actors of this town and should’ve had more credit. All of our scenes in “Giant
Leeches” had a lot of heart and a lot of meat to them. (door thuds) (bells ringing) – [Tom] And outside
is Dave’s old pal Cal, waiting for Dave to
leave for Miss Showby’s so that he can make his move. Michael Emmet was the star of
“Night of the Blood Beast,” gave a good performance, and I love to hate
him here in “Leeches.” I’d have enjoyed having the
opportunity to talk to Emmet, but I never knew where
to start looking. A couple minutes ago, when Liz was taking
off her Japanese robe and getting ready
to put on her dress, I think I spotted a Groucho
Marx bust on a table nearby. Maybe when I see this
on Blu-Ray, I’ll be
more sure of that. Now I see the reflection of
the boom on the top of the car. – After all, place
wouldn’t be the same- – [Tom] Bernard Kowalski
on Yvette Vickers, whom he also directed
in an episode of TV’s “M Squad”
with Lee Marvin. In this sound
clip, Kowalski says that when she did
“Giant Leeches” she was already a
Playboy playmate, but actually Yvette didn’t
appear in Playboy until 1959. – [Kowalski] All of
us doing the show were really impressed with her, because she had been
a Playboy centerfold, and we understood why; she had a gorgeous figure. She was hardworking, willing
to do whatever she had to do, including some things
she didn’t like, like going underwater
and being dragged around. She was a first-class
trooper and a good actress, and someone that we were very
happy to be working with. I could say nothing but
positive things about her. – [Tom] Now we’ve got a jazz
combo on the soundtrack, dance band, the music. David Schecter says, “This is probably the
cue ‘Cat’s Blues.'” When I interviewed Yvette, I told her what Kowalski
had said about her, that she was a
trooper and so on, and she was
delighted to hear it. – [Yvette] (laughs)
Bless his heart, that’s very sweet of him. As I mentioned before, I know that I can
overcome almost anything. There are times when
you wanna be sure that everybody’s protecting you, and I think it’s
good to be upfront about things that you are
a little frightened of. But in general, I’ll do
whatever the part requires. – You know, w-we’ve covered
miles of back channel and- – [Tom] Here’s another
scene no one needed. Jan Shepard still walks
among us by the way. As I sit here recording
this, she’s now 95 years old, and I hope that I
haven’t jinxed her and that she’s still around
when this Blu-ray comes out. Castle of Frankenstein’s
“Giant Leeches” review couldn’t have been much shorter. “Wretched, no
budget horror film, ridiculous giant
leeches in Florida. Everglades don’t look so
ridiculous to victims.” (Nan sighs) When I do an audio commentary and find that I need
to fill 12 seconds here and 15 seconds there, I
like to read a line or two from a contemporary review. Well, I was thwarted this time. Practically no one
reviewed “Giant Leeches,” and those who did
said nothing quotable. As if Yvette Vickers
isn’t hot enough just standing in place, she gets a makeout
scene in “Leeches” and it may be even
more provocative than the one she has
with handsome Harry in “Attack of the
50 Foot Woman,” and part of it is
an extreme closeup. Yvette was a wild chick. She married for the first
time in 1953, Don Prell. He was a jazz musician. By his own admission,
he was a hick, and they got married in Tijuana. Coming home, they
stopped in Los Angeles at a place where some
of Yvette’s friends were throwing a party. It was a bit much
for the poor guy. This was the first time
he was exposed to, quote, “guys that were like ladies.” And after a while, he’d
had enough and left, and spent his wedding night
at his parents’ house. Don later bought a
house for Yvette, the house she lived the rest
of her life in and died in. After Yvette did a
national shampoo commercial and began to think
she was on her way, she decided that Don
was holding her back. One day he found a note
on a table, “Get out.” Another Vickers’s memory
of “Giant Leeches.” – [Yvette] A lot of it was
shot at night, unintentionally. We started out shooting day
for night, but we went over. And we literally ended up
shooting a couple of scenes by the light of flashlights
and headlights from a car. Gene kept saying, “We gotta
finish these scenes today. We gotta move.” So we kept going into the night, with whatever light
we could find. – [Tom] In horror novelist
Stephen King’s nonfiction book “On Writing: A
Memoir of the Craft,” he writes about
his formative years and of being a horror
movie buff as a boy, quoting, “And when I lay in
bed at night under my eve, listening to the
wind and the trees or the rats in the attic, it was not Debbie
Reynolds as Tammy or Sandra Dee as Gidget
that I dreamed of, but Yvette Vickers from
‘Attack of the Giant Leeches,’ or Luana Anders
from ‘Dementia 13.’ Nevermind sweet,
nevermind uplifting, nevermind Snow White and
the seven goddamned dwarfs. At 13, I wanted monsters
that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that
came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and
girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.” Here’s where I would
include a line from a review if somebody had bothered
to write one in 1959. 7,800 miles of places to look, but bloodhound Dave
Walker is making a beeline for Cal and Liz Baby. – [Speaker 2] I know this
swamp like my finger. – My first husband
was a no-good bum. – [Tom] Yvette told me
that one of her husbands tried to shove her
out of a moving car and another time he
chased her with a knife. He would end every
argument with, “You are not worthy of me.” – He must’ve been a prize pig. – [Tom] In a
moment, Liz will say that after two years
working in a lousy binner, she was ready for the first guy
who said a nice word to her. Huh, Liz Baby worked in
a binner for two years and no man showed
any interest in her? What was the name of the
place? Adam and Steve’s? Yvette talked to me about
why Liz had to reveal why she became Mrs. Dave Walker. – [Yvette] They had
to explain that. I’m sure everybody was wondering why my character was
married to this big fat guy. And then when you hear the
reason, it’s very believable. Things like that do happen, where somebody treats
you with kindness and you cannot see
them as being an ugly or unattractive person. I like that scene a lot. I was recently on
a local TV show where they showed a film
clip from “Giant Leeches,” and an artist friend
of mine saw it and thought it was a
kazan movie, (laughs) baby doll or some
real important film. And he said, “Gee, I didn’t know you worked in those
Tennessee Williams movies.” Some of the scenes that we did came across as being
real thoroughbred scenes. – Two seconds of what
I pull the trigger. – No point getting riled, Dave. Wasn’t my fault. – [Tom] Bruno VeSota, born
in 1922, so he’s 36 here. He had only four years
on Yvette Vickers. Bruno was very busy in
early television in Chicago, acting, writing, directing. Then came to Hollywood
in the early ’50s. The dream-like, no
dialogue horror film “Dementia” from 1955, VeSota
co-produced and acted in it and maybe did a lot
more behind the scenes. Watch, if you dare, the extreme closeups
of the rich man, played by VeSota
with blonde hair, as he ogles a samba dancer and gluttonously
eats chicken dinner. But after we see
him in these scenes, that we wish we could
unsee, VeSota pays a price. The gammon shivs him
with a switchblade, pushes him off a penthouse
balcony, saws off his hand, and then deposits the hand
in a flower girl’s basket. The flower girl played
by Bruno’s wife, with whom he had
an army of kids. “Giant Leeches” Dave
Walker wasn’t getting none, but in real life it looks
like Bruno did all right. A few years later, Bruno
became a horror sci-fi regular when he fell into Roger
Corman’s clutches. Because of his size, he
stands out in “The Undead,” in which he’s decapitated; “The Wasp Woman,”
drinks his blood; “War of the Satellites,”
“A Bucket of Blood”; “The Haunted Palace,” and a
bunch of non-horror of Corman’s. He directed Corman’s
“The Brain Eaters.” On the downside,
he also directed “Invasion of the Star Creatures” and he got mixed up
with Jerry Warren. Watch, if you dare,
as a shirtless Bruno gets a seven-minute
massage in Warren’s “Creature of the Walking Dead.” This is one of those
maddening scenes where a young couple runs
away from a much older or much less healthy guy, a guy who moves at the speed of a guy pushing
a Cadillac uphill. But no matter how fast
the youngsters run, no matter how many times
Bruno stops to fire his rifle, to yell at them, to reload, when the youngsters
finally run outta gas, Bruno is right behind them. As I know you know, this
tortoise and the hare stuff happens in a couple of
Universal’s “Mummy” movies. By the way, speaking of Bruno’s
abilities as a director, I recently read
for the first time an interview with screenwriter
Charles B. Griffith, conducted by somebody
named Aaron W. Graham, Bruno VeSota came up,
and Griffith said, “Bruno was a sweetie pie. He was a really nice guy
that everybody loved. He fancied himself a director. One time he went out
to do a Corman picture and took one shot
in one direction, then turned the camera around
to shoot the guy answering. When he started to turn
the camera around again, the crew quit on the spot. Bruno said, ‘What did I do?’ He just didn’t know.” Griffith didn’t describe
the situation very well. What I think he was saying
was that VeSota was directing a back and forth dialogue
scene between two people and he intended to get
one person’s first line, turn the camera around and
get the second person’s reply, turn the camera around again to get the first
guy’s second line, turn the camera, na,
na, na, na, na, na. Not the way it’s done. Even I know that 3,000
miles from Hollywood. (Liz sighs) – Come on. Keep goin’. – Dave, please.
You gotta listen. – [Tom] Some impassioned
acting in this scene. Dave standing over
them Grim Reaper-like as Cal tries to kick
Liz Baby to the curb, and Liz responds by giving
him a face full of saliva. Unfortunately, she shoots
her whole saliva wad the first time. The second time is
not as impressive. One of the drive-in
movie devotees who haunts the classic horror
film board wrote of Liz Baby, “I hope that connoisseur of white trash tootsies,
Erskine Caldwell, caught her performance
as Liz Walker in ‘Attack of the
Giant Leeches.’ Forget Fay Spain or Tina Louise, Yvette’s smoking hot bayou babe was to the Little Acre born.” – [Yvette] It was hard work. That arboretum does have a very swampy
jungle-like atmosphere. You felt like this
was the real thing. So yes, there were some
uncomfortable moments, especially when Bruno VeSota
forced us to wade backwards into the swamp. I know I looked
scared in that scene, and I probably really
was. (chuckles) But I have to give Gene
Corman credit again. He was waiting with the
crew there on the sidelines with army blankets and
brandy to keep us warm and to try and keep us healthy. (Liz sobbing) – You think you’ve
learned enough to stay away from my woman, Cal? – Oh, oh! A-Anything, Dave. (Cal speaking indistinctly) – It’s well known that only
two leech costumes were made. So every time I watch the movie, I think that there are
only two leech monsters. The movie’s even creepier if you tell yourself there
might be 10 or 20 or 50. No one in the movie ever
tries to put a number on how many there are. It’s kinda senseless to think if atomic energy is
mutating swamp creatures, there’d be just two. As you’ll hear later, the guys inside the leech
costumes got the jobs because they agreed to
make the leech costumes, the same way Chris Robinson got to play the beast
from “Haunted Cave,” by agreeing to make the beast
from “Haunted Cave” costume. Corman had come a long way
down from hiring Paul Blaisdel to make his monsters
in early pictures to getting a kid, Chris Robinson to make the “Haunted Cave” suit, by getting a basketball player
to make the leech suits. – [Search Party Member]
Come on in, boys. – [Tom] The costumes were
a raincoat-like material that had lots of,
quote, unquote, “suction cups” glued to ‘em, and inside there had to
be some kind of framework so that the costume
held some sorta shape. So the raincoat material
went around chicken wire. If, like me, you weren’t quite
sure what chicken wire is, google up an image. It’s wire netting
of hexagonal mesh. As soon as you see the
image, you’ll recognize it as something you’ve seen
any number of times. But the trouble
with chicken wire is it’s hard to work with it without occasionally
getting cut. And working inside of chicken
wire, sometimes underwater, surely guaranteed
lots of little cuts. – That’s why you chased
her through the swamp with a shotgun. Come on, Walker. – [Tom] Now it’s Bruno VeSota’s
turn for a giant closeup. I wasn’t even going
to mention this. I’m not sure I like
having to mention this, but we’re about to
start another stretch of nothing happening and I
need to talk about something. So for most of the
umpty-umpth years that I interviewed old
timers for Fangoria, I wrote about half of the
video reviews in each issue and, boy, did they give me
a lot of junk to look at. But I was getting paid and I had a year’s
younger nephew, who liked getting advanced peeks at new direct-to-video
movies, so I gritted my teeth. I don’t know if I ever
gritted ‘em any harder than when I watched
a 2009 remake of “Attack of the
Giant Leeches.” I don’t even think it
qualifies as a movie. It was shot with a handheld
video camera in some process that made it appear that
every other frame was missing. It looked more like a home movie than anything that
could come out on video and that people would
be expected to pay for. Sometimes they’d
show the leech’s lake and it did look like
it was a mile across, but in other scenes it
was played by a puddle, maybe 15 feet across. Fast forward for a few seconds. If you don’t wanna hear this, it’s depressing just to talk about how rancid this thing was. Interrupting myself. Dave Walker finally
becomes a swinger. One wonders where he got
such a stout length of rope. And by the way, I’ve
always wondered… – How did he get
up there so high? – [Tom] By the way, the
deputy was again Guy Buccola, one of the leech actors. In the 2009 remake
of “Giant Leeches,” the scenes of the
abducted people in the leech’s grotto
were filmed on the grass in what looks like somebody’s
front yard in broad daylight. And this was my favorite. One of the grotto victims
floats up out of the water, breaks the surface
spitting water and gasping for air like crazy. But were later told that
he’d been dead for days when he surfaced. I gave the 2009
“Leeches” one star, Fangoria’s lowest rating, and wished that I was allowed
to use negative numbers. When Barry Brown
interviewed Bruno VeSota, the actor bluntly let him know what he thought of the
giant leeches costumes. “The giant leeches, as a
picture, wasn’t bad at all. The only thing I found
fault with was the monsters. One of the things that separates the men from the
boys in this business is knowing that if you’re
making a monster picture, you’d better make
a perfect monster, or as near perfect as possible. A producer cannot allow himself to get trapped in a
financial situation where he lets the zippers
on the monster suits show. So it came to pass with
the ‘Giant Leeches.’ Ed Nelson, who was going
to be in the picture, was delegated to making
the monster suits. As he started to make them, he was hired for another movie and had to relinquish
the making of the suits to someone else. So when the monster
suits were finally made and put on the swimmers,
who were wearing air tanks, these suits were
rubber-looking things with octopus-like suction
cups all over them to make them look like monsters. The suits didn’t fit
over the air tanks. They split and had to be
pinned together with paperclips and sewn with needle and thread. And they looked so
bad and phony that, in the final cutting of it,
as in ‘The Brain Eaters,’ you could only take a
6-frame or a 12-frame cut. Wham, show the
monsters and cut away to show somebody
running away from them. If you took one close look,
you’d laugh your head off. You see air tanks sticking out of the
monster suits, you know? It’s the same thing as
‘Attack of the Crab Monsters.’ You see this giant
monster moving towards you with human feet underneath it. And that was ‘Giant Leeches.’ If you get a man who
doesn’t have a track record of making monster suits,
you’re taking a great chance.” At this point, Barry
Brown said to him, “You could at least put some
money into monster suits.” And VeSota came back
with, “Whatever it takes. Everything else
comes after that. Whatever it takes to
make a monster suit, the monster is your star. Whatever it takes to
make a suit, spend it, ‘cause that’s your star.” (eerie music) The last time I spoke
to Roger Corman, it was about “Creature
from the Haunted Sea,” and the next to last
question I ever asked him was about the subpar quality
of his late ’50s monsters. I mentioned the halfway
elaborate monsters in his early sci-fis,
made by Paul Blaisdell, and then pointed out
that in the late ’50s he really began skimping
in the monster department. “The Wasp Woman” was Susan
Cabot in a not very good mask, “The Beast from Haunted Cave” was a junkie suit made by a kid, “The Giant Leeches”
looked like guys in heavy-duty
contractor trash bags, and then the
ridiculous-looking creature from “The Haunted Sea.” Roger instantly,
cheerfully came out with the response that
he wasn’t skimping. It was the fact that
he thought it was time to try something different. Well, going from good
crowd-pleasing monsters to disappointing laughable ones, yeah, that’s something
different all right. When I talked to
him that last time, he was 98 and pretty sick, so I let him get away
with that answer. I didn’t challenge it. Coincidentally, in this
movie set in Florida, we have, in the back of the
boat, actor Daniel White, who may have been a Floridian
through and through. He was born there and went back there
after he left pictures. If you’re a B-movie fan, you know his rat-like face
from any number of westerns where he played baddies. To me, he looks a
little like Tom Tyler, once Tyler got to the age where he went from playing
good guys to bad guys. Not much horror or
sci-fi on White’s resume, although you might remember him as the Deputy Elmer in
Lugosi’s “Voodoo Man” and as one of the crew members stranded with the dinosaurs
on “Unknown Island.” He ran away from his
Florida home at 14 to play in tent shows, minstrel
shows and vaudeville shows throughout the South. In the mid ’30s, he
hankered to go to Hollywood. So with his family, he began
traveling across country. But the trip took forever because every time
he ran out of money, he had to take a job
wherever he was at that time to make a few bucks and
be able to continue West. The sound made by the leeches, I always thought it
might be a turkey gobble or a pigeon cooing,
sped up or slowed down. But my pal, Dave Hodge of
the Louisville Kentucky Zoo gave a listen and he
votes no on both of those. He feels certain that it’s a
mechanically-generated sound, a bubbler or some
similar type of machine. When a leech lets out a
roar, that, Dave says, is the sound of a wildcat, most likely a bobcat
or a mountain lion. “Attack of the Giant
Leeches” piece de resistance, the notorious cave
of horrors scene, described to a stomach-turning
tee by Larry Blamire. – [Larry] As a monster kid,
staying up past one’s bedtime felt like forbidden territory. Add to that certain movies that would show up with
things a little darker, a little quesier
than we’re used to, and then it becomes
even more forbidden. Are we even supposed
to be seeing this? Does the TV station know
they’re running this? No scenes reflected this more than the legendary
grotto sequences in “Attack of the
Giant Leeches,” starring everyone’s
favorite listless ensemble, the barely alive
blood-drained players, also known as the leech buffet. The sight and sound of
these pathetic souls, lulling and groaning and
occasionally screaming to the tune of the leech’s
nauseating bubble and gurgle is forever burned into
the glazed eyeballs and stunned ears of monster kids craving that grotesque unknown. Right up there with such
half dead human meals as the “It! The Terror” victims and what I call the “Beast
from Haunted Cave” web snacks. The crudity and limitations of the leech monster
costumes didn’t matter, which shows you that
context is everything. Their bubbling motorboat sound was as unsettling as the
rapidly speeding up heartbeat and slurping of the
fiends without a face. And when the poor
people float to the top, they are easily the
creepiest underwater victims since “Night of the
Hunter,” and then some. Is anything so low budget
had such a lasting impact? – [Tom] In our interview,
Gene Corman did a nice job of analyzing why
parts of giant leeches are as disturbing as they are. – What seems to the trouble?
– Haven’t you heard? – [Gene] It just seemed
that in that kind of film you had to have two or
three memorable moments, scenes that the
audience would go away thinking about, talking about. Somehow when you place people
in jeopardy with leeches, with things that are distasteful and then combine
that with water, you somehow touch a very
Freudianly responsive chord in people. – When they’re
worried enough to- – [Tom] The leech’s
grotto scenes, and the steamy for 1959
subplot with Cal and Liz, to me, they’re all a
little surprising to find, in a movie of this era,
made for kids and teens. I asked Bernard Kowalski
if they had any trouble getting the leech’s
blood-sucking scenes
past the censors. – [Kowalski] Not really. In those days, Roger
and Gene Corman would deal with the censors. They were very effective. Total film buffs who
knew what the censors had allowed other people to do. They would be about the
finest representatives in that area that
you could have. They would know what
limitations had been imposed on most of the
shows that were out and then they would
fight for parity. – [Tom] I went online
to see if the arboretum was still around and, if
so, if it had a website. And it does. And I was happy to see
that it included a timeline from which I could maybe glean
a few interesting tidbits. Interrupting myself. We watched the searchers and
the dog in the foreground, and it’s easy not to notice the boat passing
in the background. “Giant Leeches,” like
“Night of the Blood Beast,” also photographed
by John Nicholas, regularly has easy-to-miss
action in the background, which, if you do notice it, is a real nice extra mile
touch for a low budget movie. While the Arboretum’s website
timeline is two miles long, it begins, I kid
you not, in 500 BC. I looked for interesting
tidbits without success, until I couldn’t
take it anymore. So, in a nutshell, the
property was purchased by the State of California and the County of Los
Angeles, jointly, in 1947, 111 acres, so that they could
create an arboretum there. In 1953, 2 additional parcels
of land were purchased, bringing the arboretum up
to its present 127 acres. It formally opened to
the public in 1955. I’m sure it’s all very pretty, and peacocks still run around, but looking at the list
of activities there, it sounds like kind of a
typical California spooky joint. For example, you can
take sound baths, where you’re bathed
in sound waves through the use of singing
bowls and gongs, and meditate, as your awed at the physicality
of the singing bowls, leading to a better
awareness of your body and its surroundings
and leading to joy. From the website,
bring your own mat. If it’s all the same to you, I think I’d have
a much better time hanging out in
Walker’s General Store with Dave and
Porky and Liz Baby. (speaker whistles) (dog howls) On the IMDB as a list of
151 movies and TV shows, that, the IMDB claims,
were shot at the arboretum, and probably most of ‘em were. I know from my own research
that “Zombies of Mora Tau” was partly shot there, probably
the zombies in the water, and also “The Cyclops.” In 1987, 1 of the stars of
“The Cyclops,” Gloria Talbott, told me about working
at the arboretum. “There was a scene in the jungle that we shot at the arboretum. James Craig and I are
chased by a giant lizard, and we run into a pond. We tried it once and we kept
running on top of the pond. And we all realized that there was at least
20 years of duck shit, cement hard, forming a surface that went out a good 10 feet. And, I swear to
God, they yelled, ‘Cut out a piece
of the duck shit so we can get the actors in.’ I actually sat there and watched
them bring out a chainsaw and hack out a big area for
James Craig and me to wade in where the duck shit was still
floating around in pieces. I’m amazed neither
of us got salmonella. I mean, it was horrendous. And I thought to myself,
‘This is glamour? This is fame and fortune?’ I just wanted to
go home,” unquote. Do you still wanna
go to the arboretum? 301 North Baldwin Avenue,
Arcadia, California, and bring your own chainsaw. I mean, bring your own mat. My pal Dave Hodge tells me
these are water spaniels, often used for duck hunting, and therefore just the right
dogs for a hunt like this. Rowing up to the bank and scampering up to
join our other players, a character named Evans, who was one of the Walker’s
General Store lollygaggers, chortling at the poacher’s
wild story about a monster, the actor Ross Sturlin,
who played the title role in “Night of the Blood
Beast” and, in this movie, in addition to playing Evans, he plays a title role
as one of the leeches. – Old Sam was alive, they’da let us
known with a holler- – [Tom] Getting back to
talking about my friendship with Yvette Vickers. Our interview ran in
Fangoria magazine. I got her to go to a FanX
convention in the Baltimore area and Chiller Theatre
in New Jersey, and after that she was off
and running on her own, going to autograph shows,
giving interviews, and so on. And she kept in
touch with me always. Phone calls, letters,
Christmas cards. I’ve got a big fat
file of everything. She didn’t trust everybody, so I was flattered
that she trusted me. I had fun doing an “Attack
of the 50 Foot Woman” audio commentary with her. But slowly, she
started to change. I always thought there was
a touch of paranoia in her, and, (clears throat)
being a licensed doctor, I recognized that it
was getting worse. And now, many times
when she called, her speech was slurred. 2005, 6, 7, somewhere around
there, I got to admit, when she’d call, I’d be awful
slow about returning the call. Because every call
was the same call. “How are you darlin’? I had to change my number again. I’ve still got people
calling and hanging up. I saw a car slow down on my
street, so I called the police. I’m working on my cabaret act. People think they know me,
but they don’t know me. There were a lot of
people in this town spreading stories about
me that are not true.” (Tom blows raspberry) The same record over and over. I’d just recline on my couch
or sit back in my desk chair and close my eyes and
listen for 25 or 30 minutes and then I’d (knocks on
desk) knock on the desk and say somebody was at the
door to get her off the phone. I liked her tremendously
for the first 15, 16 years, always did whatever
I could for her, but then she got to be
too much of a drinker and a Debbie Downer. More on Yvette later. – A stubborn pighead? – [Tom] You said
it, Steve, not me. People are disappearing into
the swamp left and right. Obviously they’re being killed, but Steve thinks the
spotted owls or whatever are more important. Now, that said, Steve
should not have confidence that Dr. Greyson knows
how to find the one spot in these trackless wetlands
to set off an explosion that’ll bring up the bodies. Come to think of it, how does Dr. Greyson know
where to set off the blast? Close your eyes, take a
deep breath and enjoy it. I think this might be one of
the few interiors in this movie where no one’s smoking. The cast of “Night
of the Blood Beast” went through a pack a day also. – Couple of days. Why? – Oh, nothin’. Take care of yourself, Steve. – [Tom] When you’re audio
commentating a movie about giant leeches
terrorizing a swamp, you kinda hesitate to
nitpick a little plot holes. But Nitpick is my middle name. In about 30 seconds, Dr. Greyson’s
dynamite will go off. And in about 45 seconds, the
bodies of Cal, Porky and Sam, will appear on the
surface of the water. In a later post-autopsy scene, Dr. Greyson will
say that all three had been drained of
every drop of blood. When Cal rose to the surface, he had been dead for
about three days, Porky and Sam a bit
less than three days. Well, my question then is why
are these completely bloodless dead-for-three-days
men so fidgety? (Liz groans) I love the bubbling water
in the grotto scenes. There’s gotta be
dry ice in there. Getting back to Yvette Vickers saying all the same things
every time she phoned me. One time she called
with a new story that caught my attention. According to Yvette, she’d
gone to a Western film festival in Victorville, California,
went to dinner with some fans, and the next thing she knew she was waking up in her
room the next morning and there was blood
here and there. She said she’d
obviously been given a date rape drug at dinner, and after that she didn’t
know what happened. Of course I was sympathetic
without believing a word of it. And down the line, I checked
with someone else who was there and the reality was
a bit different. She did go to dinner
with actor Greg Palmer and a magazine publisher
in the hotel restaurant, and she got crazy drunk, started messing around
with some other guy in the restaurant. And Palmer and the publisher
couldn’t control her. Somehow she fell down
and bloodied herself up. She later cooked up
the story she told me. But who knows? Maybe
she thought it was true. I think it was at that point that she 86ed herself out
of the film festival Loop. I’m sure word got
around about her antics. And who needs an old celeb
who gets stupid drunk and raises hell in the hotel
restaurant and injures herself and afterwards tells people
that she might’ve been raped? (ominous music) Now comes the part of the story that, quote, unquote,
“everybody knows,” even if it’s the only thing
they know about Yvette Vickers. Susan Strong was one
of Yvette’s neighbors. Susan was neighborly, even
though Yvette maybe wasn’t, and Susan got concerned
when she saw Yvette’s mail piled up and turning yellow. It probably took a while, but eventually her curiosity
got the better of her, and she came
knocking on the door of Yvette’s tumbledown house. The door was barricaded shut,
but Susan easily got in. The place would’ve given the
Collyer brothers nightmares. There was piled up
junk everywhere. She navigated around,
up the stairs, at one point went through a wall where the drywall
was gone, et cetera, and started looking
around the upstairs. And upstairs, on the floor,
in a room that was hot because a space
heater was going, were some clothes covered
with lots of fungus and what Susan
assumed was a wig. But upon closer
examination, it was Yvette. Susan let out a scream and, covered in cobwebs, fled
the house, called the cops. How decomposed was Yvette? Looking at what was left, you couldn’t tell if it
was a man or a woman, face up or face down. A cop told Susan it was the worst
decomposition he’d ever seen. The 56 pounds of Yvette were
removed from the premises and, because it was
unrecognizable as
a man or a woman, initially listed in
records as a Doe, Doe as in John Doe, Jane Doe. Initially it was thought that Yvette had been
dead almost a year, but it turned out to be
more like eight months. Susan was the only person
the cops could find who knew Yvette even a little, so she ended up getting
some inside information. And her experience affected her. She wanted to know how something
like this could happen, how a person could
end up so friendless, such a recluse that
many months could elapse with no one raising an alarm. She got ahold of
Yvette’s address book and began calling
everybody in it to let them know
what had happened and to ask them some questions. I was one of the
ones she called. That’s how I was able to
post about Yvette’s death on The Classic Horror Film Board before the news
broke anywhere else. If Yvette’s heart trouble
had caused her to die in public or in a hospital, I’m sure her passing would’ve
been mentioned nowhere but in variety and
classic images. But between her mummification and the fact that she’d
been such a hottie and a Playboy playmate,
stories ran everywhere, even multiple page
stories in such magazines as Entertainment Weekly. “The Giant Leeches” Jan Shepard was interviewed by
Entertainment Weekly and quoted in that piece, “And I was, too. Kinda. The quotes they ascribed to me, I read them and said to
myself, ‘I never said that.’ They had me saying
I first met her the day I went to her house. Well, that didn’t happen. As I mentioned earlier, I took one look at that hazmat
house of horrors and…” – [Speaker 3] I ran, I ran. I ran as little Jimmy Grimaldi
had run the other day. – [Tom] Susan
Strong wrote a piece for a Benedict
Canyon Newsletter, hoping it would prevent
another tragedy like Yvette’s. There was a memorial for Yvette. Her half-brother was there, even though he never
gave Susan Strong the idea that he overflowed
with love for Yvette. When Susan got home
from the memorial, she says that, “At the
half-brother’s directive, a junk-hauling crew had
cleaned out Yvette’s house. What the crew didn’t take away, they threw outside
and repeatedly ran
over with a Bobcat so that no one else
would wanna take it. Some of Yvette’s belongings
were left in the street, including a scrapbook
and an album of already black
and white photos of young Yvette on a beach. The house immediately
became part of a haunted Hollywood tour.”
– Right, gotta be. How else could those people
have lived down there? – [Tom] The “New
York Daily News” ran an online story
on Yvette’s death, how Susan found the
body, et cetera. And below the story were a
bunch of reader’s comments, the usual things. “I liked her movies,”
“How sad,” et cetera. One comment about Yvette’s
death made me laugh out loud, and I just had to
send a link to Susan. Quote, “The neighbor did it.” Susan got a kick outta that, but there was another comment
she liked even better. The story had mentioned
the space heater that ran the many
months Yvette was dead, and one reader asked, “Does
anyone know the brand?” – No, no. No! – [Tom] In our interview, I asked Director
Bernard Kowalski if he was happy with
the leech costumes, and he used the opportunity
to give a shout-out to the guys who
played the leeches. – [Kowalski] The two actors
who played the leeches were Guy Buccola, a
basketball player from UCLA, and Ross Sturlin, a young
man that had done stunts on boots and saddles and played
the alien in “Blood Beast.” These two fellows were forced
to build the leech costumes in order to get the job. They were paid money for
the building of them, but the job did
come with costumes. – Comfortable?
– Yeah. – [Kowalski] They were
made out of cheap, rubberized raincoat material
sewed in a cape-like form. Very little money
was spent on them. They were always tearing. So as a result, they did
have a number of problems in trying to maintain the look. Of course, when we’d go
underwater, that was difficult because they’d get air
pockets in the suit. It was the best that we could
do with the time that we had. Unfortunately, on a
seven-day feature like that, you don’t have an
awful lot of time once you’ve started to make
these kinds of corrections. To go back to your
original question, were you happy with them? In no way were they totally
satisfactory at all. – [Tom] The little guy playing
Ken Clark’s diver buddy, I get a kick out of the fact
that he had such a tiny part and just a few lines, but he blew what was
practically his first line. His character, Mike
walks up to Ken Clark and calls him Mike. I asked Yvette Vickers if she remembered
her first impressions of the leech costumes. She laughed and
then responded… – [Yvette] (laughs)
Well, I guess the same as everybody else’s. They looked like
guys in plastic bags. Of course, I’d seen the divers who played the leeches in
their black scuba suits, so I knew who they were and
I wasn’t afraid of them. But I must admit that
in the cave scenes, when they crawled up to us
and began to suck our blood, that I was really
affected by that. A lot of people have told me
that they saw giant leeches when they were 10
or 12 years old, and that they were really
scared by those cave scenes, and I can understand that. The blob, that’s my nightmare. But again, when I first saw
the leech actors on the set, I just thought they
were not very well made. And those guys did have a
little trouble in the water. They had to knock themselves out trying to make it
look believable. (water splashes) (ominous music) – [Tom] Tyler
McVey, on the right, struck me as the kinda guy who, if he couldn’t say something
nice, wouldn’t say anything. But I nevertheless
tried to get him to poke some fun at
the leech costumes. He hemmed and hawed
for a few seconds, but finally came out
with what I thought was the politest
put down possible. He said, “Let’s put it this way. I didn’t think they were
going to fool anybody.” One thing I keep
forgetting to mention, all the shots taken
through the window of the private swimming pool, couldn’t somebody
have taken a minute and wiped the algae
off the glass? The algae on the glass
makes it so obvious that the underwater action is taking place on the
other side of a window. Yvette talked to me about the
upcoming death of Liz Baby. – [Yvette] The underwater shots of the dead bodies floating
up toward the surface were filmed in
somebody’s swimming pool. It would’ve been pretty
hard to get those shots out in the muddy waters
of the arboretum. Of course, when my body surfaced and the guys pulled me
up into the rowboat, we were shooting
at the arboretum. I remember that everybody
was watching over me then because I couldn’t swim and
I was afraid of the water. – [Tom] “Giant Leeches” came
along at a time in AIP history when they were
starting to release what they call the blockbuster
exploitation pictures, “Horrors of the Black Museum,” “Circus of Horrors,”
“House of Usher.” But according to
James H. Nicholson, “The company wouldn’t lose sight of its bread and butter market.” As he prepared to unleash
“A Bucket of Blood” and “Giant Leeches” as a
Halloween ’59 double bill, Nicholson said,
“These type films aren’t so hot in the big cities, but you do well with them in
the small towns and drive-ins.” “Giant Leeches” was
released in England as “Demons of the Swamp.” – You sure you don’t
want me to go down and finish it off
for you, Steve? – No thanks, Mike. I-I think I hurt it pretty bad. – Careful now. Anything
hurt’s 10 times as dangerous. (water splash) – [Tom] In this scene,
Dr. Greyson speculates that the giant leeches
might be mutations somehow spawned by the atomic
energy used by Cape Canaveral, which he says is
in their proximity. I take a backseat to
no man in my ignorance of the demographics of
Brevard County, Florida, the Space Coast, as
its nicknamed in 1958, but somehow I don’t
picture space scientists getting their
breakfast sandwiches at Walker’s General Store. But then again I wouldn’t have
believed the giant leeches could take over Brevard County. So what do I know? Don’t forget to check out
the “Giant Leeches” trailer. There’s a long-lingering
closeup of a leech. Unfortunately, or
maybe fortunately,
it’s extremely blurry. We get a much better
look at the two leeches capsizing Porky and Sam’s boat and there’s more footage
of Liz battling a leech, her hands very noticeably
spattered with blood. It’s kinda fun to know
that movies like this go together like jigsaw puzzles. In a minute, we’ll see Liz drop into the water
in the grotto, which is Yvette Vickers on
a set at Chaplin Studios. When we see her body
floating up past the camera, Yvette was in somebody’s
swimming pool. And when she surfaces, that’s
Yvette at the arboretum. (grim music) Roger Corman died in May 2024. And my “Night of the Blood
Beast” audio commentary, on the other disc in this set was my first time commentating a Corman movie since he passed. I thought about
dedicating it to him for whatever that it’d be worth. (chuckles) Nothing. But I felt that it’d
be a nice thing to do. But then I remembered
that half the commentary was “Blood Beast” writer Martin
Varno calling Corman names and calling him a crook,
et cetera, et cetera. And I thought, “Nah, let me
dedicate ‘Leeches’ instead.” Corman had to have had literally thousands of
interviewers in his life, so I do not flatter myself
that he remembered me, who called him once
in a blue moon. I telephone interviewed
him many times, but always months apart, sometimes probably a
year or more apart. So Roger Corman did not know me. But every time we talked, he
was so outstandingly nice. And, what I especially liked,
I was able to jog his memory and get him to tell me things
about some of his oldies that he’d never told before
in his countless interviews or in his autobiography. I wanna tell two Roger
Corman stories here. Story one. At some monster movie
convention in New Jersey, I think it was a Monsterpalooza, I was asked to moderate
a panel of, I forget who, Roger Corman and
maybe Hazel Court and maybe Caroline Munro. There were four or five of ‘em. A bunch of my friends were there and they all wanted to go to
dinner at such and such a time, but I wouldn’t be able to go
with ‘em because of the panel. Well, my friends
changed the dinner time. They would wait for me
to moderate the panel so that I could go too. And I did moderate the panel
and everything went smoothly. And as the audience was
still applauding the celebs, I was off the stage quick as a
hiccup and joining my friends and speed-walking
out of the auditorium and down the hotel hallway, walking toward the
exit to go to dinner. My friends and I had to have
been walking 20, 30 seconds. We had to have gone the
equivalent of a city block when there was a hand on my
shoulder, and it was Corman, who, just a little
out of breath, told me I’d done a
great job moderating and shook my hand
and thanked me. And with that, he turned around and started back
toward the event room. I’m sure he didn’t
know me from Adam, I’m sure he didn’t know that I’d telephone
interviewed him in the past. He just wanted to thank the guy who did a nice job moderating. He saw me take off
and he must’ve run, in his 80s then, I guess, to
catch me and tell me that. Who does that? Story two. Several months ago, I phoned
and asked Roger’s assistant if I could talk with him about “Creature from
the Haunted Sea” for the Film Masters
Blu-Ray, and I was told yes. But then Roger got sick, and the interview
kept getting delayed. The assistant apologetically
notified me about each delay and gave me an update
on him health-wise. Eventually, when I
started to get the idea that he was very sick,
I told the assistant, or I told Roger’s wife,
Julie, I forget which, “Let’s forget it. I
don’t wanna bother him.” But Roger had made
a commitment to me. He said he’d talk to me about “Creature from
the Haunted Sea,” and he was determined to do it. At one point I got a call
from him from his car as he was being taken to a
doctor for an emergency visit. His voice was so raspy,
he was hard to understand. And again, I was promised
I’d get the interview. Jiminy Christmas! The guy was 98 and maybe dying, but it seemed like
half his attention was going to his health problems and the other half was
going to some idiot, me, that he’d promised a “Creature from the
Haunted Sea” interview to, and so far he hadn’t
been able to deliver. And I did get the interview after he got home from that
emergency doctor’s visit. Do people get any
more considerate? So to my mind, Roger Corman
was one of the nicest celebs I ever interviewed. Rest in peace. Although the idea of
Roger Corman resting doesn’t seem like anything
that could ever happen. In a few moments, after
our heroes have departed, we’ll see ripples on the water, get a glimpse of a leech
just breaking the surface, hear the bubbler noise. Could this be the
first monster movie which lets you know at the end that the monsters were
not all destroyed, that there’s more trouble
in store for the human race? Hundreds of monster movies have ended this way
in recent decades. It’s become a terribly
boring cliche. But could this have
been the first time? For their help with
this commentary, thank you, Robert Kokai, Larry
Blamire, Jennifer Blaire, Dave Hodge, the Mighty
Weaver Art players; and from the cast and crew of
“Attack of the Giant Leeches,” Yvette Vickers, Tyler
McVey, Bernard Kowalski, Gene Corman, and Roger Corman. Thank you for listening.

Dive into the murky Bayou of 1950s B-movie history with legendary film historian Tom Weaver! In this exclusive commentary track, Weaver dissects the schlocky charm of Attack of the Giant Leeches – a film he calls “no masterpiece” but a lasting piece of genre history.

Colorized full movie: https://youtu.be/aOoaBM3U3mI
Black & White full movie: https://youtu.be/xUwgHSFvMrY

✨ Behind the Monsters: Discover how the infamous leech suits were cobbled together from raincoats, chicken wire, and desperation (with visible zippers and air tanks!).

✨ Yvette Vickers’ Legacy: Weaver shares personal stories of the “smoking hot bayou babe” Liz Walker, her tragic later life, and her cult status (even Stephen King was a fan!).

✨ B-Movie Context: Learn why late-50s horror sunk to “breathtakingly cheap” budgets – and how this film fits into Roger Corman’s empire.

✨ Unforgettable Grotto Scenes: Weaver reveals why the underwater lair sequences traumatized kids and became a Freudian nightmare.

✨ Rare Insights: From Bruno VeSota’s gruff charisma to chaotic filming at the duck-poop-infested Pasadena Arboretum, no trivia is left unturned.

Verdict: “Wretched, no-budget horror” but packed with weird charm, steamy subplots, and a surprising legacy. Weaver celebrates its flaws, its cast, and its place in drive-in history.

Perfect for fans of: Creature features, 50s sci-fi, Roger Corman, and films so bad they’re brilliant.

Key Themes:
⚡ Cheap thrills & cheaper monsters
💀 The tragic tale of Yvette Vickers
🎬 Behind-the-scenes chaos (filming by flashlight, dynamite solutions)
🎥 Why context over quality in cult classics

For more deep dives into cinema’s weirdest gems: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2gsu7VGzgdZ2JebVTUro0VSl0ffMlY7F

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