Powerful

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

From my favorite movies..

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

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.

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 is truly mind boggling. It can't even be called camp or corn, it is so bad! But it is also so hilarious. I could not stop laughing. Even for it's time this was hilariously horrible. The flesh eaters are a sort of monster much like the amoeba of "Angry Red Planet" It begins as a bunch of small flesh eaters, but a mad scientist changes it into one big one, and one super big one. What is so hilarious is that the two lead actors are so horrible, but the supporting cast seems to at least try to be thespians. The most interesting one is a beatnik. He pretty well steals the show for his small air time. Meanwhile the hero and heroine take off as many clothes as they can, and deliver lines so bad, you'd swear they were trying to be bad. I can almost promise their delivery will make you burst out laughing, because the others are almost convincing, then these two say their lines, and you can't help but laugh. I really believe that these two were secretly the butt of the jokes from the others. I not only mean the few actors, but the director, film crew, and stage hands. They no doubt set these two up and made them fools, and the two stars probably never knew. It's a good thing they weren't around a live volcano or in a crowded lifeboat. Guess which two would have been sacrificed through some sneaky planning? You'll also laugh at the scenes in which the hero jumps at the camera. It is proof that the crew were in cahoots to make him look stupid. I can just see them all laughing after a day's shoot, snickering at the two leads. I don't mean the two leads any disrespect. No doubt they did what they were told. At some time, we've all been fools. But you won't stop laughing. Still, it is a bad film.

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.