The Flesh Eaters

source: The Flesh Eaters

Trailer—The Flesh Eaters

The Flesh Eaters

Now, this is what I call a B-Movie! On a budget that looks like it cost all of $50 - until the final monster confrontation, that is - Jack Curtis crafts a classic monster movie. As if to demonstrate his intentions, the picture opens with a bikini clad girl lounging on a boat deck. Within 2 minutes, she's topless. Within 5 minutes, she's dead. This sequence strips the exploitation picture to its bare essentials. Okay, okay...bad pun. Truth be told, though, it captures the essence of THE FLESH EATERS. We've got women stripped to their bras, lots of liquor, skeletons galore, a beatnik, and a mad foreign scientist (is there any other kind?). And don't forget the flesh eater itself! It puts Roger Corman's Crab Monsters to shame.

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.

A pilot, a drunken actress and her female assistant, and a groovy beatnik all get stranded on an island where a German scientist (Martin Kosleck) is conducting experiments involving a strange silvery substance in the water that starts eating the flesh off fish and people. This is a cheaply made film that was shot in Montauk, New York, and saves a lot of money by taking place entirely on the beach (their "island"). But it's still fun and manages to overcome its limitations, and Kosleck makes for a good sneaky villain. The hero pilot (Grant Murdock) is pretty poor as an actor, and provides some laughs and funny lines. The beatnik character is a show in himself, man. Can you feel the love? **1/2 out of ****

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.