aa56 This is one of Corman's worst. It's hard to believe that a great professional like Leo Gordon wrote this. If the Cormans butchered his script, he should have taken his name off of it. There is eye candy in it for both males and females. The leading ladies are pleasant to look at, and it seemed that Jan Shepard truly enjoyed planting her chest against Ken Clark's bare, hairy wall.

Eric Stevenson I knew that this would fall into the same problems so many movies made at this time had. It seems like these people would never run out of animals to make giant and attack people. The weirdest thing is probably how these leeches look more like octopi. I mean, I'm fairly certain I see tentacles and suction cups. I guess I know little about leech anatomy, but I don't think that's how they work. It is pretty entertaining to see these goofy characters say all this stupid stuff. They just need to focus more on the actual action and less on these weird people.It's weird how they seem to say that dynamite won't work, even though it eventually does. At least they mention somewhat of a justification where they say nuclear weapons created the leeches. Every victim dies so they're mostly pointless. Only watch it on "Mystery Science Theater 3000". The short length probably works for it. There were just too many of these movies. They're all rather boring and pointless. *

Jonathon Dabell Shot over eight days on a super-low budget - with brothers Gene and Roger Corman as producer and executive producer respectively - Attack Of The Giant Leeches is a typical 50s sci-fi cheapie. The 50s was awash with films like this, brief and often absurd time-fillers made to capitalise on Cold War fears. Here, rocket activity in the Cape Canaveral area is blamed for mutated leeches which grow to human size and drag unsuspecting local yokels into the swamp. Well, it's a plot… of sorts.Local poacher Lem Sawyer (George Cisar) stumbles across a large creature quite unlike anything he has ever seen whilst wandering through swampland in the Florida Everglades. He shoots the creature several times. Later, adulterous woman Liz Walker (Yvette Vickers) and her secret lover Cal (Michael Emmett) are having one of their romantic trysts out in the swamp when Liz's husband Dave (Bruno VeSota) shows up. Dave chases the pair of them with a gun, planning to shake them up good, but to his horror he instead witnesses them being dragged into the swamp by one of the gigantic creatures shot at by Lem at the start of the film. No-one believes Dave when he tries to tell them what happened – everyone assumes he killed them in a fit of rage, and has concocted the story about the creatures to get himself off the hook. Later, some more locals searching for the missing bodies also go missing, and game warden Steve Benton (Ken Clark) heads into the swamp in search of answers. He discovers a pair of human-sized, blood-sucking leeches hiding in an underwater cave, feeding off the blood of the human victims they have dragged away from the water's edge.Cheap, stupid and generally laughable, Attack Of The Giant Leeches is a pretty weak offering in all departments. Much of it is shot in such glum colour that the action is difficult to see. The acting is wooden at best, and the dialogue often borders on the downright ridiculous. It's a surprise to learn the script is by TV and film character actor Leo Gordon, who appeared in countless westerns in the 50s, 0s and 70s. Alexander Laszlo's score is a weird jingling and jangling of instruments which sounds almost as if it's being improvised on the spot. If nothing else the film is extremely short, its running time coming in around the hour mark. It may be nonsense but at least it's brief nonsense. No-one in their right mind would seriously recommend Attack Of The Giant Leeches, but if you're an addict of these low budget 50s sci-fi B-movies you may find some charm in it.

bkoganbing Leo Gordon was a dual talent, as an actor he played some of the toughest people ever on screen and occasionally wrote some of those parts himself. He has an extensive list of credits as a writer as well as an actor. In Attack Of The Giant Leeches he also wrote the original story.Looking at this film I was reminded of The A-Team and how George Peppard did as a laugh between assignments play stupid looking movie monsters in grade Z science fiction films. Whatever, Gordon did not have the nerve to put himself in front of the camera on this one. He wouldn't do that for Roger Corman here.Although no one ever noticed it life on a particular swamp in the south seems to have gone out of a particular stretch of lake. So when moonshiner/poacher George Cisar best known as Sergeant Mooney on Dennis The Menace sees some strange creature in the swamp water everyone gives him the horselaugh.No one laughs though when two timing Baby Doll wife Yvette Vickers disappears with her paramour Michael Emmet. In fact they suspect her husband George VeSoto of doing them in. Then two more swamp rednecks disappear.What's doing it is giant human size leeches who not only suck the blood out of their prey, but they take them down to their underwater cavern where they don't drain them completely but keep them around to snack on later. They've kept Vickers around for a while, I guess they don't get too many curvaceous blonds in tank tops down there.Hero of the day is game warden Ken Clark and his assistant Jan Shepard who figure it out and come up with a plan to destroy the giant leeches.What can I say the cinematography is atrocious, no direction, performances on the high school level. And those leeches were ug-ly.Leo Gordon should have been ashamed of himself.