Sometimes a classic sci fi work leaps out at me right away and is easy to figure, “why not do that one”. Other times I need to do a fair bit of thinking. That’s becoming more regular since I don’t have access to the two big tent poles of TV science fiction in the west. Suppose I could always do some Japanese ones, but sometimes I get concerned it’s going to bleed over with the anime reviews. This was one of those weeks, not that I don’t have selections, though.

The Flesh Eaters is a film from 1964. It opens with a young couple on a boat. They go into the water where the man goes under the surface, but he doesn’t come back up. The woman gets increasingly panicked not noticing the darkening of the water before she too sinks under. A good opening I say, can’t help but feel the Jaws vibe which would be from just over a decade later.

We are then introduced to our leads. Jan Letterman the assistant to actress Laura Winters. She hires pilot and blatant American action male lead Grant Murdoch. The plan which is to get Winters, who is quite the alcoholic, to Massachusetts is wrecked when they are forced to land on a small island (they were using a sea plane) by a storm. There they meet the one thing you don’t want to meet on an island in a black and white movie, a scientist with a German accent! (not my joke).

Soon they find to their horror that in the water round the island are countless microscopic organisms that eat flesh, and rapidly. It’s done surprisingly well resulting in some rather, for the time, horrific visual scenes of them essentially dissolving the body to the bone and blood.

When the film was rereleased in 1968, a flash back scene covering the original creation and experimentation on the flesh eaters was cut. This scene …. Well, we have a guy with a German accent in the film, you figure it out.

Before you worry that this will be a case of attack of the completely invisible aliens – there are events in the film that make some of the flesh eaters grow to considerable size. While we still don’t get a full clear look at them, what we see is rather monstrous, and vastly more monstrous than what you usually see for movie monsters of the time.

While some of the horror comes from the occasional gory scenes of the flesh eaters, it more comes from moments of suspense… but not enough, Winters is a drunk and when not putting herself in danger to get booze, she’s being used as a scape goat by the German sounding guy (honestly don’t even need to give him a name) . And let’s not get started on the hippy character who shows up.

An interesting note on the history of the film. While the film itself doesn’t seem to have made any long standing impact, you don’t see it referenced or drawn from as inspiration for other works. The title of the film caused another film to have to change its name. That film was “Night of the Living Dead” So we can thank its existence for a small part in the tale of the modern depiction of zombies.

Rating: 🎞️🎞️