The Flesh Eaters

Some horror releases need to scream that they're available, and the oddball shocker The Flesh Eaters is one of them. I mean, scream out as if nasty little microorganisms were gobbling you up like you were Steve McQueen trapped in a Jello mold. 

Bankrupt airplane pilot Grant Murdock (Byron Sanders) doesn't want to fly in a storm, but the triple fee waved in front of his nose by beautiful Jan Letterman (Barbara Wilkin) changes his mind. She's the secretary of famous actress Laura Winters (Rita Morley) an alcoholic too stoned to stand on her own two feet. The plane goes up but is soon stranded on an isolated island, where the three castaways meet Professor Peter Bartell (Martin Kosleck), a sinister marine biologist waiting for a deadly tide of aquatic microbes that "EAT FLESH! ANY FLESH!" and will even burn their way through metal to get at it. Skeletons of various victims both human and fish wash ashore, while Bartell lets loose Murdock's tethered plane and prepares several beakers of electrically-activated microbes for testing ... on his new companions.

 Competently filmed on an ultra-low budget, the independently produced movie is both funny and scary thanks to a tongue-in cheek screenplay that knows darn well what is being peddled. The main actors are television soap opera people having a fun time; Martin Kosleck is the same actor who played Nazi villains almost exclusively for twenty years. Here he plays a -- guess -- Nazi villain reactivating an evil experiment left over from the waning days of the Third Reich. The dialogue is of the strictly declarative comic-book kind, with the actors playing it straight and letting the absurdity of the situation say it all. Kosleck even gets to kiss the movie star, and gets rudely rebuffed, of course. This is before nudity and outright gore were allowed (the film apparently got a very wide release) but there's plenty of teasing on both fronts. The drunken actress Laura Winters is an over-the-top Sweet Bird of Youth type, and she's immediately jealous when her secretary Jan starts playing footsie with rugged, thick-eared pilot Murdock. When Murdock gets some of those nasty flesh eaters on his leg, Jan immediately strips off her blouse to provide a bandage.

The frisky fizzy flesh eaters consume a rescue boat captain while the foursome watches, horrified. They are soon joined by Omar (Ray Tudor), a goofy beatnik type. He floats in on a raft and barely gets ashore before the flesh eaters gobble up his sandals: "Aw, it took me two days to make those!" Omar jive-talks in a bizarre theatrical argot unrecognizable as being beatnik, hippie or yippie, but he's certainly a lively addition. Too bad that the professor has such gruesome plans for him.

The Flesh Eaters edges toward the gore aesthetic, although it comes nowhere near the sadistic excesses of a Herschell Gordon Lewis. It starts like a morbid take on a Beach Party flick. A girl on a pleasure boat loses her bikini top, followed by the rest of her body when the title critters attack. All we see are some screaming faces and water boiling with dry ice, and the main titles pop on with a visceral chill ... the movie has announced that it's going to deliver the goods.

The film is competently shot, but its oddball special effects must be seen to be believed. The deadly tide of Nazi microbes is represented by double-exposed white flares on the water. When Murdock gets some on his leg, the munching things are pictured in part by little animated pinpricks in the surface of the film. The highly artificial method is strangely effective -- it looks like little micro-explosions on Murdock's skin. This is coupled with an angle or two of Kosleck's knife literally carving off a slice of Murdock's shinbone -- just wrap it up in Jan's blouse, and it'll be fine.

The big shockeroo occurs when Bartell puts some flesh eaters into a drink and watches poor Omar gulp it down. We wait nervously until the expected occurs ... all of which is handled quite convincingly. In the context of this minimalist storyline, a ridiculous shot of Omar with a see-through hole in his stomach, tied dead to the mast of his little raft, is somehow disturbing instead of silly.

For its big finale, The Flesh Eaters transform into two monsters, one the size of a beach ball and the other about 200 feet across. The optical effects involved are transparently phony yet the stalwart seriousness of the actors and the brassy music sell the scenes fairly well. The spongy white tentacled flesh eater thingys have one eye and an obscene looking cavity that resembles, or might actually be a recycled Mars moon monster prop from Roger Corman's space re-edit Battle Beyond the Sun.

A few minutes more of gory deaths, and the show is over. There's something delightfully unpretentious about The Flesh Eaters that makes it a great party picture. It's too well made to be shamefully disgusting, and the cast gives the show their best. Byron Sanders makes a truly cartoonish leap to kill one of the flesh-eating monsters and Kosleck is unrepentantly evil until the very end. What more can one ask?

The film's only sets are an open beach and a couple of tents, and the main prop is a silly giant box with silver discs applied to its side that we're told is a solar power generator. Nobody questions what the professor is doing with it, except to electrify the fast-munching microbes as part of his nefarious plan.

Director Jack Curtis was a New York editor with ambitions and this film is his one-shot at the big time. Perhaps he learned his lesson, or, more likely, he busted his bankroll making the picture and other entrepreneurs moved in to distribute it and cash in. Writer Arnold Drake also did the script for Who Killed Teddy Bear?. Songwriter Noel Regny is credited with extra music for Gremlins in 1984. Maybe Joe Dante knows a story behind that one! Actress Barbara Wilkin apparently went to France and appeared in Claude Chabrol's Paris vu par... the very next year. That's the opposite of Marilyn Buferd, who had a big role in Jacques Becker's 1954 French Touchez pas au grisbi! only to find herself floundering several years later in the American monster opus The Unearthly. The most notable credit on the film is editor Radley Metzger, who by this time was already established as a cult adult film maker and later made notable exotica like The Lickerish Quartet. His editing is good, too. (Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant)