"Attack of the Giant Leeches" Remake Worse Than the Roger Corman Original

Don't be fooled by the enticing box art. Do not spend your hard-earned bucks to rent Attack of the Giant Leeches. I will explain.

Remakes of old 1950's B-horror movies have found a handy market in a hot field for filmmakers in recent years, with 13 Ghosts, House on Haunted Hill, House of Wax, and others. The idea is, for the most part, to take movies in the public domain so no licensing fees or royalties need be paid, lift the title and the rough concept of the story, then rework the plot using modern standards, still low budget by today's standards but generous compared to the microbudgets the originals were filmed on.

I admire independent filmmakers who try to turn in a worthwhile product on a micro-budget. Horror movies are a good approach for those filmmakers. Horror movies continue to pack people in, it can be very undemanding in terms of budget if handled right, and now it has sunk in that public domain movies of the 1950's can be a great source of material. But Attack of the Giant Leeches simply doesn't measure up as an improvement on the original on any level.

Hard as it is to believe, this is a rare case where the black and white original is actually better than the remake.

Roger Corman's original Attack of the Giant Leeches was set in the Everglades of Florida, "not far from Cape Canaveral". With justification, the story has been described as being about leeches snacking on rednecks.

Searching for illegal traps, a game warden and his girlfriend encounter a dead poacher with sucker wounds on him. Switch to fat good-ole-boy local bar owner Dave Walker whose beautiful and shapely wife, Liz, is playing around with Dave's best friend, Cal. Dave catches them making out at the local lake where the couple is attacked by the giant leeches. Dave hangs himself at the jail where the cops refuse to believe him and things seem to settle down briefly. A couple trackers dragging for the missing couple's bodies themselves become Leech Kibble. The game warden and his girlfriend's father use dynamite to blast the lake, sending bodies to the surface from where they've been secreted in dry gator holes, then they blast the lake again thoroughly to rid it of leeches.

The 1959 movie starred Ken Clark as the game warden and Playboy playmate Yvette Vickers as Liz, the philandering victim.

Although the leeches look like guys in black plastic Hefty bags with suckers painted on, the movie does have a few creepy moments and a effective and typical B-movie spooky score lifted from another Roger Corman production, Night of the Blood Beast. There are even some underwater scenes as well as interiors of air-filled gator holes in the infested lake where the victims are brought to be preserved as a continuing food supply.

The new remake of Attack of the Giant Leeches is direct-to-video from Brent Kelly Entertainment, starring a bunch of people you never heard of and some giant 3′-5′ leeches that look a little like rubber tire tread strips, and it relies on the exact same plot with minor variations.

I will admit the new movie's leeches are more convincing than the originals, but everything else fails to even live up to the standards of the crude black and white original. There are no underwater scenes unless you count the point-of-view sequences as the leeches sneak up on their victims. Instead of gator holes, the victims are stashed on shore in the lake's adjacent marsh. Three girls in bikinis camping by the lake provide the movie's G-rated eye candy, not counting the scene with husband and philandering wife, she in her underwear as in the original (why do you think my man Corman hired a Playboy playmate?). Could've been worse. He could've been in his underwear. Scarier prospect than giant blood-sucking leeches.

The score was largely missing, the volume was very low, the film stock quality wasn't even up to the standards of the original. So save your money and don't bother checking out this remake. With luck, leftover copies will find their way into a radioactive waste dump.