Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Uriah43 "Grant Murdoch" (Byron Sanders) runs a charter airplane which two young ladies named "Jan Letterman" (Barbara Wilkin) and "Laura Winters" (Rita Morley) hire to fly them to Provincetown out near Cape Cod. Unfortunately, a hurricane causes them to make an emergency landing on a semi-deserted island. The only occupant is a marine biologist by the name of "Professor Peter Bartell" (Martin Kosleck) who helps them survive the hurricane. They soon discover that they are stranded and that there is a flesh-eating microorganism which is gradually making its way inland. At any rate, rather than disclosing all of the details and risk spoiling the film for those who haven't seen it, I will just say that this was a strange and campy horror film from the early-60's. Although it had good camera work, some pretty actresses and some decent performances there really wasn't anything unique about the movie that separates it from typical grade-B movies made during this time. Even so, I suppose it's worth a look for those who enjoy films from this time-period. As such I rate it as average.

Paul Andrews The Flesh Eaters starts in New York as Jan Lettreman (Barbara Wilkin) the secretary of alcoholic stage & screen star Laura Winters (Rita Morley) hires pilot Grant Murdoch (Byron Sanders) to fly them to Province Town for a casting call, Murdoch agrees but warns the two ladies that a large tropical storm may cause problems. While flying the plane gets into trouble & is forced to land on an isolated island, at first they think they are alone but soon find out German marine biologist Professor Peter Bartell (Martin Kosleck) is stationed on the island carrying out some experiments involving tiny flesh eating creatures that infest the waters surrounding the island. They quickly find themselves trapped on the island as the flesh eaters strip flesh to the bone within seconds, somehow they must find a way to kill the flesh eaters & leave the island for safety but their troubles aren't just confined to the flesh eaters in the water...Co-produced & directed by Jack Curtis this piece of early 60's exploitative sci-fi horror turns into a creature feature by the end with the obligatory giant monster running amok but it's far better than one might expect & far better than most of it's peers from the period. The script flips between fairly serious sci-fi & horror themes about Nazi experiments & flesh eating creatures & fairly laid back humour with a nice line in bickering between Murdoch & the alcoholic Winters & then there's goofy hippie character Omar whose dialogue is often laugh out loud but in a cute amusing sort of way & he ends up getting horribly killed anyway so that's a nice satisfying moment. At 87 minutes long it moves at a decent pace, it starts off fairly mysteriously with Professor Bartell's motives & identity in particular kept a mystery before a climax involving a giant monster that was probably included because of the period it was made & giant monster films were quite popular back them I suppose. Of course it's not perfect by any means, the scene when Murdoch rescues Winters from the rocks is strange as I was just sat thinking to myself why doesn't she just go back the way she got out there in the first place? Then there's the dumb revelation that blood kills the flesh eaters, now if we think about that for a moment are the makers of this seriously trying to say that creatures that eat nothing but flesh, muscle, skin & bodily organs only weakness is being exposed to blood? No offence but how do they eat flesh & avoid blood anyway? It just doesn't make sense. Then there's that coat bit, Murdoch covers a skeleton with a coat & then the next day after a huge tropical storm the skeleton is there where they left it & the coat is as well having somehow not blown away. Then there's a daft bit at the end when Murdoch manages to get Bartell's pistol off him but within five minutes lets him get it back through stupidity & how exactly is Bartell planning to control these flesh eaters anyway? Although clichéd the character's are quite likable expect for Bartell the bad guy who just happens to be German, the dialogue is surprisingly snappy & quite amusing at times & it's a fun watch that holds up quite well & some decent gore & a decent final monster also help.Apparently filmed in 1961-ish & the copyright date on the credits reads 1962 this wasn't released until 1964, I suppose you could argue that The Flesh Eaters was the first true gore film but it's not that gory, the black and white photography lessens the impact & although made later Herschell Gorodn Lewis' Blood Feast (1963) is gorier, in colour & was actually released the previous year. There's some gore here, there's some blood splatter, a melted face or two, someone cuts a chunk out of someones leg & someone is seen with a great big hole through their body. The economy of the film is quite admirable with the entire thing taking place on one beach front & in a tent but it never feels cramped or like the makers were compromised & there's some surprisingly effective cinematography here too. Apparently while shooting on location a real hurricane destroyed sets & equipment & the production was delayed for a year & legend has it that Terry Curtis wife of director Jack won $72,000 on a game show & some of that was used to finish it.With a supposed budget of little over $100,000 this looks pretty good & although the monster at the end isn't the greatest I can name a lot of monsters from this period that look worse, also available in a colourized version. Shot on location on Long Island in New York. The acting is alright although some if not all of them appear to be dubbed.The Flesh Eaters is a nice little sci-fi horror exploitation film that I enjoyed, sure some of it doesn't make sense & the science is questionable to say the least but it entertains for the right reasons & I liked it, so shoot me.

theskulI42 Calling all B-movie fans, calling all B-movie fans, have I got a gem for you.Made with zero money, no notable actors and a rookie director who never directed a film again, somehow, The Flesh Eaters warmed my heart by keeping me genuinely engaged throughout. The film concerns harried transport pilot Grant Murdoch (Byron Sanders), endlessly hassled by debtors, who agrees to shuttle an unlikeable, drunk diva named Laura Winters (Rita Morley) and her genial assistant Jan (Barbara Wilkin) through harsh weather to a film shoot. Not surprisingly, the plane is forced to make a harsh landing on a desolate island. After running into creepy German scientist Prof. Bartell (Martin Kosleck, making an wonderfully spooky entrance), a skeleton, picked clean to the bone, washes up on the shore. asserts that it was sharks, but there is another menace afoot: flesh-eating bacteria! The film is well-put-together, far, far better than it has any right to be. The effects are simple and effective: bacteria itself has no business being anything but microscopic, and a little bit of overlay in the shimmering water does the trick beautifully. The film is also known as one of the first 'gore' films, coming on the heels of Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast, thought the very first. The opening sequence (which is so identical to the opening hook of Jaws that I wouldn't be surprised if Spielberg stole it) sets the grisly tone right off the bat, and throughout The Flesh Eaters, the gore is ably applied, and would be acceptable in contemporary films as well (as evidenced by the gushing infection that attacks Murdoch's leg). The acting is also uniformly good. Most of the reviews seem to take it for a given that it has bad acting, but taken on its own merits, the actors have much success in crafting believable, three-dimensional characters (Our Hero Grant doesn't always make the right decision, Our Lush Diva Laura feels guilty about drinking and makes attempts to stop, and even Our Villain Bartell has motivations that aren't completely sinister and nonsensical). Really, the only character that comes off as a caricature is Omar (Ray Tudor), a hippie love magnet on a wooden raft that someone ends up floating into shore, narrowly avoiding the eaters (and has his chest eaten through from the inside by drinking some of them, in yet another effectively gnarly sequence).Carson Davidson's cinematography (in what was, shockingly, also his one and only trip behind the lens) is far better than it has any right to be. Director Jack Curtis, was, hilariously, the voice of Pops in the English dub of Speed Racer. One-and-only-CREDIT Julian Stein's much is effective. The screenplay is by comic book writer Arnold Drake, whose only other film credit is the delightfully-named 50,000 BC (Before Clothing). Jack Curtis's cousin Roy Benson did the special effects and his work never appeared on another screen. Hell, even the production company Vulcan Productions was a one-and-done. In fact, it seems like the only position of any importance behind the camera to have a career that lasted more than the week and a half it took to shoot this film is editor Radley Metzger (pulling double-duty on the sound board, and whose credits are almost wholly porn), also doing fantastic work, as the film is a brisk 87 minutes, breezily-paced without being unfulfilling.The Flesh Eaters isn't perfect (the less said about it's ludicrous and wholly unnecessary finale, the better), but as a B-movie connoisseur, I've sat through far too many movies where it was obvious that no one involved had any idea what they were doing, and honestly, the more names I click on and find one credit to their names, the more I feel shortchanged. There's so many directors, and writers, and composers, and effects men and production houses that pump out crappy film after crappy film after crappy film, and yet, get to keep making them. But with The Flesh Eaters, it seems like everybody gave their best effort, and called it a day.If you're being scared away by the fact that it sounds too much like Cabin Fever, don't fret; that film is about as scary as a watermelon. Anyone who considers themselves a fan of trash, of exploitation, or grindhouse fare, you own it to yourself to track down a copy of The Flesh Eaters. The DVD has crisp sound, extra scenes, and a transfer so gloriously clean that Criterion couldn't have done a better job (and considering they occasionally release genre pics, all the work would be done for them!), yet another thing that it has going in its favor despite the fact that it has no right to have it so good.Damn you, Jack Curtis. You are an enigma of missed opportunities. But alas, you were busy fixing the Mach 5, so I guess the blame for this one rests solely on the shoulders of Racer X. Or Chim-Chim.{Grade: 8.25/10 (B+/B) / #14 (of 28) of 1964}

sol1218 **SPOILERS** Trying to get to Provincetown MA. for a play that she's staring in the famous and temperamental actress Laura Winters, Rita Morley, who's stranded in NYC, some 300 miles away, gets herself so smashed on gin that she'll have trouble remembering her name much less her lines. This has her very concerned agent Jan Letterman, Barbara Wilkin, get a charted plane to fly Laura there for opening night as a major storm approaches the New England coast.Down and out shuttle pilot Grant Murdoc, Byron Sanders, who at first balks at flying through the dangerous cloud-cover changes his mind when Jan offers him three times the amount of cash that he usually takes for the flight. Airborne and on a due north course to Cape Cod with the storm overtaking his plane Murdoc is forced to land on this uncharted and , what at first looks like, deserted island in Long Island Sound. Murdoc together with Jan and the barley sober Laura are surprised to find this creepy-looking guy who claims to be a professor in marine biology Peter Bartell played Joseph Gobbels look-alike Martin Kosleck.Acting normal, which is a herculean task for him, not to get his guests on the island suspicious to his real intentions Bertell is well on his way of perfecting this radio active and flesh eating algae or plankton. Who's formula he's planing to sell to the highest bidder, the US the USSR the UK and even Germany East or West. With which it, the country that Bertell sells it to, can not only conquer the waves but the world as well.Things get a little muddled for Bertell when he loses himself in a fit of carnal and uncontrollable lust when he finds Laura sunning herself on the beach all by herself. Bartell tries to rape the drunken, but very well endowed, Laura who fights off the horny old guy. Laura had already gotten herself so drunk that the next day she completely forgot what happened to her. Which gives the hot in the pants Bertell a second chance at her which he does later in the film.It's later that when this spaced out beatnik Omar, Ray Tudor, shows up on his raft that things really start to get out of hand. Omar together with Laura later discover what Bartell is doing which cost them both their lives. I turned out that the professor himself is, more then anyone in the movie, responsible for his own demise by thinking that he can fool with the laws of nature and get away with it. Bartell's mad experiments with the man-eating plankton which, after he electrifies it, turns into a glowing and flesh-eating crab-like monster. A monster which there's no way of him controlling or stopping from swallowing all life, human as well as fish and animal, on earth.Really a Martin Kosleck movie with everyone else in the film, with the possible exception or the drugged out and mind addled beatnik Omar, just there going through the motions and nothing else. Kosleck or the person he's playing Proffesor Peter Bartell gives it all he's got as the crazed, in the flashbacks we don't really know for sure if he was or wasn't, ex-Nazi mad scientist who like his deceased and beloved Fuhrer wants to take over the world. In Bartell's case for a nice and tidy profit not to, like in German Fuhrer Adolph Hitler's case, National Socialize or Nazify it.Like all movie about mad scientists Bartell screws himself up big time by him trying to create an army of killer and flesh-eating micro organisms he instead creates, by electrifying the waters off shore, a giant illuminating crab. The glowing crab has the crazed Bartell run for his life only to get attacked by flesh-eaters who make short order of him by turning Bartell into a bag of bones.Murdoc who found out, through Laura's strange death, what can stop this crab-like creature and with a syringe of anti-flesh-eating serum, plain human blood, sticks it to it and puts an end to this insanity. An insanity of gigantic proportions that only a fruitcake, with lots of nuts in it, like Professor Peter Bartell could have dreamed up.