Out now in a gorgeous Blu-ray from Shout! Factory is the fabulous 1964 horror film- The Flesh Eaters, the movie author Michael Weldon described in his seminal book The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film: “A prime example of an outrageous early 60s independent shocker.”
The film was directed by Jack Curtis, a well-known voice-over artist, whose work included Speed Racer. The film was funded with money his wife won on the game show High-Low in 1951 and the screenplay by Arnold Drake, who also wrote the script for Who Killed Teddy Bear? The film editor was Radley Metzger, who went on to direct such elegant, soft-core sexy shockers as The Lickerish Quartet and Score. And it was filmed on Long Island. Montauk, to be exact.
The plot is as follows: Grant (Byron Sanders), a NY private plane pilot, begrudgingly agrees to fly an alcoholic actress- Laura Winters (Rita Morley) and her secretary Jan (Barbara Wilkin) to Provincetown during a dangerous, encroaching storm. They crash land on an island where a crazed marine biologist (Martin Kosleck) has been experimenting with oceanic, iridescent, flesh-eating organisms that now surround the island.
Martin Kosleck was well-known for playing Nazi villains on film and was performing on stage in NY when he was approached by the filmmakers and agreed to be in this film. Many of the other cast were selected from the stage also.
The clever way the filmmakers created the “flesh eaters” was to actually scratch the film itself with a pin which left a weird, skewered glittering glow on screen when you see the creatures.
But you can never fully understand the impact this movie had on kids in the 60s. I vividly remember the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland with The Flesh Eaters on the cover showing a man clawing the skin off his face. I could not wait to see the film. And it was one of the first “gore” movies in many ways, tame by today’s standards but surprisingly brutal and shocking then. I was obsessed with the film. I even own the one-sheet for it, and wonder if my move to Provincetown in the 70s was inspired by the film. One of the promotional gimmicks for the film at the time was offering theater patrons packets of “instant blood” for protection. I would have gone berserk if my theater had offered that.
This Blu-ray includes the alternate version of the film, which basically is just a rather tasteless Nazi experimentation flashback scene showing several nude women thrown into a pool filled with the pesky flesh eaters. It also includes a rousing commentary with screenwriter Arnold Drake; filmmaker Fred Olen Ray and film historian Tom Weaver which exhaustively, and amusingly, relates the arduous making-of-the-film (a hurricane caused them to stop the film for a year and then continue). Watching the movie again after many years, I was delighted at how witty the dialogue was and how well the film held up.
This Blu-ray release of the film, which restores the lustrous black & white photography to its proper sheen, is a cause for a gore-hound celebration.
I love this movie!
I’ll bet you ate a hot dog when you first saw this movie.