It’s an outrage, a meretricious atrocity, a blaring, brazen bloodbath. It’s The Flesh Eaters, a cinematic Grand Guignol shot in ghastly black and white and produced with frightful thrift that just so happens to be the greatest B-grade horror flick ever made. And I do mean ever.
This movie has got the lot: a deranged naziphile scientist, a beefcake hero who doesn’t know the meaning of the word pain or emote, a whining, drunken trollop and her blonde good-girl assistant, a platitude-spouting beatnik imbecile, and a giant luminescent monster that looks like the love child of Squiddly Diddly and a fried dim sim.
If that’s not enough to whet your exploitation movie appetite, there are gouts and gouts of inky gore. In fact, such is this motion picture’s gruesomeness that when I first saw it almost 20 years after its 1964 release it had been given a short back and sides by a TV censor.
The Flesh Eaters was directed by Jack Curtis and scripted by Arnold Drake, a veteran comic book scribe who conceived DC’s Doom Patrol and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Drake’s ability to squeeze a big story into a small comic book keeps the movie galloping along at a Melbourne Cup pace. There’s no time to be bored with this celluloid beauty.
Warning: Spoilers Galore!
Pilot Grant Murdoch is flying shickered actress Laura Winters and her personal assistant, Jan Letterman, to Provincetown in his seaplane when engine trouble forces him to make an emergency landing on a deserted island.
While seeking shelter from an approaching storm, they encounter Dr. Peter Bartel, a marine biologist with an armor-plated German accent, who lumbers out of the misty surf in a scuba diving suit. Bartel claims he’s conducting research on shellfish.
So drunk she can barely crawl, Winters stumbles across a human skeleton washed up on the shore. Bartel puts it down to a shark attack. This is despite the fact that the skeleton is completely intact and has been picked cleaner than a stoners’ box of chicken McNuggets.
Bartel invites the new arrivals to spend the night in his tent, where he introduces them to his pet parrot, Lewis. He says Lewis keeps him company on long, lonely field trips. The bird’s confounded screeching has a miraculous healing effect on Winters, turning her sober instantaneously.
Murdoch pulls Jan aside and tells her he doesn’t buy Bartel’s explanation about the mysteriously well-preserved skeleton. He suspects Bartel is hiding something from them. Boy, is he ever!
The next morning, Bartel approaches Winters on the beach. Needing the kind of companionship a parrot just can’t provide, he asks her why she’d want to hook up with a virile hunk like Murdoch when she could have an aging authority on shellfish like him. She laughs at his lame pick-up technique and bites him on the hand.
Winters hits the bottle hard. She collapses on the beach with a blood-alcohol reading of highly flammable. Meanwhile, Bartel sets the seaplane adrift, stranding her and the others on the island.
Alarmed by the number of fish skeletons littering the shore, Murdoch informs Jan that they have to leave the island asap. He goes looking for Winters and finds her at the water’s edge, staring alcoholically at his now missing seaplane’s anchor rope. He blames her for losing the plane. She storms off in desperate need of a drink.
Jack Daniels leaves Winters trapped on a rock surrounded by the incoming tide. While rescuing her, Murdoch is attacked by the titular flesh eaters, glowing, whistling carnivorous microbes that infest the ocean around the island. They attach themselves to his legs. Bartel has to dig them out with a pocket knife.
Jazz music fills the air. It’s coming from a phonograph on a raft offshore. Omar, a goofy beatnik, is the raft’s sole passenger. Murdoch and Jan holler at him to stay away from the island, but he’s too busy shouting beatnik drivel to listen. He comes ashore with his sandals caked in flesh eaters. Bartel excises the contaminated footwear with a few deft strokes of his pocketknife.
After a spot of communal tea on the beach, Letterman and Murdoch are exploring some sand dunes when they happen upon an immense black box covered in white polka dots with a power cable attached. Murdoch surmises it’s a solar battery. How Bartel managed to transport it to the island is a secret the screenwriter will take with him to the grave.
Bartel zaps a fishbowl full of flesh eaters in his tent with 10,000 volts of electricity as everyone looks on. He says he’s going to kill the flesh eaters in the ocean the same way. The others leave him to continue his pioneering work. Suddenly the flesh eaters fizz back to life. Bartel grins devilishly.
A motorboat speeds toward the island. The guy piloting it cops a spray of saltwater in his face, which flesh eaters reduce to a piss-poor make-up effect. The boat drops a U-ey and skips back the way it came. Murdoch and company, watching from the beach, lament what could have been their way off the island.
Bartel sends Murdoch and the ladies to find a suitable spot where he can jump-start the ocean. While they’re gone he offers Omar a flesh-eater Micky Finn. The idiot drinks it. Black goop, in lieu of red blood, pumps out of his stomach. Bartel captures his agonized howls with a microphone.
Sometime later, Murdoch and the ladies hear Omar screaming. They spot him sailing into the distance on his raft. Unbeknownst to them, the screams are coming from a tape recorder beside his corpse. Flesh eaters have eaten him clean through.
Snoozing off a hangover in the tent, Winters is awakened by a boiling sound coming from the fish bowl. She peeks under a tarpaulin covering it and flees in terror. Correction, she does her makeup, and then flees in terror. The tarpaulin rises as a heaving mass beneath it grows bigger and bigger.
Winters comes on to Bartel. She explains that she wants to be on his team now because his team is the winningest team. They pash. Then he stabs her in the gut with a wooden stake. He buries her atop a sand dune. Not the ideal place to hide a body, but he’s in a hurry. As he hastens away, her hand bursts through the sand.
Murdoch has a heated argument with Bartel, who pulls a gun on him. Bartel reveals that the flesh eaters are the creation of Nazi biologists. Who else! Being a staunch patriot, he intends to sell the flesh-eater tech to the US military; however, if they don’t want it, there’s always the Russians.
Bartel orders Jan to fetch some equipment from the tent. She’s confronted there by a hideous glowing blob creature which has scarfed poor Lewis. Realizing that the creature is the result of Bartel’s fish bowl experiment, she races back to the beach and warns him not to electrify the water. But does he listen? Instead, he forces Murdoch at gunpoint to throw a saucepan-cum-electrode into the surf.
The blob creature barrels out of the tent, electricity arcing from its two rubber tentacles. Bartel has some bad news for Jan and Murdoch. He has to shoot them so he can escape the island while the creature is busy feasting on their dead bodies.
Suddenly Winters, wooden stake in hand, lumbers toward the mad marine biologist, snarling that she’s going to kill him. He plugs her right in the face. Her corpse rolls down the dune and, just by accident, plunges the stake into the creature’s beach-ball-like eye. Blood drips off her hand into the puncture. The creature explodes.
Bartel and Murdoch deduce, brilliantly, that human blood causes the transformed flesh eaters to go kablooey. A timely deduction, for just then a condominium-sized blob creature forms in the ocean. They jury rig a giant hypodermic syringe to inject it with blood.
Once again Bartel pulls his gun on Jan and Murdoch. His excuse this time is that shooting them dead is the only way for him to avoid the electric chair. Murdoch knocks the gun out of his hand. They fight and Bartel ends up in the drink. Roaring in pain, Bartel staggers out of the water, body aglow with flesh eaters. He grabs the gun with a flesh-stripped hand and blows his high IQ out.
The gigantic blob creature bubbles to full size. Wearing Bartel’s scuba diving suit, Murdoch sloshes into the brine, armed with the hypodermic syringe. A monstrous tentacle seizes him. He manages to wriggle free of the unconvincing appendage and lands conveniently on the creature’s colossal eyeball, into which he empties the syringe. He leaps to safety just before the creature goes up in a cloud of superimposed smoke.
Murdoch shares a relieved hug with Jan. They faced the flesh eaters and lived. They walk off along the beach together as the sun slowly departs their side of the world.