Something is going on in the Florida swamps. The swamps are quiet, the gator population is down and people are turning up dead - with bizarre marks and no blood left in their bodies. One hot and sultry night an otter poacher comes face to face with what’s causing all the trouble, giant leeches. Now it's up to the local game warden to hunt down and put and end to the massive leeches and their blood drinking ways.

Like the leeches, this flick sucks, just not as much. The plot and the acting aren’t bad, even the swamp sets are fairly good, but there are two major things wrong with this flick. The first one I can overlook and it deals with the underwater shots in the film. Unlike Creature from the Black Lagoon, which used real underwater cameras in actual swamps, Leeches shoots all of the underwater scenes through a huge plate glass window in some marine park somewhere.

Once during the movie you can actually see handprints on the glass, but for 1959, I can let that slide. What is worse about this flick are the leeches themselves, and they are laughably bad. The leech suits are men in black swimsuits, with a few circles on them and they put a few rubber teeth along the goggles the actors wear, it looks so bad, especially when the leeches are swimming.

The plot and the cast are actually pretty good. A bunch of nobodies, but they all do a great job as the swamp dwellers. The best however is Yvette Vickers who plays Liz Walker, the local adulteress, whose crotch is hotter and more humid than any of the nearby swamps, slinky and curvy Yvette will keep all the fellas eyes on her and for the ladies you get a couple of real hairy-chested manly men in their swimwear to ogle. At first the leeches appear to be just big old monsters, but following the easy to use formula of atomic transformation, you find out that Cape Canaveral is just around the corner and you can kinda guess what that leads to, the whole nature mutation thing again.

For a 50's creature feature this is actually not that bad of a flick, but the creature costumes are really, really bad and the filming through a plate glass window, doesn't help.

4 of 10