Tuesday 2/13/24
Watched The Flesh Eaters (1964). Surprisingly suspenseful at times. Stupid at others, but kind of a cool film, with a Cape Cod-ish setting. Or at least a random island in the vicinity of Cape Cod setting.
I like these early gore films. They're not actually gore-y, but if you saw one of them at the time, you would have seen some things that you weren't used to seeing.
1963's Blood Feast is another one. What else? 1960's Eyes Without a Face, which has a Cocteau-like aspect. One I'm particularly fond of is 1958's Fiend Without a Face. There's a lovely one-sheet poster for that film, too. I rented all of these and saw them for the first time as a teenager.
The Flesh Eaters actually has quite a bit of deep focus in it. You need it--people are shot at these distances on the mostly open island. Two people will be in the foreground by the water, and someone else will be running down from the steep beach slope above. There are a number of moving camera shots as well that surprised me.
The mad scientist type is this Nazi-loyalist--from the States--played by Martin Kosleck, who played a lot of Nazis in his career. He was Goebbels no less than five times. Isn't that wild? He could have been sitting at home, gotten a call from his agent, and then said to his boyfriend, "Good news, I'm playing Goebbels again. I own that part, bitch."
Kosleck was in the Rathbone-Bruce Holmes/Watson picture, Pursuit to Algiers, which I do actually have a one-sheet of, though it's in storage.
I had no problem when the beatnik/proto-hippie guy drank the beverage with the flesh eaters in it and got himself eaten alive from the inside out. Not as annoying as an indoor scarf person, but pretty bad all the same.
George Romero originally wanted the title of Night of the Living Dead to be Night of the Flesh Eaters, but then someone pointed out this not-so-classic film to him from a few years before.
They stretched this sucker out to an hour and a half, which is also surprising.
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