GL84 Traveling out to sea, a group of seafarers crash landing on a deserted island and seek refuge with a professor on the island studying a group of silvery objects nearby that are keeping them on the island and forcing them to fight off the deadly creatures before they can leave.This one isn't that bad of a cheap creature feature. Among it's best features are the little creature in the film as it does some really good things with them being the star of the film. The fact that they're so small and quite imposing is a great feature, and since they're deadly this really manages to get a few good ideas thrown in. The fact that they're so small and can eat flesh gives them a nice advantage, since they can come up on their victims before they realize it is a fine feature, which is what happens several times in the film for great results of the creatures in some nice attack scenes here due to a couple of nice suspense scenes. There's the opening crawl over the beach during the windstorm and the later fight over the tide pools with the creatures below providing some decent and somewhat chilling scenes here. There's also some nice work here in the fact that because they live in the sea, it puts a damper on most of the potential escape attempts due to the fact that there's the opportunity of them to jump on board. That leaves a lot of potential ones to go through and not be workable, which is a great concept. This one is also a little more graphically violent than expected, and that is quite nice seeing the characters visibly covered with the creatures and the beginning stages of being eaten begin, and there's even a lot more shots of victims reduced to skeletons than normal, and there's a couple of others in here that are bloodier than expected. These here are what help the film, but there are a few flaws. Those, though, can all be traced back to one central idea, the film's cheap and cheesy appeal. Once the giant monsters appear at the end, this one is effectively pigeon-holed as such a film since they look really cheesy, perform even more so, and rarely look threatening. It is mostly noted for how they interact throughout here, which is where it gets the big mark for it's easily noticed that they're cheaply integrated together, and they make it that much more unlikable. The final fight with the huge one is the perfect example of this, and along with the hideous special effects work, is so cheesy that it's hard not to find it ridiculous. The last part is also based around the main twist at the end, which can be seen coming from a mile away and shouldn't even be considered a twist as it happens in nearly every single example with this set-up. These here are the film's biggest faults.Today's Rating/PG-13: Violence.

MartinHafer This is an abysmal film from start to finish. While the fact that there weren't any real sets (it was almost exclusively filmed on the beach), the biggest liabilities were the awful writing and acting. Some of the actors weren't too bad, but most were awful. The lady who played the down-and-out alcoholic actress looked like she was doing a third-rate imitation of Foster Brooks. The "Beatnik" was pure Bob Denver--like a combination of his Maynard G. Krebs and Gilligan characters--a "kooky" character dumped in the middle of a supposedly serious horror film. The BEST actor might just have been the guy in the super-weird monster suit near the very end of the film!! The film begins with the drunk actress and her secretary convincing a pilot to take them in his plane even though a hurricane was quickly approaching--smart thinking, huh?! However, the plane unexpectedly has engine trouble and is stranded on an island with an obviously crazy German scientist. Despite the fact that the German guy is totally nuts, it takes them almost the entire film to figure out he's up to no good.Once the storm safely passes (and they were very well protected in a tent--GREAT protection from a hurricane), a glowing mass of itsy-bitsy creatures begin surrounding the island. Touching the creatures is like being dunked in acid--as they knew when they saw a fully articulated skeleton washes up on the shore. Now a skeleton cannot stay together once the flesh is removed, but somehow it looks like it just came out of the medical supply house packing case! How are these annoying idiots going to escape? And, who particularly cares since they are SO annoying and the creatures seem so,...well,...boring! The bottom line is that this film is only good on a camp level--you know, the type film you watch with your friends to laugh at just how bad it can be!! Don't watch this if you want to see a horror film--the only horror is the badness of the film!

ferbs54 Truth to tell, I had not heard of this movie until recently, but after reading several laudatory reviews in various film books, and after hearing a coworker buddy of mine rave about it, I quickly put it at the very top of my list of films to rent. And boy, am I ever glad I did! "The Flesh Eaters" (1964), as it turns out, is nothing less than a horror minimasterpiece; a genuine sleeper whose relative obscurity may soon change, thanks to this crisp-looking DVD from the fine folks at Dark Sky. In it, an alcoholic actress, her hotty blonde assistant and their hunky-dude plane pilot are forced to land on a barren island near NY's Long Island, right before a hurricane. There, they encounter a scientist played by Martin Kosleck, who is working with the teensy critters that give this film its name. Kosleck, a German Jew who nonetheless excelled at portraying weasly Nazi types throughout the '40s, is superb in the lead role, but then again, all the actors in this film are surprisingly fine. The film also boasts beautiful, high-contrast B&W photography, utilizing bizarre camera angles and point-of-view shots; some highly effective gross-out scenes; and some truly original-looking monsters, both large and small. The film gets wilder and wilder as it proceeds,and offers some real surprises toward the end. Thus, this little independent shocker is just dynamite, and a real find for the jaded horror fan. It's also suitable for the kiddies...say, from 10 and up. It'll warp them a little, but they won't soon forget it, and will probably rave about it to THEIR coworkers one day...

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.