Elizabeth + "Attack of the Giant Leeches"

Elizabeth, that's an excellent sketch of the tree at Porcupine Mountains. I always like to take photos of the sun's rays filtering through the trees, and you captured it in your drawing. How long does it take you to complete a sketch like that? Do you draw it all in one sitting? When I draw, it takes me about a week to finish one, doing anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour at a time. Well anyhow, good work as always! I also like your new Vocal Booth. You know I listen KUSC, and all of their DJs have been broadcasting from their closets, too. At first I was wondering why, and then I figured it must be because of the dead air. Maybe in a living room or bedroom the sound would bounce around too much? Best of luck on your recordings of "the all-important vocal melodies" as I call them, lol. The more I see how many simple chord progressions were used in hundreds of classic songs, the more important I consider the vocal line. In fact, today's chord progression is for "Hard Day's Night" by The Beatles. It's got a G-C-G to start the verse, but then moves down to G-F, just like in "Ramblin' Man" by The Allman Brothers. So there you have two songs using similar chord progressions, but with very different vocal lines and overall sounds and styles. Interesting, too, is that in both songs, when the guitar drops down briefly to F, the vocal goes higher. In rock music, the building blocks are the same over and over again, but the layers on top - the vocals, guitar sounds, harmonies, etc. - make all the difference. Go back and listen to Buddy Holly, see how much mileage he got out of E-A-B. He was one of the kings of simple inventiveness, not to mention great guitar sound......  :)

Last night's movie was another good one : "Attack of the Giant Leeches"(1959), in which a Park Ranger (Ken Clark) and a Doctor (Tyler McVey) try to solve the disappearance of several yokels in a Florida swamp. Roger Corman was in the producer's chair this time, having farmed out the director's job to Bernard Kowalski, who does an admirable job with a pared-down script.

An old geezer is down at the swamp one night, checking his otter traps when he hears a rustling noise in the reeds. Suddenly his eyes bulge and he screams, then starts blasting away. After emptying his rifle into Whatever It Was, he hurries back to the local roadhouse to tell his story, adamant when the rednecks on hand laugh at him.

"I'm tellin' ya it weren't no gator! I've seen enough gators in my time to know what one looks like. This thing had........arms! It had arms like one a them octopuses, and it had great big suckers, like.....whataya call 'em?...........tentacles, yeah! But it wadn't no octopus, neither. I filled it full o' shot and it didn't flinch"!

The 'Necks at the bar laugh him off and his tale is quickly forgotten. The bar's owner, for one, has other things on his mind. His purty little wife is cheatin' on him with the town stud. When he catches them together, he forces them down to the edge of the swamp at gunpoint. While the deceitful duo beg for their lives, he makes them tread out into the water. The night is black and they are terrified. Curiously, there are no gators around, a strange fact noted by Dave, the bar owner and jilted husband. "Y'all got nuthin' to worry about. The gators must be takin' a nap. You two are gonna stay out there until you learn your lesson".

"Oh please Dave, please Dave....we swear we'll never do it again"! Cheat, that is.

But just as Dave is getting ready to let them come ashore, they are grabbed by a gigantic slimy shape that takes them quickly under the surface. The thing was hard to identify in the darkness. Dave's not sure what it was, he tells the Sheriff, who remains skeptical. "I think you shot 'em both and dumped 'em in the swamp", he replies. Dave swears it isn't true. "I was just tryin' to scare 'em, really"!

The Sheriff, eager to solve the case, offers a reward (pronounced REE-ward) of fifty dollars to anyone who can locate the bodies. Two moonshiners take up the task and set out on their canoe the next morning, gator poles in hand, to search for the missing couple. They too notice the absence of the alligators. "Should be 70-80 of 'em in a swamp this size........what could be makin' em leave"?

They're about to find out. Now there are four people missing. The Sheriff is a cantankerous sort who figures they all got what was coming to them : a couple of cheaters and two drunks. He wants nothing more than to shut down the case, but the Park Ranger, a clean-cut good guy (and non-Redneck), is determined to solve the mystery. He enlists the help of the town Doctor and the pair make an exploratory scuba dive into the depths of the swamp. While down there, the Ranger sees a Gigantic Slimy Shape suddenly swimming at him. Good thing he brought along his harpoon gun.

THH-WAKKK!

But it does little good. The Thing just swims away.

Back at the Sheriff's office, the cold, hard facts must now be faced : "Looks like ol' Cal was tellin' the truth about that Thing he shot". Yessirree, you guys should've listened in the first place!

But finding the Thing still doesn't explain what happened to the bodies of the four who went missing. "If they're in there, they shoulda floated to the surface by now".

The Park Ranger muses on this for a moment, then suggests a possibility. "You know, when I was in Italy during the war, we did some diving off the coast. Once we found a shipwreck, and in some cabins you could still come up into the room and remove your face mask. There were air pockets all through that ship, and I wonder if there might be some at the bottom of the swamp".

"Like in caves, you mean"?

"Exactly. Now, old Cal was saying that Thing had tentacles, like an octopus, only he first called them 'suckers'. We've been wondering why the bodies haven't floated to the surface, but is it possible they aren't dead? Maybe that Thing is a Giant Leech, and instead of killing those folks, it's feeding off them. What if it's got them trapped in an underwater cave and is slowly draining their blood"?

Okay, it's me again. Sorry to be so graphic but that's exactly what's going on. I felt it wasn't right to soft-pedal it, so I'm giving it to ya straight. It's true : The Thing is A Giant Leech, and it is indeed feeding off the missing folks at the bottom of the swamp. Making matters worse, there's two of them. Bullets and harpoons haven't done any good, so it's time to bring out the explosives.

Leo Gordon wrote the script this time for Roger Corman, but like Charles B. Griffith he's got a good ear for dialogue, in this case the slang of the South (which I have humbly tried to recreate, haha). Also like Griffith, he dispenses with anything extraneous. Gordon doesn't share Griffith's penchant for weirdness - there aren't any philosophical rants coming from his leeches - but he is able to write a multi-layered story that has a fair amount of character development, mixed into the "whodunit" plot with a layer of hard science as the icing (supplied by the presence of the Doctor and Park Ranger). Gordon knows his Backwoods Culture, and in that sense "Attack of the Giant Leeches" has an authentic Southern feel along the same lines as "Eaten Alive", haha. All of the solid production values of the better Corman movies are on display here, and the acting is serviceable and sometimes better. The always-entertaining Bruno veSota, a Corman vet, stars as Dave Walker the bar owner.

I give "Attack of the Giant Leeches" Two Big Thumbs Up. Ironically, it was one Creature Feature that could've benefited from ten or fifteen extra minutes, just to flesh out the plot a little more. When was the last time you heard me say a movie should be longer, lol. Especially a short one. But I say it because "Attack" was well made and had a solid, forward moving story. I would have welcomed the extra minutes, but it's still one of the Better Cormans at it's finished length. Highly Recommended for Rubber Suited Monster fans. //////

That's all I know for the present. It was 101 degrees today, still warm as I write. It's time for my CSUN walk, then a little music to go with my reading. I'm excited because I got a new CD in the mail : "Early Iberian Organ Music" on the Naxos label. Oh boy! See you later tonight at the Usual Time.  :):)

Tons and tons of love!  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)