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"The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary." A humid strain of Baby Doll pulses through it, with the local belle (Yvette Vickers) sauntering indolently into the general store in a half-open peignoir, a toothbrush in and out of her foamy mouth. The rotund cuckold (Bruno VeSota) catches her in flagrante with one of the louts (Michael Emmet), the illicit couple stands before his shotgun on the swamp's edge: "Into the water!" A game warden (Ken Clark) and a scientist's daughter (Jan Shepard) are the Good Couple elsewhere, a pair of reward-hungry poachers are moonshine-swilling jesters. The leeches themselves are marvelously ramshackle creations of the Corman school, one moment they're crew members squirming in sleeping bags and the next they're Cubist vampire-tentacles. A hint of Cape Canaveral contamination plus allusions to the Seminole and the U.S. Army add to the dense subtext, the torch-lit chiaroscuro of an underwater cave (the trapped humans are sucked raw by jagged suction cups) gives a whiff of an obscene underground orgy. Dynamite has the bodies bobbing up to the surface, anticipating a key image from Russell's Women in Love. Bernard L. Kowalski's filming is concurrent with Ray's (Wind Across the Everglades), resulting in a pungent little fable with a certain Rimbaudian side ("Singer, your goddaughter is my thirst so mad / A mouthless intimate hydra / Which consumes and ravages"). With Tyler McVey, Gene Roth, Dan White, and George Cisar. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |