- Directed by Jack Curtis
- Written by Arnold Drake
- Stars Martin Kosleck, Byron Sanders, Barbara Wilkin
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 27 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec9Js0iL9VI
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s got a surprising amount of gore considering the age of the movie and budget. There’s a decent story, some horror tension, decent acting and direction. Don’t overthink the science though.
Synopsis
Ann and her boyfriend Fred are out on a boat, and he’s really annoying. They both jump in for a swim. There’s a strange noise, and they both sink to the bottom and bubbles come up as credits roll.
Jan Letterman wants to hire Grant Murdoch’s plane to take her and Laura to Provincetown. There’s bad weather coming in, but she offers triple his regular rate. The engine starts to cut out even before the storm.
They land on a deserted beach. They have to tie down the airplane before the storm hits. Laura’s a drunken movie star, and Jan is her assistant or secretary. As they walk along the beach, they run into Professor Peter Bartell in his wetsuit.
Laura soon stumbles across a skeleton in the sand. It’s what’s left of Ann. Peter blames sharks. They go to Peter’s tent and see his creepy bird. “I assure you we are for a good pounding,” Peter says as the storm rolls in.
Morning comes, but the wind is too high to take off. Jan says that Laura has some mental issues that keep her from acting. Grant is suspicious of Peter, who’s been deceptive about the sharks.
Peter is clearly jealous of Grant; he thinks that Laura’s interested in Grant, but she’s only interested in getting more booze. She ends up biting him and running away. She goes back to the plane for her bottles but passes out on the beach.
Peter finds a glowing fish skeleton. Then he finds Laura passed out and unties the airplane.
Grant finds dead fish too, and Peter theorizes that it might be a parasite of some kind. Grant decides it’s time to get off this island. Then they find Laura next to the plane anchor—but no plane. Naturally, they blame her.
Grant spots something glowing in the water—something alive. There are millions of the things in the water. Laura finds her booze-filled suitcase out on the rocks and goes after it. Grant rescues her, but he accidentally steps in the bubbling water.
He cuts off his pants leg and it’s a boiling bloody mess under there. Peter cuts the things off, and they tie up his leg. He also collects a few specimens in a metal cigarette case, but it quickly burns a hole through the metal.
Peter says his supply boat is coming tomorrow, and they’ll be able to leave that way. In the meantime, some guy floats up on a raft, and the small glowing silver dust-things that eat flesh crawls up onto his raft and burns his feet. He comes onto shore, and Peter cuts his sandals off. He’s Omar, a really stupid beatnik-hippie type.
We cut to Matt and Jim, two sailors that run supplies to Peter. Matt gets into a boat and heads the island.
Back on the island, Grant asks Peter about his huge solar power unit. Why does he need so much power? He demonstrates on some sample creatures. He electrocutes a bunch of them in a beaker. He wants to run a long wire to the beach and electrocute the ocean (I don’t think it works like that).
About 55 minutes later, the “Flesh Eaters” come back to life, but Peter keeps that to himself. Matt comes up on his boat, but the flesh-eaters eat—his flesh. After that, Peter puts one of the things in Omar’s drink. The things eat their way out, which is surprisingly gory for a film this old.
Laura goes back to the tent and finds that the flesh eaters that Peter experimented on are not dead. Not only that, but it looks like they are growing. She knows Peter knows more than he’s telling and goes to Peter to “join his side.” He leads her off into the hills and stabs her to death before burying the body. Except we see her hand reach up out of the dirt.
Grant accuses Peter of “losing” their plane, so Peter pulls a gun. He reveals that the Nazis developed a strange virus that would consume only living matter. It was developed as a biological weapon that would kill the entire fish supply of a continent. He plans to sell them to the highest bidder as a weapon of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, back in the tent, the growing flesh-eaters eat Peter’s bird.
Peter has Grant throw the electrodes into the water to test his electrocution project. Jan goes back to the tent and finds the bird has been eaten. She realizes that electrifying the flesh eaters only makes them grow and become more dangerous. She runs back to Grant and Peter, but they’ve already done it.
The tent thing’s now bigger than a car. Peter points out that the sea is now cooking up a monster a hundred times bigger than this one. Laura pops out of nowhere and attacks Peter. He shoots her and pushes her into the monster. She hits it in the eye with a knife and it dissolves. No, it wasn’t the knife, it was her blood.
Grant thinks they should rig up some kind of huge hypodermic needle containing their blood. Peter uses a syringe to draw blood from each of them. Grant goes out after the new monster in a wetsuit with the by needle.
For some reason, Peter decides to pull a gun on Grant before he battles the monster. Peter ends up going for a very brief swim and then shooting himself.
Then the big monster surfaces. It’s bigger than Godzilla. Grant wades out to it in his rubber wetsuit and jabs it in the eye with his blood-filled hypodermic. The creature then explodes.
He then comes back up onto the beach with Jan. They’re still trapped on the island, surrounded by the original small flesh eaters, and their plan to electrocute them only makes things worse. We don’t know what’s next…
Commentary
The special effect for the sparkly little monsters is pretty neat considering the time period. Martin Koslek plays the mad scientist well, and Byron Sanders does a pretty good leading man. The big monster at the end is pretty awful, but comparable to other films of the period.
It’s got a super low budget, but it’s really ambitious and does a lot with a little. There’s a lot of blood in this one between the monsters and the blood-drawing scene. The big monster at the end was a little hokey, but overall, it was pretty good.