Mystery Science Theater 3000 #406 "Attack of the Giant Leeches" w/short "Undersea Kingdom, Part One"

This episode begins with the short Undersea Kingdom, Part One. The plot is something to do with a war in Atlantis between two factions. On the evil side, a man dressed like a chicken (NOT Krankor) activates some evil robots who shoot a rocket or something. Meanwhile, by way of their submarine, a group of human explorers investigate the lost city under the sea, which strangely looks like a pretty dry place, what with the vast desert they have to wander through. The explorers are soon discovered and hunted down by the undersea marauders. This first part ends on a cliffhanger and is picked up in episode #409 The Indestructible Man.

Definitely not Krankor.

I have never been much of a fan of the serial shorts. Like most people I've always preferred the educational shorts; but this one is fun and has some great riffing. It contains the great, unusually dark riff from Joel: "all of these people are dead now. Isn't that weird?" delivered with complete sincerity. I can't think of many darker from this era of the show.

The main feature Attack of the Giant Leeches begins in a greasy Florida town where we meet a fat man named Dave who discovers that his wife is cheating on him with a guy called Cal who she meets periodically at the local swamp (romantic). Dave follows them there with his shotgun, and as retribution he forces them to run into the swamp at gun point. Dave witnesses the two cheaters dragged away by the giant leeches and calls the local law enforcement. He tries to explain to the sheriff that the monsters are behind the disappearance, but as usual, the authorities don't believe him. Instead they attribute the deaths to alligator attacks. In an unusually dark twist Dave the fat man is overwhelmed by guilt and hangs himself in his cell. 

"Oh great, a swinger. Always on my shift." - Joel

Meanwhile, local hero Steve believes in the monsters and works on a plan to hunt them. He assembles a search party to find the victims, and along the way they discover that there are no alligators left in the swamp. Either they've been scared away or something has eaten them. Scary right? Steve gets permission to go diving in the swamp (which looks to be about a metre deep) armed with a trusty spear and a bomb with which to destroy the monsters. Along the way he gets into a scrape with a leech and his buddy has to jump in to save him. They return to shore with proof of the leeches' existence and blow the swamp up (apparently... there's a splash). The dead leeches float to the surface. The end.

The leeches attack.

As indicated by the inclusion of the short, Attack of the Giant Leeches is a short movie. As a result you'd think it would be fairly fast paced, but you'd be wrong. The only way to describe this film is “intensely boring.” It's not the worst movie featured in MST3K, nor is it one of the best. It's not even the most average. It's nothing. Having said that, the episode itself is a pretty great one; not what I would consider a top ten or top twenty candidate, but pretty solid all around. For a Joel episode there are not too many overly obscure references, as they were known to do on occasion if they had a movie like this that presented a whole heap of nothingness to work with. There is a fun host segment featuring the song "Danger to Myself and Others" that pokes fun at the Southern hicks depicted in the film, that's to my recollection one of the earliest host segments to target the South. There would be many, many more to come in the seasons that followed. It's easy to see why: swamps lend themselves well to crappy monster movies, not to mention the archetypal county sheriff who doesn't want anyone telling him how to do his job. Thus there was a huge catalogue of MST3K fodder set in the South for the crew to choose from. See Squirm, Boggy Creek II and of course "Manos": The Hands of Fate for a few examples.

 

The leech costumes are some of the worst in MST3K history, and there have been some bad ones. There was the pickle / reverse ice cream cone from Venus in It Conquered the World, and the furry dogs passed off as shrews in The Killer Shrews, but the giant leeches possibly out rank them. They look like industrial size bin bags with goggles attached.

Good Thing

The short is infinitely more entertaining than the feature, and you'll be missing it after ten minutes of Attack of the Giant Leeches. I know that the shorts served the purpose of supplementing the shorter feature films to reach the episode length, but I would have liked to have seen The Undersea Kingdom shorts joined together as one whole episode. Maybe someone out there could edit them all together? It would potentially form an interesting "lost" episode.

Bad Thing

It's hard to pick a bad thing from the main feature because nothing happens. I guess it's the anticlimactic ending. Steve plants a bomb, survives a confrontation with one of the leeches and sets off the detonator. Then everyone leaves and the film says “The End.” There are no final speeches, no cliffhanger ending with one of the leeches still alive, nothing. Just like the rest of the film. Some people really enjoy these Roger Corman films and the episodes of MST3K they produced, but although this is a fairly light, entertaining episode, I find Corman's films neither good enough nor bad enough to be interesting.

"Thank you for comforting me with your gun." - Crow