Directed by Edward Dein, written by David Duncan
Starring Grant Williams, Coleen Gray and Phillip Terry
1960
An endocrinologist looking for a secret formula that will turn the
elderly young again travels to Africa with his wife to search out a tribe with the
secret of youth. Things don’t go as planned, however, and soon the wife returns
home, mysteriously younger, and seeks out lives to feed her ever-growing
dependence on the youth drug she has discovered.
This Universal horror is really late in the cycle, all the way to
1960, but in some ways is a bit of a throwback. Instead of the straight forward
slogs many of these films became, this one harkens back to the “one damn thing
after another” school of filmmaking, to the movie’s benefit. You never know what’s
going to happen next. It starts with the doctor being over-the-top cruel to his
alcoholic wife, and at first you think, well, it was that time and place. But
then you realize it’s all a set up for the wife’s revenge and you think – what
the hell’s going to happen next? The title refers to the woman feeding off of
other characters to stay young, instead of featuring an actual leech woman, but
to the movie’s credit, it does not feel like a bait and switch the way SHE-WOLF
and a few others do. It’s a good note to end Horrorfest 2019 on, a surprisingly
entertaining and ghastly entry into Universal’s legendary list of horror
flicks.
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