Monster of the Day #856

Well, that sucks.*

[*Ken Begg, the Oscar Wilde of the 21st Century.]
  • Ericb

    Kristen Stewart is such a wooden actress.

  • Ken_Begg

    You might be giving too much credit to Kristen Stewart here.

  • Reed

    Yay Leech Woman! It’s not often that your favorite ridiculously conceived and ludicrously executed puppet shows up on a movie web page! Or that you get to type that sentence!

  • Ken_Begg

    Luckily, it’s NOT Leech Woman. What a snore that movie is.

  • Ericb

    The MST3K riffing of it is pretty funny though.

    “You’re not going to poke MY pineal.”

  • sandra

    That ‘blood’ looks like raspberry jelly.

  • Flangepart

    FX guy: “Got these packets from the diner. Saved a bundle there.”

  • Rock Baker

    I rather liked THE LEECH WOMAN. But then, it had Gloria Talbott in it….

  • Rock Baker

    Of all the puppets, this one always made the least amount of sense to me. Where are all those full-size leeches coming from? I remember one went in, and there was only room enough for one…. Plus, her making use of her abilities were so involved and drawn-out that her victims had to be incapacitated in one way or another before she even went to work.

  • Ken_Begg

    I much prefer Wasp Woman. Junkier and cheaper, but far more lively.

  • Rock Baker

    As cute as Barboura Morris is, she’s still no Talbott. Don’t get me wrong, I love both flicks, but I always award extra points for Universal’s great stock music.

  • The Rev.

    I thought more than one got put in, but maybe not. Either way the available space is an issue, as is the fact that they probably should’ve starved to death by the time of the first movie.

    I’m with you on this puppet, though. I never really got it, and unlike the others it really doesn’t have a place in their force (situational assassin, I guess?) Such a weird, specific murder weapon that is useless outside of, as you said, incapacitated victims. Of all the movies I’ve seen she’s killed exactly one person. I will admit that in light of whose soul was in her, some retroactive sympathy emerged for what happened to her in the 2nd movie. Of course, that revelation then opens up a mess of issues with Toulon’s whole motivation in said movie and his reaction to that puppet’s fate…

  • The Rev.

    “Neil! NEEEEEEEILLL!!”

    The movie’s all right, but then I’ve never watched it un-MSTified. I have a feeling it’d drag pretty badly without Mike and the ‘bots.

  • The Rev.

    There’s also the fact that I have a hard time believing three good-sized leeches could bleed a guy to death, even with as much as they seem to be wasting here.

    Having said all that, though, I will admit that the scenes of her mouth expanding and her puking them out (complete with icky noises) was pretty creepy. Vastly distending jaws seem to strike a nerve with me; the only things I remember about Flesh Eating Mothers are a blatantly-fake prosthetic head with distending jaw that still managed to creep me out; a surprisingly well-done nose ripping; and the line, “There’s an epidemic out there! MOTHERS are EATING their CHILDREN!”; emphasis added by the actor.

  • Petoht

    I’m amused by the discussion of the realism and reasoning behind magically animated killer puppets.

  • The Rev.

    That’s what we do around these parts! I’m even amusing myself with this.

  • The thing is, there really should have been some rationale for having so many slugs in her. Even a hand wave (we know this is silly, just go with it) would help with the suspension of disbelief.

    That said, I never stopped to think about it when I watched the movies.

  • I find it just typical that a movie I’ve wanted to see again for years turns out to be boring.

  • Ken_Begg

    You have to slog through mountains of dross to find the rare diamonds, my friend.

  • Rock Baker

    In one of the recent WW2 set films, she spit up a leech into a plate of food being eaten by a Japanese spy. He swallowed it unaware and it choked him to death. That was fairly effective, and a tad unnerving.

  • Rock Baker

    Well, the animation itself was via a serum, so it was grounded by a sense of reasonable rational in a science fiction sort of way. Only Leech Woman’s special ability seemed overly magical.

  • The Rev.

    Cullen: My mind works differently, I guess; I was questioning everything about her modus operandi as soon as it became apparent. I like to think my suspension of disbelief is good, but sometimes it gets overwhelmed. Saw‘s ending did it to me, as well.

    Rock: Yeah, the whole puppet animation fluid thing seemed like mad science rather than magic, despite the mystical trappings implied when we see Toulon first learning of it. They even require regular infusions of it (granted, it’s like every 50 years or something), like so many serums we’ve seen in mad scientist movies. That said, Toulon’s soul transfer in the 2nd movie was definitely all magic, so there is some precedent. As Cullen said, a fig leaf of some sort would’ve been nice (he could’ve cast an enchantment while putting in the leeches or something).