Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)

There was an excellent Soviet movie called The Last Inch, (Последний дюйм) made in 1958, based on an American  short story by James Aldridge. An American bush pilot lives in the middle east with his 12-year-old son. He's a widower and he wants to send his son to live with his late wife's parents in the U.S.

Desperate for work, the man takes a job doing underwater photography. He and his son fly to an island. The father goes into the water and is bitten by a shark. The kid drags his father to the plane. He can't call for help on the radio, so the movie has both a shark attack and a child flying an airplane, but it needed the subplot of the father wanting to send the kid to his grandparents, the kid not wanting to go and the strain this causes in their relationship. Actually, I'm not sure which is the plot and which is the subplot.

Attack of the Giant Leeches is about giant leeches kidnapping and killing people. It sounds stupid, but if that were really happening it would be so shocking and horrible that nothing else would matter.

But the movie was set in the South in a leech-infested swamp. There's an overweight fellow (Bruno VeSota) married to a vivacious Baby Doll-like vixen (Playboy centerfold Yvette Vickers) who runs around with other men.

I liked the lurid subplot, maybe because the giant leaches were so unconvincing. The husband gets out a shotgun and threatens his wife and one of her boyfriends which he shouldn't have done because, when the two are abducted by giant leeches, cops think he murdered them.

Regular leeches would have been bad enough for a horror movie.

Black and white, 62 minutes. Filmed in eight days. Produced by Roger Corman's brother, Gene.