“Leeches!”
Movie #18: 31-Days of Horror Challenge 2017
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The Lakecrest College swim team is preparing for a big meet, it loses one of its athletes to an unfortunate drowning accident, and it is discovered that he had been using steroids. As the rest of the team scrambles to clean itself up, the college campus is beset by giant leeches.
Writer/director David DeCoteau gives the audience a lesser quality of the kind of horror-comedy for which he is well known. Cheesy, b-grade, sometimes brain-aching stupidity, and full of long, head-to-toe pans of pretty, barely dressed, college age boys. The kill scenes are too heavy handed on bad CGI, and most are erotic and phallic, some simply homoerotic. Whether this is of interest or not, the stereotypical gender roles are somewhat reversed in this film. The women were rather more assertive, tough, and modestly dressed and the boys are eye candy victims. None of the characters are particularly well developed, and the big reveal at the end is not exactly a surprise.
The major subplot for this film is the moral crisis of using steroids (and for that matter, any type of drug) and peer pressure. Much of the dialogue is spent discussing this ad nauseum. I think they are also going for an angle of the pressure of sports and sports scholarships, but although that is driven home in the opening scene, and is certainly there throughout, it’s largely dropped as the story abandons all the subplots and simply becomes a creature feature, where our “hero,” a biology/science major who is also on the swim team, doesn’t know how electricity works.
I was able to suspend my disbelief and roll with the evolution of the monsters, the audience does that all the time if the story is worthwhile. In this case it is not.
