The stock footage used to portray the tribal celebrations shows several different African tribes in various different tribal dresses as well as various different kinds of celebrations.
While pursuing June, the leopard roars and growls repeatedly.
Cats do not growl while stalking or on the chase.
When the dynamite explodes, the tribesmen fall towards the explosion.
While resting near the water after their escape from the village, June and the scout see two crocodiles climbing ashore near them.
We then cut to a close-up of an alligator.
When Old Malla and her escort enter into the prison tent, in one shot it shows Malla entering first.
In the next shot, the escort walks in first.
During the ceremony of making the women young again, the process of tapping the pineal gland for hormones involves stabbing the sacrifice at the back of the neck with a short sharp instrument.
The pineal gland is actually located deep within the brain.
Garvay's first name is Bertram in the credits, but he's only ever called David on screen.
At the start of the safari, a large-eared African elephant with huge tusks is shown trumpeting from behind.
When the travelers look back, shown through the trees is a small-eared Asian elephant with juvenile tusks.
When the tribesman is about to be sacrificed for Mala, he had an afro.
When his neck is pierced, we see he has a close cut style instead (no afro).
This movie came out the same year as the Roger Corman production THE WASP WOMAN, which was also a movie concerning an aged woman discovering a secret procedure to make her younger, but with deadly consequences. I don't know if the similarities of the two movies was a coincidence, but the similarities are the only interest one can possibly find from this cinematic yawn.
Much more thoughtful and intelligent than its misleading title implies, this film transcends its B movie quickie roots to offer plenty of startlingly incisive and provocative spot-on commentary on Amercia's obsession with staying forever young at any cost and our society's shallow overemphasis on attractive physical appearances. Coleen Gray gives a strong and sympathetic performance as June Talbot, a bitter and unhappy middle-aged woman who's stuck in a lousy marriage with the mean and uncaring Dr.
1959's "The Leech Woman" marked the end of Universal's classic horror era begun by "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" in 1931 (three years later they would change hands yet again, from Universal-International to Universal City Studios). A companion piece to their previous femme fatale in "Cult of the Cobra," from a David Duncan script echoing his previous epic "The Thing That Couldn't Die," male characters easily dominated by their female counterparts (working title "The Leech"), Ben Pivar credited with cowriting the original story.
Edward Dein directed this horror yarn that stars Coleen Gray as June Talbot, an alcoholic and unhappy older woman married to a heartless doctor(played by Philip Terry) who is having multiple affairs. When a very old African woman visits him, she promises him an anti-aging cure in her native land, so takes her(and June) along on the safari back there, and the formula works only by extracting a fluid from the back of the neck of a man, killing him in the process(guess who!
Never has a mere ring been such a powerful weapon - not even Tolkien's ring, and certainly no "pineal ring". Then again, there never WAS such a thing as a pineal ring in any type of fiction before - because no B-movie or pulp novel was ever this stupid.
Once upon a time Coleen Gray was in some great films like Red River, Kiss Of Death, and Kansas City Confidential. But sadly like so many actresses the good films and the good parts in them disappeared and she was reduced to starring in The Leech Woman.
A mildly entertaining grade 'B' horror movie but one in which no one in the movie has any redeeming qualities, they are all shallow self interested individuals. This is a movie is about every woman's dream of youth and beauty, of both face and form and what they will do to obtain it, or the illusion of it.
Scientist Dr. Paul Talbot (Phillip Terry) has got himself a sham of a marriage with his wife June (Coleen Grey) who likes the drink a little too much.
Colleen Gray, the leech woman of the title, was born in Nebraska, a farmer's daughter, and she looked it, cream-fed, sort of, as fresh and pretty as a field of sunflowers. She really was active for only three or four years, from, say, 1947 to 1951.
