The Leech Woman received mixed reviews upon release. According to
BoxOffice magazine's standing feature "Review Digest", which summarized the rankings of films by a standard set of publications, the film was called "very good" by ''
Harrison's Reports; "good" by Film Daily and BoxOffice
itself; "fair" by The Hollywood Reporter and Parents' Magazine; and "poor" by the New York Daily News and Variety. BoxOffice
also compiled figures for its "Boxoffice Barometer", a percentage scale on which 100 equaled "normal" box office receipts. The Leech Woman'' had an average score of 101. Eight theaters in cities around the US reported their percentages: Minneapolis, 140; Buffalo, Detroit, Indianapolis, and San Francisco, 100 each; New Haven, 95; Boston, 90; and Omaha, 85. advertisement from 1960 for
The Leech Woman and co-feature
The Brides of Dracula The
BoxOffice review says relatively little that is specific to the film itself, starting instead with the statement "Dracula's various femme relatives,
The Wasp Woman [1959] and all the other gory gals of the screen, must move over and make room in their hall of infamy for this newcomer to the rank of distaff side chill dispensers." But the anonymous review goes on favorably to call the film "a solidly produced, ably acted spine-tingler" and describes Dein as a "business-like" director and Gershenson a "budget-stretching" producer who "combine[d] to elevate the offering several cuts above the norm." Warren, however, quotes two contemporary reviews that thought little of
The Leech Woman. The pseudonymous "Tube", writing in
Variety, called the film a "lower-berth item" with a "tendency to meander into lengthy, irrelevant passages," while
The Monthly Film Bulletin used the phrase "dull horror film" to describe it. Warren himself finds the film to be not very well made, saying that it has a "perfunctory get-it-over-with air" and is saddled with a poor structure as "More than half the film is spent simply setting up the rejuvention gimmick; June's life as a leech woman occupies a very small part of the film." Nonetheless, he praises Gray's performance as "the film's greatest strength" and "one of the few really memorable performances of her career." But he writes that "Gloria Talbott can't work up much energy" in her role and that Williams was "a hapless contract player (...) who had no choice about appearing in certain films." Warren also says that "no characters are likable, so we spend our time with unpleasant bores." Senn, on the other hand, says that Gray is "let down by Bud Westmore's makeup department in her early scenes where her face looks like it needs rejuvenation less than just a good scrubbing." But Senn, too, writes that Gray's "performance as the female
Mr. Hyde stands out" in a film that is otherwise a "juvenile but well-acted chiller that came at the tail end of Universal's string of 1950s sci-fi/horror
melodramas." In looking at race in the film, the anonymous reviewer at Blackhorrormovies calls it a "parade of clichés and stereotypes" and points out that its "portrayal of Africa is pretty typical of Hollywood in this era (and to some extent, up to the turn of the [21st] century)" with its "mystical rites with wildly gyrating natives," its "references to indigenous tribes as 'savages'" and its "'good' locals escorting the outsiders who either die or flee in terror (in this case, both)." But "the Malla character is an intelligent, well-spoken, classy lady—the type of black person not often seen in horror films of this era." The reviewer also points out that Malla "has a heart of gold compared to the Caucasian characters in the film, who are all despicable human beings." Other critics, such as Bruce F. Kawin, bring up the roles that sexual identity and aging play in the film. Kawin writes that June's failed attempt to use Sally's pineal gland secretions is her undoing as the transformation ritual demands male secretions. "
The Leech Woman rejects a lesbian solution to June's problem (there is no
radical feminist movement yet), which in context is presented as unnatural—that is, as another unnatural solution when what is needed is submission to nature, letting oneself age and die." Aging is the specific focus of critic Dawn Keetley. To her, the film "gets not only at what aging feels like for everyone, but, specifically, at what it feels like for a woman in a society that continues to value youth and beauty" as June is forced to face the "sudden horrific onset on aging" over and again. Worse, when June "reverts" from being youthful to middle-aged, she experiences becoming "older and older each time." Likewise, aging (and sexism) is the topic of film scholar
Vivian Sobchack. She writes, "It is now a commonplace to acknowledge the complexity of
ageism and
sexism in white heterosexual culture in the United States." Taking
The Leech Woman as her text, and the relationship of June and Paul in particular, Sobchack notes that "in a sexist as well as ageist
technoculture, the visibly aging body of a woman has been and still is especially terrifying—not only to the woman who experiences self-revulsion and anger, invisibility and abandonment, but also to the men who find her presence so unbearable they must—quite literally—disavow and divorce her." Sobchack further points out the additional complexity of the "double standard" of the aging man and woman, naming it as a "standard that elicits a complex of engendered emotions from both the women and the men who bear it: fear, humiliation, abjection, shame, power, rage, and guilt." ==Legacy==