Zombie

I Eat Your Skin finds novelist William Joyce eating up his advance money without turning out any pages of his next potboiler novel. So his publisher Dan Stapleton says he knows of a great Caribbean island where the natives do do their voodoo real well and Joyce might get some local color there. So Joyce heads off with Stapleton and Stapleton's brassy wife Betty Hyatt Linton to an island where Walter Coy is doing some Dr. Moreau like experiments on the natives as the guest of plantation owner and medical doctor Robert Stanton and his daughter Heather Hewitt.

This all starts as looking for a cure for cancer using snake venom and who in the world suggested that line of research? Pretty soon these grotesque looking zombies get real restless and everyone has to abandon the island if they can.

Some nice calypso music is the best thing that I Eat Your Skin has going for it. It's bad, but it's deliciously campy bad and some folks have a taste for that sort of thing.

Pretty slick little number here, a way low budget zombie voodoo potboiler filmed on the quick in Florida at the height of the early James Bond craze. Expect lots of palm trees, swept back wayfarer sunglasses, a big brassy orchestra with twangy guitars + bongo drums, boozy bimbos swooning by the pool, and some sort of novel mode of transportation, in this case an airplane that is destroyed in the movie's biggest laugh.

The film concerns itself with a swinging playboy writer who is dispatched to darkest Key West to get to the bottom of some wacky voodoo cult and meets a couple of decent looking dames between stops for cocktails. The natives use a powerful narcotic which transforms them into the living dead and explains the jungle being just a mess after all this time. The damndest thing is that Carey Grant would have felt right at home in this movie, even with the ping pong ball zombie monster makeup.

The movie is awful for sure but it works in some miraculous way, partly due to the fact that it was aware it was an awful movie employing awful actors, using awful cinematography, awful music, and awful script, etc. The good news is that everybody participating was apparently briefed before hand lest any sort of sweeping performances or actual cinematic artfulness sneak past the dime store tiki torches, wet bars, and matching salt + pepper shakers. Some good one liners though, I guess that's harmless enough to allow without tempting anybody to take it too seriously. Then again with a title like that, who can?

It's kitsch, bounding with energy and some decent smarmy humor that will either get on your nerves or catch you with a belly laugh when you aren't expecting one. I like another reader's comment when writing that they had enjoyed this film more than the three A list big budget event films they rented at a Blockbuster: PRECISELY! Yes, that's the spirit! They were able to relax and just watch this god awful no-name movie for what it was -- rather than being primed to have the world saved or the universe explained by Leonardo di Caprio -- and ended up having a pretty good time. Caught them by surprise probably. You can buy it on DVD for a dollar, probably less, and keep it for your very own. Try it.

4/10

Del Tenney's I Eat Your Skin was filmed in Florida in 1964, under the working title Zombies. Alot of films were made at this time to cash in on the James Bond craze, Like this one. The opening and closing scenes are filmed at Miami's Fountainbleu Hotel, the same hotel where a few scenes of Goldfinger take place. This movie was originally titled Voodoo Blood Bath, but Tenney couldn't find a distributor and didn't have another feature to release along with it for a drive-in double feature. The movie sat on the shelf for years until, in 1971, producer Jerry Gross began searching for a film to release along with his I Drink Your Blood. Gross bought the rights for Tenney's film and retitled it. All of this explains why there is no skin eating in I Eat Your Skin.

I've seen this movie at least a dozen times. This is definately one of those, so bad it's good spook movies. The makeup effects, although cheap, are at the least memorable and not just grease-paint. The acting is also memorable, if only because it's so bad. The Uber macho-ism of lead character Tom Harris (played by a mostly shirtless William Joyce) will make you laugh out loud. I cannot recommend this movie enough. I was more entertained by this flick than the last 3 big budgeted movies I rented from Blockbusters!

In I EAT YOUR SKIN (aka: ZOMBIE), Uber-macho writer, Tom Harris (William Joyce), is pried away from his gaggle of fawning, bikini-clad fem-bots, long enough to take a trip to Voodoo Island.

Why?

It seems there's a mad scientist there who's working on a cure for cancer, using snake venom (!). Plus, there are zombies! And young, nubile voodoo dancers! Annnd, bongo drums!

So, why not?!

Harris is soon off for the island, accompanied by his agent, Duncan Fairchild (Dan Stapleton) and his unbelievably squeaky, utterly annoying wife, Coral (Betty Hyatt Linton). Oh, and Coral's poodle.

Within seconds after crash-landing, Tom spots his first bathing beauty! Shockingly, she's being stalked by a pop-eyed zombie! No, seriously, his eyes are basically two fried eggs! From here, things get a tad absurd. Thankfully, voodoo dancing and mad science merge to get us through!

If you enjoy hyper-schlock, especially the films of Del Tenney, then, nirvana is your destination! This brain-hammer is a personal favorite...

Come on, if you love B drive-in movies this is a must. Stocked entirely with a phoned-in plot, a great Johnny-Quest-like soundtrack, stereotypes (the devil-may-care, hunky romance-writer hero, expendable blacks & Latinos, bimbo wives with stupid jealous husbands, mad scientist, zombies with sunny-side-up eggs over their eyes & bad skin--it's got them all).

Like draftees into the government-sanctioned moral hygiene videos of the '50s & '60s, the C-actors seem quite willing to mutter the screenplay's bizarre malapropisms: Rich guy welcoming guests to dinner at his uncharted island plantation: "If you want those cocktails I'm afraid your'll have to bring them with you. Juarita (?) is an excellent cook. One thing she will not tolerate is food getting cold. Perhaps it's just as well--I have a Borjelais (sic) I'm very proud of. Hard liquor will just dull the palate." The Spanish is even more improvised--as if translated by Google.

No less fun (to me, anyway) for its utter predictability. Cashing in on the James Bond trend for the Busch-&-popcorn drive-in set 50 years ago (though substituting clashes of race and class for the Cold War), the scariest thing about it is the window it offers into prevailing views of (white) manhood, (white) womanhood, and the nefarious darker-skinned people who try stand in their way.