Zombie

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.

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...

In an obtuse way, it was a bit entertaining. There's this island where the brave pilot goes for whatever reason. On the island are bug eyed zombies and people practicing voodoo. There is a potential cure for cancer that has gone amiss. The natives need a young blonde to sacrifice in order to get their skin cured. No dermatologists on the island. The whole thing is preposterous. There is a lot of dancing and gyrating, which seems to happen quite a bit in zombie movies. These scientists have this modern laboratory in the middle of all this, and the blonde girl's father is in the middle of the whole thing. Zombies wander all over the place, attack and kill. There's one scene where a man is decapitated, and because he seems to be Hispanic or some kind of islander, it's as if someone broke their bicycle. They don't even bother with his body. He is mentioned once later, but it doesn't matter. He was expendable. The main character, who his with him, doesn't even look down at him. Oh, yes, there is no skin eating going on, making this a bad skin eating movie.

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.

On all the scenes with the very hairy arms and hands feeding and handling the venonous snakes were filmed at the Miami Serpentarium, those hands belonged to the late William Haast, I'm surprised that wasn't mentioned in the Trivia section. I believe that Mr Haast passed away at over 100 years old in spite of dozens of venomous bites that would have killed an Elephant.