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.

Some folks fly to a small island in the Caribbean. Once they arrive, they find that there are murderous zombies roaming about as well as locals who are all members of a voodoo cult. In addition, there's a cancer researcher who is doing work with irradiated snake venom who seems a bit oblivious to the fact that the locals are into human sacrifice. Sounds like a nice place, huh?!

This is one of many horribly low budget horror films I have seen in my lifetime and the biggest thing that sets it apart is the title. After all, the release title "I EAT YOUR SKIN" sounds amazingly exploitative and sick. However, despite a promoter changing its title, the film itself is amazingly conventional--and it's just another grade-Z schlock horror film--complete with bad acting, camera work, makeup, and the works! While it's very bad, it isn't quite bad enough to be fun to watch and make fun of the film. No,...it's just bad!

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.

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.

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.