aka I Eat Your Skin

• Produced, written and directed by Del Tenney
• Starring
  • William Joyce
  • Heather Hewitt
  • Betty Hyatt Linton
  • Dan Stapleton
  • Walter Coy

This movie was retitled “I Eat Your Skin” when it was reissued as part of a double feature with I Drink Your Blood (1970), and if you know it at all, you know it by the reissue title because… well, come on. Which would you rather see? The original title, though, is a better fit for the movie, and not just because there is no skin eaten during the course of the story. Granted, the original title is generic and boring, but so is the movie it was originally attached to.

Our hero, such as he is, is Tom Harris (William Joyce), a creature of fantasy if ever there was one: He’s a best-selling author who also happens to be something of a playboy and ladies’ man. We’re first introduced to him as he recounts a thrilling scene from one of his novels to a bevy of bikini-clad maidens around a hotel pool in Miami. Well, “maidens” may not be entirely accurate, especially in the case of the one particularly pneumatic admirer whose balding husband doesn’t take well to her locking lips with this writer guy. Cuckoldry! How comedic!

Pulchritude! Pulchritude for everyone!

(This premise works best if you banish from your mind the images of any real-world bestselling novelists in living memory — Stephen King particularly. Or Truman Capote. Or even Harold Robbins, whose output Harris seems to emulate.)

Having established our protagonist somewhere between Ernest Hemingway and the swinging spy heroes of the time period, the movie then introduced Duncan Fairchild (Dan Stapleton), Harris’ bon vivante manager or editor or agent or something, and Fairchild’s wife Coral (Betty Hyatt Linton), herself something of a playgirl on the downswing. Here’s where the single glimmer of creativity in this movie is seen: Harris and Coral’s relationship is defined by a a constant play-acting at an illicit affair — they address each other as “lover” and “sweetie” and such — when Coral is, in fact, the only Caucasian woman in the course of the movie on whom Harris demonstrably does not have designs. (I did say it was a glimmer, right?)

So. Fairchild has met someone who just inherited a small Caribbean island, where a scientist has been working to develop a cure from cancer from snake venom, and where native legends still speak of the living dead. This new owner has invited Harris (and the Fairchilds, naturally, because Harris can’t be expected to travel without an entourage) to visit the island, and Fairchild thinks it’s the perfect locale to stimulate Harris’ imagination for his next bestseller. It’s guaranteed to be a productive and relaxing trip; after all, what could go wrong in a place called “Voodoo Island”?

You’re kidding. Seriously?

They charter a small plane and very nearly don’t make it to the island, as it’s not exactly where the X was drunkenly scrawled on a map. But they make it to a landing on the beach of what they conclude to be the correct island with only fumes left in their gas tank. Tom takes the pistol and goes exploring in the jungle toward the glint of rooftops that he saw from the air, and encounters… no, not a zombie. A blonde! Swimming in the river. THEN a zombie, and one look at the zombie makeup in daylight will make you wish they had shown it only at night. (That wouldn’t help you much, though; as we see later, all night scenes are shot with a perfunctory day-for-night filter.) The zombie makeup consists of strands of wet cotton on the face and neck, tapering off when it reaches the chest, and the goofiest eyeballs you’ve ever seen on a creature like this. Not Killers From Space-style goofy; these things are so flat and dull, you’d swear they were painted on the cotton.

Anyway, once Tom shouts to warn the girl of the weird-looking native dude, she splashes off one direction and the zombie off in another, so Tom continues until he finds an old Spanish fisherman. The fisherman agrees to take to him to the main house, but they are pursued by… no, not the blonde. The zombie! The fisherman loses his head to the zombie’s machete; Tom fires several times into the zombie’s chest with no effect, when suddenly they are rescued by a jeep full of men in pith helmets! The zombie scurries away, and the leader of the jeep party introduced himself as Bentley (Walter Coy), foreman of the plantation and house, and sorry for the ordeal, Mr. Harris. Soon everyone from the plane is gathered up and taken to the house for civilized comforts, while Bentley makes some excuse about the locals using a narcotic plant which can cause that kind of zombie behavior upon overdose.

Yeah, that’s how all us writers work.

Harris also rediscovers the blonde, though there is absolutely no dialog to show that either realizes the other was the one they saw by the river. She’s Jeanine (Heather Hewitt), daughter of Dr. Biladeau (Robert Stanton), the prospective cancer curer, and since she’s the only woman on the island who doesn’t speak with a Spanish or French accent, Harris turns the Seduct-O-Meter up to 11. They enjoy one another’s company enough that after dinner, they go for a nice moonlit walk on the grounds. It’s predictable — to anyone that them, I guess — that their first kiss will be interrupted by a handful of zombies who try to drag Jeanine off. Bentley reveals to Harris privately that Jeanine might be in danger, as the Africans who settled this island came from a tribe in Africa that held virgin sacrifice to be palliative to the gods, especially blondes. (I would then tell you that, later that night, Harris makes sure that the “virgin” part of the equation is taken care of, but it’s more by strong implication than anything overt.)

In the morning, after Harris has spent a couple of hours typing away, Jeanine almost agrees to leave the island with him, if she can get her father to come along. Unfortunately, we see what kind of devilry is afoot in Dr. Biladeau’s lab: He’s irradiating snake venom, then injecting it into otherwise healthy men who become zombies in a tableau of time-lapse photography that makes the zombie makeup look even worse than it did before. So Biladeau can’t really leave his work, but he does agree that Harris should take Jeanine away. In fact, they’ll leave that very day!

Beakers? Of colored liquid? But that must mean — there’s SCIENCE going on here!

Except, you know, ZOMBIES get in the way. We’ve seen several scenes (mostly useful as filler to increase the running time) of the natives participating in a voodoo drum dance of some sort, led by a witch doctor who takes his marching orders from “Papa Nebo,” a man disguised in facepaint, a top hat, and a pair of sunglasses with what looks like dreadlocks hanging from them. They go to such lengths to disguise him that it doesn’t seem like much of a bet to put $20 on Papa Nebo being Bentley. The witch doctor controls the zombies, who naturally want Jeanine to stick around and be their “goat without horns,” so there are chases, captures, escapes, disguises, and a few explosions. (Shucks, at the end you get to see an entire paper-mache island blow up in a really unconvincing manner, even by the standards one would ascribe to paper-mache islands.)

What’s worse than seeing a zombie coming toward you empty-handed? Let me tell you.

What’s notable about this movie, he said paradoxically, is how unremarkable it is. Aside from Harris’ playboy demeanor, the implication that Harris and Jeanine spend the night together, and the decapitation of the fisherman, the entire production would be right at home among the zombie movies made twenty or more years previous — I’m thinking specifically of King of the Zombies (1941) and the like. There’s even a mention of an “army of unstoppable soldiers” thrown in at the end; you know it had to be there, because voodoo-influenced mad science always has a military application. If it hadn’t been for the retitle, Zombies would be even more obscure and forgotten than it is.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4, plus 1 goat and 1 chicken
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 6
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0