I Eat Your Skin

Some flicks have titles that perfectly fit the film they're titling. Night of the Living Dead, for instance. You hear that title, you immediately know exactly what kind of film will be following the opening credits. And brother, did that particular drive-in cult classic pay off in gory dividends! What other film of that era featured a whole friggin' cannibal holocaust, a butchered barbecue, in the literal sense, of two of the main characters after they get sizzled in a pick-up truck trying to escape from half-nekkid resurrected undead girls with large, pasty white 1969 derrieres?

Some films are just yum, yum good.

I Eat Your Skin is not one of them.

I Eat Your Skin, a film with a bizarre, misleading title, is, or rather was, paired as a grindhouse double feature with the somewhat superior (at least as far as sheer horror goodness and rat pate barbecue) with I Drink Your Blood. It is listed as having been released in 1971, but I think, and it looks, like it was completed maybe in the mid-Sixties.

I drink your blood & I eat your skin/drive in trailer

Its title is ripe for mental images of cannibal ghouls in Leatherface masks devouring unwary and tormented victims hanging from Sawyer Family Seanie Beane meat hooks while buzzsaws buzz and pots of simmering intestinal goodness burble in rusted stoves adorned with the skulls of dogs, chickens, small rodents, etc.

Alas, no dice.

It is a pulp fiction island fantasy, a bad drugstore paperback about a globetrotting playboy adventure novelist who has women at the poolside luxury hotel (including one whose husband literally drags her away by the hair, kicking her in the ass, in a scene that would get the film blacklisted today), before being goaded by his publicist, publisher, or whatever,to go to an island where a lot of nice-looking women voodoo dance around an altar and a guy dressed in Baron Samedi fashion controls apparently some zombies that look as if they are wearing green oatmeal with plastic, painted fried eggs for eyeballs.

Okay.

The novelist and his party, his old lady and what not, hangers-on, entourage, crash land on the beach. Then, we get introduced to the daughter of a mad scientist who spends all day in a high-tech, low rent mad scientist lab, milking king cobras for an antidote to the bad wicked zombie curse, which was created not by voodoo it seems, but by the blonde dreamboat's psycho scientist daddy, who was attempting a cure for cancer. And, we might add, failed spectacularly.

At one point the plane explodes. I can't relate this to anything else that happened in the film while I was watching it. I guess I wasn't really paying close enough attention. It all sort of shambled by me like a zombie covered in green oatmeal goop.

It made so little impression on me in fact that I find myself hard-pressed to find a hundred and fifty more words for word count to actually finish this review. Oh, at one point, there seems to be a musical number while a very buff houngan dances around with a chicken. Or, I think I remember him having a chicken.

Really, what else can be said? I could give away the ending, but by the time we get there, the whole thing has become as putrescent as slowly-rotting living dead oatmeal skin. One of the interesting things about this flick (and there's not much) is the fact that the central plot point, the zombie disease, curse, whatever is confused. Was it voodoo that brought about the ressurected dead (or are they dead?), or was it the influence f the freak doctor, whose laboratory self-destructs with a bunch of moog synth bleeps and bloops you've heard recycled many times in many different movies?

This movie stinks worse than a creeping, crawling undead. Roll 2d6 and let the Cleric do his job.

I want out.

Now.

I Eat Your Skin / Full Movie / 1964/1971

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