Caribbean Adventure -- Del Tenney's Masterpiece

By Steve Evans

I confess to a dangerous and evidently incurable addiction to bad movies. Over several decades I’ve tried to process the reason for their appeal and can say only that great art seems all the richer after my exposure to lousy art. Plus, it’s damned difficult to make a film – any film – especially in the absence of money and talent. This is why I admire the efforts of such inept auteurs as Ed Wood Jr. and Tommy Wiseau. They loved making cinema as much as Welles, Kurosawa, Kubrick and Hitchcock; they simply weren’t any good at it. Plus, I refuse to be hamstrung by the sniveling jackals of bourgeois sensibility. I say the only sin a film can commit is to be boring, which is to say, I'll watch almost anything. I've been accused more than once of being the most egalitarian film critic alive.

Now, the ne plus ultra of Tried & Failed, to my mind, remains the great Del Tenney. This Connecticut-based actor-director-producer-screenwriter cranked out a handful of trashy exploitation films in the early 1960s. The Horror of Party Beach is perhaps the best known, relatively speaking, and features radioactive monsters with bratwursts for teeth. Look it up if you don’t believe me. It’s a wild hybrid of Beach Blanket Bingo silliness and man-in-a-suit monster ridiculousness, with a great garage-rock soundtrack by the Del-Aires, who I’m also betting you’ve never heard of – and with good reason.

Yes, but Tenney’s masterpiece must be I Eat Your Skin, a ludicrous zombie flick made in 1964 and not released until 1970 because until then nobody wanted to distribute the picture. No skin is actually eaten, probably because the film was retitled from its original name, Caribbean Adventure, by schlock dirve-in distributor Jerry Gross. He bought the movie to make a double bill with his other feature, I Drink Your Blood.

One can only suppose Tenney was happy the film finally screened under any title. So what do we get? The zombie makeup looks like they glued-on fried eggs for eyes. The hero is a sexist jerk, more or less in step with the times. Tenney’s awful flick draws upon many influences, especially the contemporaneous James Bond films. The climax is straight out of the first Bond adventure, Dr. No. A bit of research reveals the Miami scenes that bookend the movie were shot at the Fountainbleau Hotel – the same property where early scenes for Goldfinger were filmed. I like the jazzy brass score.

In spite of the horrible acting, the bargain-basement special effects and silly makeup, the dreadful dialog and preposterous plot, I Eat Your Skin is compulsively watchable, especially if beer is involved. A full 80 minutes of WTF? And it don’t cost nuthin’. Behold my gateway drug into the netherworld of Le Bad Cinema. Watch it tonight with someone you love. Thanks for reading.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2017 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.