It’s something of a tradition for me to start off the first week of the New Year by watching a bad movie. Bad, as in incompetent. Poorly produced. Ineptly acted. Lousy direction. Ridiculous special effects. The idea is my film watching can only improve as the year progresses. Not really. I just have a dangerous and evidently incurable addiction to really dreadful flicks.
So today we’re gonna spin I Eat Your Skin (1964), a longtime fav in the disreputable genre of Le Bad Cinema. As is my nature, I must first share some backstory about this motion picture.
It was made as Voodoo Blood Bath and sat unreleased for seven years until an exhibitor, the aptly named Jerry Gross, bought the picture for pennies on the dollar to use as a double feature with his movie I Drink Your Blood. To enhance the alliterative exploitation effect, Voodoo Blood Bath was retitled I Eat Your Skin.
No skin is actually eaten.
Our story: A sexist-pig novelist, his publicist and a shrill woman with a powerful thirst for cocktails decide to visit a mysterious island for research on a new book. The island is home to a sketchy scientist, his smoking-hot daughter and assorted natives who practice voodoo rituals. Eventually zombies show up with makeup that resembles fried eggs for eyes. I am not making this up. On-screen talent includes nobody you ever heard of, which in a strange way makes the story more involving since there are zero celebrity distractions.
The movie opens at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach – the same hotel used in early scenes for the James Bond adventure Goldfinger, also made that year. There all similarities end, as I Eat Your Skin flies off the rails almost immediately. It is wildly entertaining and will leave you incredulous. A full 80 minutes and 47 seconds of WTF?
Directed by the incomparable Del Tenney, who was a busy man in the early 1960s. The same year he wrapped up I Eat Your Skin, Tenney also managed to complete The Horror of Party Beach, which is likewise essential viewing if you enjoy movies about bikers, beach babes in bikinis, surf rock and rubbery bug-eyed monsters with bratwursts for teeth.
As a public service, a full and uncut copy of I Eat Your Skin is available below. Learn to see the worst films; they are often sublime.
Cinema Uprising Copyright © 2019 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.
Cinema Uprising Copyright © 2019 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.
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