IEatYourSkin

I Eat Your Skin (1964)

I think that this movie is best known, at least by me for being on a double bill with one of my favorite drive in movies of all time, I Drink Your Blood (notice the cool poster I found to put with the review). Unfortunately while that movie is great I Eat Your Skin is just plain terrible. The movie starts off with a playboy writer named Tom who gets roped into heading off to a remote island with his publisher and the publisher’s annoying wife. After arriving on the island they bump into a bug-eyed zombie that does some nice work with a machete. After escaping the zombie the group runs into a doctor, the doctor’s beautiful daughter, and plantation boss that are working on the island. Everything seems okay until more zombies show up and try to carry off the professor’s daughter while Tom is working his “magic” on her. See it turns out that the doctor accidentally found a way to make zombies while looking for a cure for cancer and now the plantation boss is forcing him to make a zombie army to take over the world. The island blows up, the zombies all are destroyed, and Tom gets the girl.

This is a terrible movie. The story makes no sense and while starting off cheesy and fun gets boring real quick. I really thought that the movie might have some cheesy charm to it, but was sadly disappointed. Have you ever seen a movie that appears to have had maybe 10 or 15 minutes worth of material before running out of ideas? This is definitely one of those movies. The performances are bad enough that they manage to shine thru the shoddy material that passes for a script. It is bad enough to have extras that can’t deliver lines, but some of the featured cast is just as bad. Plus while she can deliver lines the actress that portrays the publisher’s wife (Betty Hyatt Linton) has one of the most annoying voices I’ve ever heard. I wanted to reach thru my TV and time to smack her in the head! And really I’m not a violent guy.

The special effects are shoddy, even for an uber low budget flick like this. The zombies look like someone slopped oatmeal over their eyes and let it dry. This even isn’t the kind of effort where you can sit back and laugh at the effects like some of the rubber suites I’ve seen on screen. Nope these are just plain bad. Toss in some bad lighting, flimsy sets, and lousy audio/dubbing and you get a really poorly made movie. This is just a bad film, even by director Del Tenney’s (Horror at Party Beach, Curse of the Living Corpse) less than stellar standards.

This movie is a waste of time. Hell there isn’t even any eating of or mention of skin in the movie at all! The only good news is that if you must see this movie it can be had on one of the budget Mill Creek Entertainment collections. For more information check them out at http://www.millcreekent.com/

½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer