I EAT YOUR SKIN aka ZOMBIES (1964/1971)

This film opens with a girl in a bikini doing some stripper moves around a campfire while voodoo revelers revel around her. Eventually a man with what I can only describe as a face drape (dangly strings that cover most of his face) orders the slaughter of a goat as the climax of the proceedings. Cut to Tom Harris (William Joyce, at left), a playboy writer of adventure novels whom we first see entertaining a gaggle of bikinied women poolside at a hotel in Miami Beach by narrating a scene from his latest book. When one horned-up fan gets into a kissing clinch with him, her husband menacingly intrudes. Luckily, Tom's agent Duncan arrives to spirit him away on a small plane, along with Duncan's ditzy wife Coral, to Voodoo Island, privately owned by the wealthy Lord Carrington. The natives practice voodoo, the women are mostly virgins as most of the males were lost at sea years ago, and a scientist is doing work on irradiated snake venom—and there may be zombies roaming about. Duncan thinks the visit will kickstart Tom on his next novel, but things go downhill quickly. First, the plane runs out of gas on the approach to the island and they land hard on a beach. Then while looking for help, Tom sees a bug-eyed monster man menace a beautiful young woman who is skinny-dipping in a pond. He manages to warn her away, then finds a fisherman who tells him of the zombie cult on the island, after which the bug-eyed man cuts his head off with a machete. Charles, the island overseer, comes upon Tom and takes him and the others to his house where they meet the scientist who is working with snake venom; the skinny-dipper is his daughter Janine. Janine, being blonde and a virgin (though with the horndog Tom around, she might not be for long), is thought to be wanted by the cult for a human sacrifice. The travelers prepare to leave the island with Janine, but a zombie carrying a box of explosives heads walks into the spinning propellers, blowing up himself, the plane, and the pilot. Soon we find out the secrets behind the snake venom experiments (which are causing the zombie plague) and the identity of the face-draped cult leader, but is it too late for our adventurers?

Information about the tangled background of this film can easily be found through a Google search. Suffice to say that Del Tenney, low-rent director of the notorious HORROR OF PARTY BEACH made this black & white cheapie in 1964 under the title Caribbean Adventure or Voodoo Bloodbath, but a distribution deal was canceled and the film gathered dust for years until it was dug up, retitled I Eat Your Skin—though in fact no skin is eaten, at least not on screen—and paired with a much grosser film called I Drink Your Blood for a fairly successful run at drive-ins around Halloween of 1971. (It later appeared on home video as Zombies.) By then, I imagine audiences were disappointed, not just because it's black & white, but because there is very little gore (just the split-second decapitation). But if approached as a mid-60s horror cheapie, it's fairly entertaining. The soap-opera handsome William Joyce does a nice job as the hero, and he's more fun if you imagine him as an Ian Fleming stand-in, but his performance is pitched a little higher than those of other cast members. Heather Hewitt (Janine) is lovely and pairs well with Joyce. Most everyone else, however, comes off a little amateurish in comparison. Dan Stapleton (Duncan) and Betty Hyatt Linton (Coral) are mostly obnoxious, and the overdubbed exaggeration of Coral's voice is downright grating. Walter Coy (Charles) is a rather bland villain, though the scenes of the cult rituals work up some atmosphere. The scene with William Joyce flirting with the ladies was filmed at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach where an early scene in the James Bond movie Goldfinger was shot. This feels a little long at 90 minutes, but I have to say I enjoyed it as a mid-60s B-movie. [YouTube; the widescreen print available here is in pristine condition]