I Eat Your Skin DVD Review
In I Eat Your Skin, a publisher scoops up his prized playboy writer, Tom Harris, and takes him to Voodoo Island in hopes of jump-starting his next big seller. After seeing a zombie attack a woman on the island, Tom takes a greater interest in the goings on with the natives and a particular interest in Dr. Biladeau’s daughter, Jeannie. It seems that the natives believe the death of Jeannie will bring about prosperity on the island and Tom and Jeannie need to convince Dr. Biladeau to leave the island with them, but they soon find out how deep Dr. Biladeau is involved with the strange activity on the island.It’s tough for me to watch movies like I Eat Your Skin, being made in the era where women were portrayed as being of little use beyond being well manicured life support systems for their willing vaginas. The only women in this film are Tom Harris’ fawning, pawing and adoring fans hanging on every word that he recites from his cheesy romance novels, his publisher’s wife who he constantly flirts with in the presence of his publisher, Jeannie Biladeau who, doesn’t want to but, must fall for Tom Harris and his ever shirtless advances and then there’s the middle-aged black maid. It seems that the idea that a woman could be a anything but something to protect from danger, your trophy, your eye-candy, your fuck-hole, rather than someone to help you protect something or someone else from danger is beyond people of this era. For me this era in film is a black-eye that I’m rather appalled at having existed. This kind of crap usually casts an “I hate this movie” kind of shadow over the whole viewing. That said…I put this movie on at the bar where I was working and the patrons had a real hoot making fun of it and doing their own versions of Mystery Science Theater 3000 type commentary. The strikingly plastic visuals shown in I Eat Your Skin make easy sport for even the dullest of wit.
The zombies in I Eat Your Skin are pretty goofy looking, hardly scary. They seem to have started the make-up process with large, half-an-eggshell looking appliances over the eyes that give them a rather lo-fi bug look. Then they added some sort of texture to their faces, that gave the feel of dried mud, that extended past their necks and smoothed out on their exposed chests. They topped each zombie off with a sleeveless plaid shirt, worn open, with Bermuda shorts. The whole process is detailed at least twice in the movie during step-by-step dissolve transformation scenes that don’t exactly match up right. The funniest effect and probably the high-point of the film, was the use of a small plastic model of an island that they blew up. An island! Not a boat or a building or a train or a car, a whole damn island! It caps the film off quite nicely.
I Eat Your Skin is campy, goofy, 1960’s fodder for a Mystery Science Theater 3000 minded audience. It’s definitely good beer-drinkin’ party watchin’, but as a serious film it is severely lacking.
