New Horror Movies Ep. 139: Dead Man Still Walking - I Drink Your Blood (1971) - and - I Eat Your Skin (1971) - podcast episode cover

New Horror Movies Ep. 139: Dead Man Still Walking - I Drink Your Blood (1971) - and - I Eat Your Skin (1971)

Apr 04, 202540 min
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Summary

Dr. Walking Dead reviews the 1971 horror films *I Drink Your Blood* and *I Eat Your Skin*, examining their zombie connections and cinematic qualities. *I Drink Your Blood* is analyzed for its satanic panic themes and early infected zombie elements, while *I Eat Your Skin* is critiqued for its tonal inconsistencies and lack of horror elements, despite its zombie narrative. The episode provides a detailed comparison of the two films and offers recommendations for viewers interested in 70s horror and zombie-adjacent cinema.

Episode description

OK, “Gentle Listeners,” Dr. Walking Dead has shown up for work for us with this week’s special double-feature show. In this 49th Edition of DEAD MAN STILL WALKING, your intrepid professor, Dr. Walking Dead Kyle Bishop, graciously took at least one cinematic bullet for the listeners, metaphorically speaking… The two movies that Dr. Bishop examines during this episode include the 1970s odd couple of double features, I Drink Your Blood (1971) and I Eat Your Skin (1971) — the latter, a G-rated, black-and-white movie that was actually produced in 1964. Dr. Bishop brings his usual astute analysis to these proceedings, informing us of actual onscreen murder of an animal, and therefore, which instance(s) of blood in the film is real blood. And speaking of blood, we learn about meat pies being injected with infected, rabid dog blood, thereby constituting a very early example of “the infected zombie” narrative. And Kyle even goes so far as to tell us about a Horror movie where the evil characters “treat people poorly.” And that’s only his notes on the first film! Wait until you hear what he has to say about the second! Join us!

Note: To view ALL of Dr. Bishop’s Dead Man Still Walking solocast episodes can USE THIS LINK. And to view ALL of Dr. Bishop’s episode-by-episode commentaries on The Last of Us – Season 1, with Jay of the Dead, then USE THIS LINK.

Dead Man Still Walking is a biweekly, short-form solocast hosted by Dr. Walking Dead Kyle Bishop, author of American Zombie Gothic and How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture. Dr. Walking Dead also presents a popular segment called The Dead Zone on regular episodes of this podcast. For his Dead Man Still Walking solocast episodes, Dr. Bishop will focus exclusively on zombie films, with the occasional exploration of zombie-related themes, zombie television, and other zombie media (e.g., comics, literature, etc.).

Dr. Bishop is an academic and professional scholar of zombie films and other zombie narratives. He has been teaching for 23 years. Dr. Bishop serves as an English professor, Film Studies professor, and he’s currently the English Department Chair at Southern Utah University.

You are welcome to reach out to Dr. Bishop with comments or questions via email: [email protected], X: @DrWalkingDead, BlueSky and Instagram (@DrWalkingDead) or by leaving him a voicemail: (801) 980-1375. You can also watch the documentary, Doc of the Dead (2014), which features Dr. Walking Dead. Find more links below for Dr. Bishop.

Be sure to subscribe to Jay of the Dead’s new Horror movie podcast on:

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You are welcome to email our show at [email protected], or call and leave us a voicemail at (801) 980-1375. You can also follow Jay of the Dead’sNew Horror Movies on X: @HorrorAvengers

Dead Man Still Walking with Dr. Kyle Bishop is brought to you by Jay of the Dead’sNew Horror Movies, an audio Horror movie podcast. It features nine experienced Horror hosts review new Horror movies and deliver specialty Horror segments. Your hosts are Jay of the Dead, Dr. Shock, Gillman Joel, Mister Watson, Dr. Walking Dead, GregaMortis, Mackula, Ron Martin, Dave Zee and Spawn of the Dead! Due to the large number and busy schedule of its nine Horror hosts, Jay of the Dead’sNew Horror Movies will be recorded in segments, piecemeal, at various times and recording sessions. Therefore, as you listen to our episodes, you will notice a variety of revolving door hosts and segments, all sewn together and reanimated like the powerful Monster of Dr. Frankenstein!

Transcript

Jay of the Dead's New Horror Movies presents... Dead Man Still Walking with Dr. Walking Dead. Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to a special double feature episode of Dead Man Still Walking. This is also episode 49, which is super cool. Many, many thanks to good old Jay of the Dead for helping me get the show this far along. Hard to believe that I've covered as many zombie movies as I have already.

And, of course, there's tons left. There's still a long way to go. So the shows that are moving forward in time... They're just kind of wrapping up and getting into the 80s. And the ones going back in time, geez, haven't made it that far because we keep getting new zombie movies, which is great. And I will continue to bring you coverage of those new zombie movies. And I'm going to have one up.

pretty soon. But needless to say, we're going to do something a little special for the 50th episode, which will be our next one. So tune in. I think that'll be a really fun, fun episode. I'm going to try to go a little bit different, do something different, kind of modeled off of other shows and their landmark episodes, kind of.

kind of following the lead of Land of the Creeps and trying to do something fun. But I don't want to give it away, so I'm just going to ask you to tune in to episode 50, hopefully in a couple weeks, and let me know what you think about it. Well, today I have, uh... I took a bullet for you guys, but we'll talk about that later. We are going to do a special double feature. that I have seen promoted as a double feature, and I think was actually exhibited as a double feature, although that's...

It's a really weird double feature. I am speaking of the two 1971 films. I drink your blood and I eat your skin. Now, it sounds from those titles that this is a perfectly valid combination that these two films together would make for tremendous enjoyment. And the poster art that is available on Internet Movie Database shows that they were promoted similarly with the same kind of marketing team and some of the same marketing strategies. However...

There's not a lot else going on here. So, Drink Your Blood, 1971, an hour and 23 minutes. directed by David E. Durston, currently showing as rated R, although at the time it was slapped with a rating of X. because of violence. I think it's now an R because the violence in it is not as gratuitous as we would expect today, of course. In fact, I don't even think it's particularly gratuitous in comparison with films in the later 70s.

but I can certainly see how it would have caused a bit of a stir. I Drink Your Blood is filmed in color. It has a pretty funky 70s era horror score soundtrack, which you would expect from these kind of films. It is a satanic panic film. And it is a little bit low budget. It's international production. It, you know, I'll say more about it in a minute. Now, that has been paired with I Eat Your Skin, originally titled, wait for it, Zombie.

which predates full cheese by seven years. But here's the thing about I Eat Your Skin. It was produced in 1964. It was not released until 71, where I believe it was released in this kind of new package with I Drink Your Blood. But I Eat Your Skin is G-rated, and it is black and white. It's an hour and 32 minutes from writer-director Del Tenney. So what we really have is we have a kind of voodoo era, black and white, pre-Night of the Living Dead film with I Eat Your Skin.

And then we have a post-production code, post-Romero, full-on 70s I Drink Your Blood grindhouse film. So... Yeah, it's it's it's an interesting ticket to put these two together. I screened them in the order they were released. Because as far as I can tell, I Drink Your Blood was released in April and I Eat Your Skin was released later in the fall.

And so I'm going to review them in that order. But I just want everyone to be aware that I Eat Your Skin was actually produced like seven years earlier. And it's you can tell. So that's what we're going to do. And you're going to see or hear rather what I have to say about it. Bloodiest horror show in history. I drink your blood. Become animals and eat their victims. I drink your blood.

infects an entire town with rabies and turns a group of men into a band of bloodthirsty zombies ravaging a peaceful countryside. I drink your blood. Will make your blood curdle and your skin crawl. Okay, I drink your blood. is more or less what I expected from the title and from the poster art. Great blood horror to rip out your guts. The tagline on the poster says.

So this was written and directed by David E. Durston. And like I said, it is it's presented or promoted at least as a grindhouse film. It does kind of have that rough, rough kind. And it's low budgetness, but practical effects and kind of exploitation. It's hippie exploitation in a little way. And it seems to be... I don't really know his other films. I don't know a lot about David Durston. I'm sure Doc Shock does. But it doesn't look like he is necessarily well-versed in horror.

Although prior to this film, he made the love statue, which sounds like a Pygmalion narrative, but maybe also just an exploitation picture. But that's not our concern. This isn't a podcast about David E. Durston. This is a podcast about zombies.

So are there zombies and I drink your blood? Well, here's my wish. Here's what I wish. I eat your skin sounds like a zombie movie and I drink your blood sounds like a vampire movie. Well, that's not what we're going to get. So let me tell you a little bit more about I drink your blood. It is a product of the satanic panic. It is about a group of satanic hippies. I'm getting that from Internet Movie Database. And how they come upon a...

town that has been largely deserted because they're building something. A dam maybe that they're going to flood the area. But there's so there's workers and there's like a handful of locals, maybe five locals. It seems to be like two families. And so most of the town is deserted, and this group of hippies end up stuck there because they run out of gas and trash their van. And they're deep into drug culture, which is, of course, making them very dangerous and violent.

The film opens. I think the opening of the film is pretty great and it doesn't quite. The film kind of goes, I feel, in a little bit different direction, but it opens with this like quasi satanic ritual. And I got to say, it's a pretty diverse group of hippies. So it's led by Horace Bones, who kind of is presented as some kind of weird. I don't know what they're going for here. Native American.

voodoo Satanist. He's kind of interesting how he's presented. It's played by Bhaskar, Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, which sounds Indian to me. Not Native American, but India Indian. He's the leader of the group. He's like the high priest of the Satanists. And then we have a couple white guys. We have a black guy. We have an Asian woman. We have an older pregnant woman. We have... We have a mute woman.

And I'll linger on her for just a second. We also have another woman who is a little more forgettable. But the mute woman is Lynn Lowry, who would become much more famous later, particularly with her efforts with Cronin. Berg.

You probably know her from Shivers. I really like her. I like her look, and I like that she's been so prolific. She is still working today and has a lot of projects under development, which is really cool. She's not credited in the... film though because David Durston had a problem with her boyfriend or I don't know who cares about that machination but she is in it and she doesn't speak It's like her first major screen role, and I think she does a great job.

Now, these Satanists start off by abusing a local girl, and the abuse of that girl is ambiguous. At times, they seem to imply that they just roughed her up. At other times, it's implied that she was raped. And I kind of think the latter is more plausible within the plot structure because it is kind of set up as a rape revenge narrative with this girl's initially with this girl's grandpa and then with her younger kid brother.

So there's some stuff going on there. So yeah, the Satanists come on. Here's a little bit of a warning. Their ritual at the beginning of the film does involve the killing of a chicken. And this is an actual on-screen murder of a chicken. And that's kind of where the blood comes in, but they don't actually drink the blood. In fact, they don't at any point in the film drink blood. The title was originally... Paranoia? Paranoia or...

Hyperphobia. Sorry, I was close. It was known as hyperphobia or just phobia, but they thought I drink your blood would be more sensational. And even though they don't drink blood, but you do see blood. And of course, the chicken blood is real blood. But when they show the blood. being applied to the members of the cult. I'm sure that's fake blood. And it does get bloody in other places later without harming animals. It's all practical effects, etc. So that does come in later.

But I just wanted to put that out there. For those of you who are squeamish about that sort of thing, don't watch I Drink Your Blood. So they make their way into the community. You find out that this diverse group of people are kind of horrible and they're kind of horrible to each other. They treat each other poorly, especially Horace Bones, who doesn't seem to have any respect.

or care for any of his minions. But then we intersect with this contrasting group, which is a very wholesome group of people with a local bakery who are trying to survive and a young woman who's dating the foreman of the construction site. And the grandpa who's raising his two grandchildren without their parents. And so we're instantly sympathetic with them because of the young woman who is abused by the hippies.

And then it just kind of escalates from that because the hippies break into an old abandoned hotel. There's a really shocking sequence involving rats, although no rats were harmed in the making of the film. I'd rather they hurt a rat than a chicken but that's just me and the drug culture thing So there's some there's some really creepy satanic ritual moments. None of them, to my knowledge, founded on any kind of actual Satanist practices. There's just.

Not body horror, but they kind of treat people poorly. And there is some cutting and some bloodying, etc. So what's going on there is that the film was directly inspired by Charles Manson and the Manson murders. And so there is this idea of this. cult of hippies and Satanists coming to town and causing harm. And so it does kind of heighten that sense of paranoia, or as the original title says, phobia.

Well, the grandfather gets his gun and he goes to take care of these horrible hooligans who raped his granddaughter. And it doesn't go well. They hurt him, they stab him, and they force him to take LSD. And he's kind of down for the count for the rest of the film. He's injured. He's delusional. And this really riles up the younger brother. And I'm not giving...

actor names for these because I really don't know who's who. I didn't pay enough attention to the character names. So that's on me because there's only two of the characters on Internet Movie Database actually have photos. So you can tell something about that. Anyway, so the kid, he's upset. He wants to get revenge, not for what happened to his sister, but what happened to his grandpa. But it does become then this revenge narrative.

And when you take into account the other films of the early 70s, it's a nice little twist, this idea that the dealer of vengeance is a young boy. And the not only was a young woman abused, an older man was. So that's kind of interesting. So here's the twist and why I'm talking about it. The young boy. encounters a rabid dog and kills it. Good for him. So he puts down the rabid dog and then being quite the enterprising lad, he steals the doctor's bag.

And by the way, there is a town doctor who's still there played by the director and uses a syringe to extract rabies infected blood, which the young boy then adds. to a bunch of meat pies that the bakery is selling to the hippies. So we kind of get this weird Sweeney Todd thing going on. where we've now got meat pies that are infused with dog blood, and that dog blood is infected. So he's able to kind of manipulate the hippies into purchasing the meat pies. And there is one kind of good hippie.

who does care about the girl who got raped. And so, as luck would have it, he does not eat of the meat pies. Because he is good at heart, so he doesn't eat it. But the rest of the hippies do, and they start to go insane as the effects of rabies take them over. Now, I am not a doctor, and I did not take the time to Google this, but I do not know if ingesting the blood of a rabid creature will pass on the rabies, but if saliva through a...

A cut will do it. I'm thinking drinking blood or eating blood would as well. So there, I guess, is the I drink your blood. They eat blood. But I eat. A dog's blood would be a terrible name for a movie. So there you go. There's where the blood factors in. And that's where I come in. because initially I was going to say this has nothing to do with zombies whatsoever. But we do get an extremely early example of the infected zombie, which is kind of I've talked about how it had shown.

up at this time period with Romero's The Crazies, with Cronenberg's Rabid. We do have some proto-infected zombie stuff going on in the late 60s, early 70s, and I Drink Your Blood is definitely one of those. By ingesting the blood, they become rabid. The rabidness manifests in an insanity that makes all the hippies particularly violent.

And then they end up attacking the few remaining townspeople and the gang of construction workers. That means that when they do attack them, they do pass on the infection. and they turn the construction workers into crazed, murderous people like themselves. So, another round of Is It a Zombie? I am going to have to give a somewhat reluctant yes to I drink your blood because I do recognize...

28 Days Later and more recent infected zombies as zombies, so therefore there's nothing different going on here. In fact, in both this film and 28 Days Later, the zombification element is rabies, or at least... least a version of rabies. So yeah, the last 30 minutes of this film, we do have something very like a zombie scenario. Zombie adjacent, but you know, maybe just full on. proto-zombie stuff is going on. So I'll give it that. Now, that's where things do get pretty extreme, pretty violent.

There is a lot of murder and mayhem and dismemberment and self-harm and kind of an ambiguous ending. with the boy. But yeah, this does deliver on the violence score and on some of the disconcerting gore that you would expect from a film like this at a time period such as this one. So I kind of like I Drink Your Blood because it is definitely indicative of this early 70s filmmaking.

It's not as sober or as grave as Last House on the Left, but it does have a similar filmic quality. And of course, there is a kind of a similar plot line that's kind of going on there. It has a little bit of a feel of some of the Italian cannibal and zombie films of the 70s. It doesn't feel like a Romero film at all.

So be aware of that. But I think it's kind of a wild ride. It isn't super scary. It's more troubling. And I would definitely say that this is more of a satanic panic film than it is a zombie film. film or even than it is a horror film but obviously you can make the case that a satanic panic film is a horror film it certainly was at the time because in the 70s the idea of satanists was very horrifying especially

in the wake of Manson, which is what this film is really embracing. I would say that this is more a film of Charles Manson-like behaviors than it is anything else. And surprisingly, the acting, I found it was really pretty good. There is a certain affected stylization to the way they're acting, and there does seem to be dubbing. because it kind of has that European aesthetic, especially with the soundtrack, some of the filmic qualities, and some of the...

The blood. This is full-on Italian giallo blood that's going on. So it was produced by Jerry Gross Productions, which is in the U.S., but there were other people involved that makes me think that there's a little bit of connection to it. the European, continental European tradition. But I could be way off on that. Anyway, I think it's a disturbing film.

I think it's kind of got a cool story compared to some of the other films I've seen of this era. And it's certainly not the worst zombie or zombie adjacent film that's out there. It's kind of on par maybe with the first of the Blind Dead films, kind of some of those traditions there. But it's not a super...

excellent film. So I just want to put that out there. So even though I'm pretty favorable towards it, I'm going to give it a 6 out of 10. It is what it is. And for what it is, I think it does a pretty good job. in terms of zombie films and probably contemporary taste, I'm going to put this as a 6 out of 10. I'm going to give it a cautious recommendation.

I think people who are triggered by rape narratives, rape revenge narratives and animal cruelty and murder are really not going to want to see this. It's going to be triggering. So this is not the right audience. if you like 70s era gore. Satanic Panic, variations on a zombie. I think you're going to like it. And it is available on Tubi. That's where I watched it. It was perfectly fine transfer with just some commercials. But it's also on Peacock.com.

Plex, Screenbox, this Fawcum, which I've never even heard of. So it's out there. I'm sure it's probably on YouTube as well. So there you go. There's the first half of our somewhat bizarre double feature. Once again, that is David E. Durston's I Drink Your Blood, or I Eat the Blood of a Rabid Dog. This is Gilman Joel, and you're listening to Dead Man Still Walking with Dr. Walking Dead. So let's shift gears dramatically.

I had actually seen I Drink Your Blood before. So in preparation for this double feature, I watched it again. And I liked it better than I had initially and kind of could see the zombie connections a little bit better. So then it's like, all right, this is double billed Internet Movie Database. If you look up I Eat Your Skin, the image is the double billing.

which may just be from a DVD, but it shows, oh, I drink your blood, I eat your skin, similar design, similar title, originally titled Zombie. This is going to be a great film. Well... I watched it, and I watched it for you, gentle listeners, so you don't have to. This is not a good film. It is unequivocally a zombie film. And it's very much a zombie film one would expect.

from maybe the 50s. But this is 64, Dell Tenney, not released until 71. And so it is kind of building on some of those early, early black and white. voodoo exploitation films. These are not Romero style zombies. These are not infected zombies. They are, however, the raised dead because it becomes abundantly clear that these creatures are dead. They are reanimated yet dead.

But it is really, tonally, it's really weird. So I've been thinking about how to describe this. And basically, it's some kind of fusion between Johnny Quest and an Annette Panicello film. That's as close as I can get to it. So it's in black and white. It has a very jaunty jazz score. The scoring reads a little bit like a romantic comedy or maybe a beach.

Like I said, an impenicello, this kind of beach frivolity, this kind of lighthearted romance. And so that music pervades the film and completely... It makes it completely devoid of any elements of horror, even though that is how Internet Movie Database categorizes this, as horror. It is also G-rated. So there is a little bit of violence. And honestly, I think it's for the era.

I think it's extreme for a G-rated film, but by today's standards, it's laughable. Also, the effects are terrible. Anyway, I'm having trouble even talking about it. I'm sorry. I did some digging. Not like research. I wouldn't do that. It's available on Prime Video and on Tubi. The Tubi version opens with a kind of a voodoo ritual scene from later in the film.

Before the title sequence, the Amazon print opens immediately with the title sequence. So I don't know what that's about. I don't know why that scene was duplicated at the beginning of the other film, probably to make it more interesting and to establish. that it's a voodoo film because the print that opens with the title sequence, honestly, listeners, I thought I was watching the wrong film.

I thought somebody over at Amazon had put the wrong movie connected to I Eat Your Skin because I thought there's no way this is the movie I was going to watch. It does have kind of a voodoo-esque. title sequence with what's presented as ostensibly kind of native artwork. And then it cuts to a beach resort with a hunky playboy who is narrating a solace. story to a bunch of bathing beauties. And it doesn't feel like a horror film. It doesn't feel like a 1970s film. It feels like

We are way in the wrong film. And it's it really is this idea of, oh, it's this this big time romance author and all these women love him because he's so hunky and he's having affairs and there's this comedic. moment where the woman he's like enamored with her husband comes after him and it's it's played for laughs and it's like this kind of weird romantic comedy but not that romantic

Ah, it's weird, folks. And I didn't like the tone that it set, which is why I think the Tubi print went a different direction with it. But anyway, the plot of what there is, is this... producer or this editor or this friend wants our hero, our hunky playboy hero, Tom Harris. played by William Joyce, wants him to accompany him and his extremely annoying, annoying, annoying wife to a tropical Caribbean island to do research for a new novel.

Now, let me take a breath. The Fairchilds. Duncan Fairchild. He is the kind of editor dude. It's not even clear what his relationship is, but Dan Stapleton. You know what? Maybe this film also has a good chunk of Gilligan's Island in it, because this would be the millionaire in his life. So Dan Stapleton, he's kind of the straight character, and then he's married to...

Coral Fairchild, played by Betty Hyatt-Linton, and she is supposed to be the comedic relief, I guess, but she's not funny. She's just annoying. She is a shallow caricature. of a whiny, pampered, spoiled... privileged wife. And the jokes are such low-hanging fruit, I think even for the 60s. The idea is that she has too much luggage and she insists on bringing her dog and all she wants to do is gamble and sunbathe.

And I hated every moment that character was on the screen. Second, they're going to a Caribbean island called, wait for it, Voodoo Island. That's right. It's just called Voodoo Island. It's not an island. that has a name where voodoo is practiced. Nope, we're just going to call it Voodoo Island. And the reason they're going to Voodoo Island is they are going to do some research into this guy, Dr. Augusta Billadeau, played...

by Robert Stanton, who is doing experiments and allegedly discovering the cure for cancer. Okay. He's also working with another scientist, maybe, named Charles Bentley. Walter Coy, and his daughter is there, Janine Billadeau, played by Heather Hewitt, who is, of course, the romantic interest for Tom Harris, because they're really the only two young single people in the movie.

So there you go. The stage is set for some gripping horror as we fly our little biplane out to the island where they miscalculate and run out of gas and have to land on the beach. And as Tom goes into... the jungle to find help he finds a young woman who is swimming in a river for some reason and then she is menaced by a zombie and he has to intervene

Okay, so about the zombies. With I Drink Your Blood, definitely kind of zombie adjacent. They look like us. They just kind of foam at the mouth a little because they have rabies. These guys are going for full zombie. But they look terrible. Basically, they are actors wearing open shirts who have had like mud stuck to them. And they have these weird goggles on that are supposed to be bulging blind eyeballs.

I don't know what it is, but the makeup's not good. So they're kind of in the realm of Plague of the Zombies, but I think the Plague of the Zombies look really good. So scratch that. They're not in anybody's league. They're not like anything else you've seen.

They look like guys who have mud packs on their faces. But they are zombies. Although, though, they're tool-wielding zombies, which is definitely a characteristic of the so-called voodoo zombies. So we're definitely, you know, pre-Romero. They're not infectious. They're just violent. And we do learn that there is a master. There is a zombie master who is controlling them. So it's full on white zombie country with those initial ideas and tropes of zombie narratives. So we're not.

anything new here we're just kind of playing with variation on a theme so they do handle tools and weapons this initial dude has a machete and he tries to kill Tom but you know Tom has a Gun. So side note, Tom has a pistol and I don't know if William Joyce had ever used a pistol before, but the way he carries the gun and holds it is laughable to someone who does know how to use a pistol. So side note.

Tom shoots the zombie in the chest and it does nothing. So yes, we have full on zombie foo going on. Uh, there's just one to begin with. And then we kind of forget about him for a while as we go into this. this dramatic side plot. Oh, there's this doctor who's making some kind of experiments into cancer research. But of course, listeners, you've already guessed that he's in fact creating these zombies. Yes.

It didn't really work out as he had hoped. And mostly we introduce Janine and Tom and they kind of start fooling around and they implicitly have sex. But this is, you know, G rated. Tom has his shirt off for pretty much the whole. movie and the other wife is annoying. The only wife is annoying. And there are times in the film where it's like, yeah, but what about the zombies, man? I want to get back to the zombies. They do try to bring in the voodoo stuff. So like in. I walked with a zombie

Voodoo drums, so-called voodoo drums, are often featured on the soundtrack. You can hear the drumming. And the idea is that there's going to be a voodoo ceremony coming up for peace and prosperity, although I think it's... to combat the zombies, and it may or may not involve a human sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of a young blonde virgin. Well...

Guess what? Janine is blonde. Janine's not a virgin, but I don't think there are any virgins on the island. So it's going to be Janine, which, of course, is going to annoy Tom to no end. So we do get at the central feature of the film, a kind of voodoo ritual that begins the Tubi version. And it is very evocative of I Walked With a Zombie. So I Walked With a Zombie is 43.

It employed black actors playing black characters. It employed this kind of native sounding music and drums with some dancing. Now in my research for I Walked With A Zombie, there was some indication that they were using actual folkloric music and dancing. I can't vouch for that and I eat your skin. I am doubtful that it's that. And it's also weird because

The locals are all supposed to be descendants of the slave trade, but very few of them are actually African black. There's a lot of Hispanic people and a lot of white people. They're not in... black face but they are just white and i guess they're playing black i don't know what's going on racially

But I don't think it's good. This film, in terms of race and racial presentation and post-colonialism, is much closer to the mistakes of White Zombie. And it is not really in the realm of, I walked with a zombie. which I think is probably the best pre-Plague of the Zombie zombie film. I think I've said that before. So we're trying to recapture some of that authenticity from I Walked with the Zombie. The problem is we get too hung up on the...

the hunky playboy side plot, the romantic side plot, the comedic couple side plot. And that's where, okay, the cast of characters is the Gilligan's Island problem. The jazz soundtrack and the almost laughable zombies. That's your Johnny Quest bordering on Scooby-Doo. And then because of this kind of playboy fun in the sun, everybody's in bathing suits the whole time. That's where you get.

Good old Annette. So there you go. That's my whole explanation. Now, the film does come to a climax. And we do get more zombies. And we find out that there's a sinister plot at play. But I was pretty checked out by then. I did finish the film. I did it. I took one for the team. I had to take a couple of breaks there near the end and tell my colleagues that I was I was doing real scholarly research by finishing this film. But. I don't love the ending either.

Okay, so final thoughts on I Eat Your Skin. I Eat Your Skin is not the correct film to pair with I Drink Your Blood. If you want to do it for a party, make it a drinking game, knock yourself out. But it's an entirely different movie from a different era. It also doesn't really know what it is. It's too much of a fusion of different genres and storylines with diverse characters who shouldn't necessarily be in a film together.

What I Eat Your Skin does do is show you how great I Drink Your Blood is by comparison. So it's just a bad film. It's not well executed. It doesn't have a lot of production value qualities. The fact that nobody wanted to distribute it for seven years is also telling. The internet movie database rating for I Eat Your Skin is 3.6 out of 10. I am going to give it a 3 out of 10. And I am going to say avoid. Yes, avoid this thing. like the plague. That's right. I went there.

But I will say, kind of my parting shot on I Eat Your Skin, it turns out it's actually a science fiction film. And this does make sense because between 1943 and 1964, most of the zombie are zombies. adjacent films were science fiction based more than they were mysticism, magic, sorcery, or other kinds of horror narratives.

So it does get quite science fictiony in the end, and we get a tremendous science fiction deus ex machina, which I found groan-inducing. So there you go. I'm putting it out there, but I'm not going to give it away in case any of you actually... want to waste your time with this film. So sorry, Delteni. I did not enjoy your zombie. There is only one zombie and Fulci made it.

So there you go, folks. A special double feature from 1971. I drink your blood and I eat your skin. One's worth watching. One is not. Neither of these are going into the Zombie Hall of Fame, but they're interesting. I guess I eat your skin. skin might be what jay calls a cinematic oddity or it may just be crap so there you go uh again next time next time 50th episode we're gonna do something fun i'm gonna get jay on uh he and i are gonna

fight or get along. It's hard to say. So tune in, uh, please, please follow. And, um, I'm available to engage with on the blue sky on the Instagrams, uh, email. bishopk at su.edu always interested in having a further conversation even if it's a rebuttal on your part I'm always open to rebuttals but check me out share this podcast with others if you enjoy it if you have zombie fans

or friends, zombie friends, zombie fan friends, you know, share. I'd like to entertain if I have the opportunity. And maybe, maybe just once, educate. But we can't all be Dr. Shock Dave Beckham. So that's it. We'll catch you next time. Everybody, peace and love. Take care of yourselves and ciao. I'm going to pitch in at the middle of the residence. Response cut for you. In the PD, peaceful fire. was trying to drive away in a vehicle that is now on fire.

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