Del Tenney’s tame zombie film was shot as early as 1964, according to Variety under the title Zombies of Voodoo Island (and not simply Zombie as is often reported, though it has since turned up under that title) and as part of a proposed double bill with something to have been called Frankenstein Meets Dracula though that never got made. Tenney was being bank-rolled by Twentieth Century-Fox who were looking to capitalise on earlier low-budget genre successes but the company clearly over-estimated Tenney. When they saw what he turned in they not only ditched the planned double bill but also dumped Zombies of Voodoo Island onto an archive shelf where it sat gathering dust, unloved and unwanted until distributor Jerry Gross, looking for a companion piece to his new gorefest I Drink Your Blood (1971) dusted it down and gave it the wholly misleading new title I Eat Your Skin.

Novelist and playboy Tom Harris (William Joyce) visits a remote Caribbean island known to the locals as Voodoo Island (alarm bells ring, Harris of course ignores them) to research his latest adventure story. With his publisher Duncan Fairchild (Dan Stapleton) and Fairchild’s wife Coral (Betty Hyatt Linton) in tow, he saves the day when their aircraft runs out fuel and puts them down safely, though now of course they’re stranded. They encounter a zombie menacing a young woman and are rescued by a group of armed men led by Charles Bentley (Walter Coy). Over dinner at Bentley’s house, they meet the woman they saw earlier, Janine Biladeau (Heather Hewitt), the daughter of scientist Dr Augustus Biladeau (Robert Stanton). Despite being assured by everyone that there are no zombies, Janine is abducted by the walking dead to act as a sacrifice in voodoo ritual. After a lot of wandering about and not really doing anything particularly useful, Harris learns that Augustus is experimenting with irradiated snake venom in a search for the cure to cancer but his work has, inevitably, gone horribly wrong and turned test subjects into zombies.

What audiences who caught I Drink Your Blood first on that double bill would have made of Tenney’s film is anyone’s guess. By any standards, I Eat Your Skin is an anachronism but against David Durston’s madcap tale of rabid hippies it must have looked positively prehistoric. I Eat Your Skin (skin never gets eaten once) is an old-fashioned, curiously reticent film, crudely made, indifferently acted film, very different in almost every respect to Durston’s more cynical and nasty film. Black and white worked well for George A. Romero in Night of the Living Dead (1968) but Tenney’s monochrome photography just serves to make the film seem even more out of time than it already was.

Adding underlining the film’s outdated feel is a jaunty but wholly inappropriate jazz score from Lon E. Norman which seems to have been written for something completely different, but which also adds to the cut-price James Bond feel of the proceedings. But despite his wonton womanising, propensity for discarding his shirt at any opportunity and wisecracking demeanour, Harris is no 007. In fact he’s pretty hopeless, just wandering around getting into scrapes and doing no real investigation at all. He’s just there, a passenger on a very dull journey, being buffeted from one bit of business to the next with no effort on his part.

Technically, the film is a disaster. It looks like it was shot without synchronised sound and has that disconnected feel that comes from a not very accurate dubbing job where characters outside always sound like their speaking in a slightly echoey room. Ed Gibson’s photography is flat and lacking in atmosphere and at one point hero and heroine take a “midnight” stroll in broad daylight, though to be fair has day for night photography ever really worked for anyone? And the zombies are a laughable sight – Guy Del Russo’s make-up wouldn’t have passed muster even before Night of the Living Dead showed us more believable zombies, though a late in the day appearance of a zombie suicide bomber is a nice twist.

Fox were right to abandon Frankenstein Meets Dracula if this nonsense was all Tenney could come up with. It brought his very short career (he’d previously directed The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964) and The Horror of Party Beach (1964)), his next – and final – gig not being until 2003’s obscure Descendant). I Eat Your Skin was a good decade and a half out of time when Tenney made it and when Gross got his hands on it he did it no favours by releasing it opposite a much more lively film but also by giving it a title that was bound to disappoint. Made before Romero changed the zombie film forever, Tenney’s undead are more akin to the shuffling slaves of White Zombie (1932) and the 1940s Monogram programmers than the flesh-eating ghouls audiences were now expecting. But had it made it to drive-ins in 1964 it might still have not struck a nerve, Harris being far too square a hero to chime with the required youth audience.

In 2019, a trailer emerged claiming to be for a remake of Tenney’s film, an Australian/Filipino co-production directed by John Klyza who said that it would “starkly divert from the original but with callbacks.” The film came and went on very limited edition discs before parking itself on obscure streaming services though judging by the lack of reviews to be found, not many people were that interested in it.