While Mill Creek now sells a 200-movie box called Tales of Terror, they used to sell a completely different 50-pack of the same name. That older Tales of Terror 50-pack was then incorporated, unchanged, into their Horror Collection 250-pack -- aka our ten-year project completed at the end of 2018.
However, as we've previously noted, an even older version of Tales of Terror had a few interesting movies that were later cut from the set, including a Tod Slaughter film we still haven't seen.
So we sat down to watch two of those films, with no other plan in mind, only to discover they had a huge theme in common. To quote Ice-T, poet of our time:
Way down in New Orleans, yeah
I met this old lady...
If you know what follows that incipit, you know what's coming. And -- wouldn't you know it? -- the first of these movies isn't just set in the Pelican State, it is the Pelican State.
[aka Louisiana, aka She Devil]
Grade: D-
Well, when we see the Sack emblem, we know a few things about the film to come: it'll be short, and it won't be very good but will at least be interesting.
That pretty well sums up Drums O' Voodoo, a morality play in the figurative sense, and just about the literal one as well: it was adapted from a stage work, Louisiana, by one J. Augustus Smith, and with a lead antagonist named "Tom Catt" it's clear the brushstrokes will be broad in this one.
Smith also plays the preacher Amos Berry, also known as (sigh) Elder Berry. His checkered past becomes leverage for Mr. Catt in the latter's quest to bang nubile niece Myrtle (Edna Barr) --
-- and since Myrtle's already started jookin' in those jook joints, the danger is clear and present. The power of Christ can't compel Tom Catt to back off, but maybe something else can do it? You remember how things ended for Ice-T, don't you?
Thus enters Aunt Hagar (Laura Bowman, whom we know from Son of Ingagi), whose sonorous voice and foreboding manner -- "Leave everything to me...and the vooooo-dooooo" -- make it clear that this is a woman not to be trifled with. Does trifling ensue? You betcha!
Another blog, Atom Mudman's A-List, has already covered Drums O' Voodoo with both greater depth and greater sympathy than we can offer, so no need to rehash his good work.
Though Drums is certainly unusual in many ways (some of which Mr. Mudman details), we unfortunately found most of it excruciating, give or take. As a poorly-preserved document of a poorly-adapted screenplay, what we have here can't really be characterized as "cinematography", but more the equivalent of setting up the camcorder at the back of the auditorium to capture those precious moments of your kid as Tree #3.
When you put that together with amateurish acting, a cornball script, and a print in absolutely trash condition, there's not much left. However there's some documentary interest in seeing and, especially, hearing scenes of black American religious life in the early 1930s.
That part is kind of neat and ought to be known to scholars -- and since apparently Drums O' Voodoo was included in the 2017 UCLA Festival of Preservation (under the She Devil title), maybe there's a copy out there that actually looks decent and includes an intact ending. (This one sure doesn't -- shortly after the film's climax, it unceremoniously Poochies back to its home planet.)
And hey, Laura Bowman does get a few good lines at the expense of Tom Catt, observing that he's "not as human as the alligator, or gilly monster, 'cause even they don't tackle the females when they ain't willin'!"
Preach, Aunt Hagar, in your witchy way, and with your one facial expression.
And speaking of gila monsters:
[aka Zombies, aka Voodoo Blood Bath, etc.]
Grade: F
Right away we note: yes, after the film sat on the shelf for 7 years, it was retitled I Eat Your Skin so that it could play on a double-bill with I Drink Your Blood. Fine.
But the new title technically isn't deceptive, as some have claimed, since there is a skin-eating...condition...that plagues some of the characters in this film.
OK, with that out of the way? Gosh, this movie sucks. Yes, regional filmmaking; yes, seven years on the shelf; yes, all of those things. But this film isn't fun in the way that The Giant Gila Monster or Teenagers from Outer Space is fun, nor in the way that Miami Connection or Troll 2 is fun.
It's just a stupider, slower, duller version of a half-dozen movies we've seen already -- akin to Teenage Zombies or The Horrors of Spider Island, but not even as good as those. (And yet Mill Creek felt compelled to retain it on the Chilling Classics box set: the world wonders.)
I Eat Your Skin tries to be funny, isn't; tries to be sexy, isn't; tries to be scary, isn't. This movie just isn't. It has an overarching lack of is-ness, you might say, except in the sense communicated by sentences like:
- Watching this movie is exactly what I don't want to be doing right now.
- This film is a dispiriting waste of time and celluloid.
- Experiencing these 80 minutes is as titillating as a Dixie cup half-full of wet sand.
Oh, I Eat Your Skin successfully "is" at least one other thing: disconcertingly racist even for a 1964 film, leaving one to wonder how it came off in 1971.
In this film the black people are the bad people, full stop, while the zombified oafs that lumber around the island are uncomfortably reminiscent of the freakish giants in The Lost City. The whole thing is just icky.
Watching Mill Creek boxes could easily give the impression that the early 1960s were an awful time for film: smutty and smirking, grotesque and heavy-handed, trashy yet still bound by prior norms and shortcomings, and subjecting viewers to a constant bombardment of sub-Mancini big-band "jazz" clichés.
I Eat Your Skin does little to undermine that impression. It's the kind of film that pushes screeching people into pools and thinks that's funny --
-- or sets the action in a place called "Voodoo Island" and thinks it's engaging in effective storytelling.
It's got trombones, and tremolo guitars, and mad scientists, and voodoo ceremonies, and nothing we wanted. We rued its beginning and welcomed its end. We hope you appreciate our sacrifice in watching it.
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