Adventure novelist and playboy Tom Harris is sent from Miami Beach to remote Voodoo Island in the Caribbean to gather material for a new book.
When Tom asks him about zombies, Charles says there are none and that the islanders are "a very simple people" who cannot comprehend that a man could be "deranged of mind, a homicidal maniac."
As the others gather, Tom tells them of the zombie attack and says "I heard a rumor there's an army of walking dead on this island."
Augustus immediately dismisses the notion, saying that the islanders use a plant-based narcotic that can cause physical and mental problems.
She takes Tom to Augustus's lab, but before they can enter, her friend Fernando warns them that Janine will be kidnapped and sacrificed that night.
As Enrico starts the plane's engine, the tall zombie walks into its spinning propeller carrying a box of explosives.
Tom, Janine, Coral, Duncan and Augustus race back to the lab, the cultists and zombies giving chase.
Augustus rigs his equipment so that it will blow up and destroy Voodoo Island, ending, he says, Charles's "insane" plan to take over the world with his army of indestructible zombies.
Dying, Augustus explains that the zombies are the accidental result of his experiments and when Charles discovered this, he hatched his scheme for world conquest.
[2] Academic film critic Peter Dendle notes several problems that point to the production phase of I Eat Your Skin.
[3] Tenney's original intent was to release the film - then known as Zombies - on a double feature with Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster.
He also said that delays were caused by a hurricane and by members of the cast and crew needing medical treatment for snakebites and illnesses contracted in the Florida swamps during filming.
[12] Recent theatrical screenings include the Mahoney Drive-In in Lehighton, Pennsylvania in October 2015[13] and Quentin Tarantino's New Beverley Cinema in Los Angeles in January 2017.
He notes that after failing to be distributed "for seven years," it was "put on a double-feature programme advertised as 'Two great blood horrors to rip out your guts.
He calls the jazz score "intrusive and quite often inappropriate," says the movie is "flatly photographed and poorly lit" and opines that I Eat Your Skin "plays just below the competency level.
After noting the "bad effects, horrible dialogue, and a Muzak-inspired score," he calls the movie "a goofball flick" and a "concoction [that] is fascinating, and like so many other films of the 1960s, it's almost entertaining in a so-bad-it's-good way.
He writes that I Eat Your Skin is a "laughable voodoo-esque tale" with "woeful zombies" that was "shelved for reasons obvious to anyone who has had the misfortune of sitting through it."
It rated I Eat Your Skin as "fair" on its five-point very- poor-to-very-good scale, with The New York Daily News calling it "very poor.
"[20][21] In a review of the eight-film DVD box set Mad Monster Rally, David Cornelius of DVD Talk writes that "The film (...) went undistributed for six long years, and one look explains why: it's an utterly square attempt at early-60s hipness with a jazzy score and a hero (...) who fancies himself a [Sean Connery]-era James Bond, surrounding himself with platinum blondes."
Cornelius goes on to say that "Tenney pads the picture with a couple exploitation scenes of witch doctor rituals, and we fall asleep".
[22] Paul Pritchard of DVD Verdict simply calls I Eat Your Skin "just the type of cheap crap that sullies the good name of exploitation cinema.
"[23] A drive-in theater sign in the 2018 film The Other Side of the Wind advertises the double feature of I Drink Your Blood and I Eat Your Skin.