Note: After revisiting this flick, I determine it is an all-time achievement, worthy of the Iron Coil.

I got a two-fer disc from Netflix with  “Back from the Grave” and “The Undertaker and His Pals.”

Somebody got their wires crossed because the former is “I Eat Your Skin,” previously discussed in this space. I repeat it here. I have nothing to add, really, except in this version they got the dubbing straightened out:

Two exciting facts about ‘I Eat Your Skin“:

• There is no skin-eating in the film.
• Auteur Del Tenney was from Connecticut and once made a good film, 1964’s The Curse of the Living Corpse, which had real writing, a real script, a real editor, and real actors, including Roy Scheider in his screen debut.

“I Eat Your Skin,” also made in 1964, wasn’t released until 1971 as the second half of a drive-in double bill with “I Drink Your Blood,” a hippie-biker rabies epic.

It had been sitting on the shelf under the title Voodoo Blood Bath, but the distributor liked the “Last Supper” imagery on the twin bill poster. (“I Eat Your Flesh” would have been better, but it was taken.)

Novelist Tom Harris writes smutty best-sellers and spends his time poolside at the Fountainbleau in Miami, reading aloud from his works to a crowd of bikini-clad housewives. His agent, a clenched-jawed WASP named Fairchild, hatches a scheme to go to this island where a scientist is working on a cure for everything and, oh yeah, there are supposed be eighteen kinds of poisonous snakes and zombies on this island.

So they go because a pudgy bald guy in a Dacron suit is chasing Tom (with malice aforethought) for horsing around with his wife. So what the hey?

During this opening sequence it is apparent that director Tenney achieved something remarkable: this is the first American film made for domestic release where the words don’t match the lips. At all.

It’s as if it was dubbed into Korean and dubbed back from the Italian translation of the Korean by a crew from Portugal.

This results in happy accidents such as the pudgy bald man shaking his fist and yelling “I getting you am son of beech!”

OK – there’s a whole lot of plot which I won’t bore you with. It’s sufficient to relate that the zombies are real, the voodoo priest wishes to sacrifice the blonde, the scientist is fairly evil, the other guy is completely evil, the good guys escape, and the island blows up.

The zombie transformation scenes are entertaining in a primitive fashion; their eyes bug out through the caked-on makeup, making them look like trout that have been lightly coated in corn meal and fried. (If you don’t believe me try it.)

The voodoo dancing is pretty good but ultimately tedious, as is the sight of Tom with no shirt.

The clenched-jawed WASP looks like what you’d get if you stirred the genes of Robert F. Kennedy and William F. Buckley together and told the result you were outlawing touch football and madras pants.

As a period piece, I Eat Your Skin is mildly amusing. One decapitation. One extended blast of voodoo dancing. Girls in bikinis. Man in Dacron suit shoved in pool. Bad prose read aloud to girls in bikinis prior to man in Dacron suit getting shoved in pool. Exploding zombie. WASP climbing a cliff in loafers. Mad scientist. Snakes. Code Yellow ethnocentrism – enough to be noticeable, but not egregious enough to be funny. Short.

Two coils.

Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer (2007) is a nice, tidy, and moderately amusing revenge flick with some serious monsters and a whole lot of sinister barfing and death tentacles.

Young Jack witnessed his entire family getting whomped on by some sort of forest demon, and he is wracked with guilt because he got away. This in turn causes him to be a goateed, baseball-capped loser with a bad anger problem.

And a plumber.

Normally this set-up would send the red flags flying, but luckily they keep the psychobabble to a dull roar, the better to concentrate on the glop, which this flick has in spades.

Robert Englund plays the nutty professor who buys the house with the evil stuff in the yard, so when he gets infected with the monster yick he retches a lot in front of his dopey students, and then morphs into a thing that looks like a cross between Jabba the Hut and Freddy Krueger.

The thing sends out the Death Tentacles, which bind up the victims until it’s time to jam a weird white thing down their throats and suck up their insides (and, presumably, their souls). Then they turn into zombie monsters.

Jack’s belligerence sure does come in handy here, because these zombies (or monsters, I can’t decide) take a lot of killing.

There’s some of kind of love subplot but I can’t remember what it was about, except that it does not involve any nekkidity (automatic one coil deduction).

One large fat beast. Two, if you count the nerdy girl. Actually, it’s three, if you count Robert Englund before and after the transformation. Two accessory beasts. Fast-moving zombie demon critters that used to be community college students. (You can tell them from regular, non-zombie demon critter community college students by their speed.)

Green barf. Yapping dog. Sinister old man in hardware store. Old boiler. Fun with plumbing. The old “the car won’t start and the monster is coming” gag. Superstitious natives. Psychiatrist.

Short and to the point. A nice job, only lacking in breasts to be a CACA Iron Coil contender. As it is, a well-deserved three coils.

The Bloody Brood (1959) is a Canadian beatsploitation flick starring an impossibly young Peter Falk as the slightly cross-eyed and all sinister Nico, a drug dealer who is also the leader of a group of beatniks.

They’re having a party, dig? And the gang just witnessed the old newsie die of a heart attack at The Digs, dig?

So Nico and this other cat who dresses real square but is truly hip, you know, they decide that the real kick is to plan and carry out a murder.

(Okay, the attempt to write this in Beatnik ends now.)

So when this kid shows up with a telegram for the guy whose apartment they’re trashing, and he’s not there, and the kid sees a rather fleshy gal in tights doing one of those aimless dances you can still see at a Bob Weir/Phil Lesh show, well, it’s all over, because these psychobeats feed the kid a hamburger with ground glass in it.

And the kid dies.

This infuriates his older brother, Cliff, who infiltrates The Digs (the bar where these dorks congregate) and eventually figures it out, in between getting beat up by Nico’s underworld henchmen.

The big denouement is when Cliff bribes the house poet (the Gregory Corso of this group) with cash and booze to read a horrible poem that reveals the details of the murder.

This sounds like pure fermented curd, and in many ways this is a pretty crummy flick.

But the acting is pretty good. The direction is pretty good. And the music is pretty good.

The poetry, bongo playing, and bad dancing, however, are about as scaly as you’d expect.

So for a cheapo exploitation flick designed to take advantage of the notoriety of the Beats, it’s not half bad.

I give this one an honest three coils.

Vampire Party (2008) is a vampire flick with young people in it that has absolutely zero angst.

And what a relief that is.

Sam and his two pals Prune and Alice are party animals. They finagle invitations to this infamous Medici Night party, held in a castle accessible only by helicopter.

That’s the good news. The bad news is the party is for vampires, celebrating some similar night in the 14th century where one of the de Medici gals arranged with the local bloodsuckers to wipe out a few thousand Protestants.

So it doesn’t take long before mayhem breaks loose.

Thank God the directors don’t try to explain everything. Instead they go with silly sight gags and bad jokes, rendered worse because this is a French flick.

Arms melt off in holy water. Vampire death by fire. Vampire farts. Vampire toupee. Vampire hairstyling, discussion of. Running dental gag. Incantations that produce amusing results. Two breasts. Plenty of well-timed blood. Honest-to-God vampires that burn up in the sunlight.

Light-hearted and short, this is the perfect antidote to the ghastly “Twilight” nonsense.

Four coils, and a nomination for the iron Coil list

My friend Val hipped me to 1968’s  Pretty Poison, notable to him because it was shot in and around Great Barrington, Mass.

Tony Perkins is Dennis the weirdo, out on parole for a juvenile arson/manslaughter beef.

Tuesday Weld is Sue Anne, the psycho high school babe.

And that chunky guy over there, half asleep in the armchair, is me.

See, Dennis is nuts. He tells ol’ Sue Anne some load of bull about being a secret agent and a sinister plot.

And she turns out to be crazier than he is.

Unhappily for this flick, the craziest of all are those who sit through it without once deploying the fast-forward.

After a long night in the woods, Dennis is menaced by a red newt.

Never mind too much plot getting in the way of the story. For that to be true, you’d have to know which story the plot is messing with.

And there are too many things happening here.

It could be a serious attempt at a topical thriller, except it’s not even a little bit thrilling.

It could be a black comedy, except the humor is unintentional.

Or it could just be a lousy movie.

Val reports that when Perkins arrived for the shoot, he visited the only openly gay men in the neighboring town of Egremont — two German furniture makers who wore tight leather pants. Their dog bit him, which might explain the way he runs in this film.

We’re talking extremely unlikely love scene between Tuesday Wed and Anthony Perkins filmed through the foliage. (Normally this would call of an automatic one-coil deduction but in this case I think it’s a blessing.) Psychedelic freak-out with the full moon, so lamely rendered that it would have me chasing down my dealer to demand my money back. Much examination of little bottles of some red liquid. Many fine character actors wearing bow ties, cardigans and stingy brim fedoras. Cops that say “Shaddap, punk.” Big Tony running festively through a field after being attacked by a red newt. Loud cigarette-smoking mother with shellacked hair. Incidental music by Johnny Mandel that he reused for M*A*S*H, correctly reasoning that no one would remember Pretty Poison.

Only watch this with a South Berkshire County, Mass., old-timer to point out the locations and talk about gay German furniture makers.

Otherwise this is pretty painful poison.

One coil.

(Click one the link for an entirely different take from an art-damaged ninny: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/02/another-dose-of-pretty-poison.html)

I had one of those panicky moments recently.After watching yet another uninspired, direct-to-video horror flick, I wondered if I had exhausted the supply of horrible movies.

Not to worry. The folks at Criterion have put out a series called Eclipse. Here is the bumf on that:

Eclipse is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque restrospective for the adventurous home viewer.

Translation: We have the rights to all kinds of weird stuff, but we don’t want to put it out with our regular flicks. So we decided to package three or four flicks together, add some film critic crap on the liner notes, and sell the thing for $35 to little Tarantino wannabes.

Now then — Series 37, “When Horror Came to Shochiku,” covers that magical time when the Shochiku studio, late to the “man in monster suit destroys scale model of Tokyo” party, decided to go into horror movies.

There are four movies in the set. I have watched three.

After considering The X from Outer Space (1967), I conclude that one way to keep costs down for the adventurous (and impecunious) home viewer is to go cheap on the translators.

Because the title makes no sense. That’s okay, though, because the subtitles don’t, either.

The deal is the groovy space crew is trying to get to Mars, but every mission gets waylaid by some mysterious force which leaves some intergalactic space crud on the propeller.

And the dopey crew scrapes off a sample and sticks it in a jar.

Of course the minute they get back to Earth the thing pops out, gets into some atmosphere and turns into a giant chicken-headed dinosaur with death ray eyes, a very thick skin, and some seriously progressive ideas about urban renewal.

As with all monster suit movies, the sequences starring the beast get tedious. On the other hand, it does look like a chicken. Sort of.

Two and a half coils.

Also in the series, from the same director (Kazui Nihonmatsu) is the far superior Genocide (1968), in which enraged insects, fed up with the lethal antics of mankind, decide to wage their own war, starting with swarming over a B-52 carrying a hydrogen bomb and forcing thee airmen to parachute — with the bomb — to some isolated islands off Japan.

You can tell it’s the H-bomb because it’s clearly labeled as such: “H-bomb.” (Also “Handle With Care,” “Fragile,” and “This End Up.”)

See, Joji, local bug nut and married to the lovely and pregnant Yukari, insists on carrying on with Annabelle, the blonde, bikini’d bug nut.

He couldn’t have gotten too far with her, however, otherwise he’d have noticed the Nazi death camp tattoo on her personal chest.

Annabelle, driven mad by her experience, wishes to exterminate mankind. This fits in with the plans of the super-poisonous insects on the remote islands, whose venom drives everybody mad before they die.

There are also Eastern bloc spies and American Air Force nitwits with high water chinos, the better to expose their white socks.

Bug death, with lesions. Hallucinatory bug scenes. Major swarmitation. Sixties bikinis, which I think are sexier than today’s. Rare 19-shot revolver. Grim ending. Three and a half coils.

Iron Sky (2012) is an extremely silly movie that recently got American conservatives in a snit because the President of the U.S. looks like Sarah Palin.

I only knew about this from a post on Michelle Malkin’s Facebook feed, which directed me to her Twitchy website, which discusses Tweets on Twitter.

And if that not’s a good reason for banning the Internet then I don’t know what is.

Anyhoo, this Finnish foolishness is so dumb it shouldn’t worry anybody. Seems in 1945 the Nazis were able to escape and make it to the dark side of the moon, where they set up a colony and bided their time until…

The present day, when a couple of astronauts, sent to bolster the Palin-lookalike’s reelection campaign, stumble into the setup, with unfortunate results — one gets dead and the other gets bleached.

The Nazis discover the astronaut’s cell phone which can power their entire death star thing — until the battery runs out.

Then it’s off to Earth for some iPads and hijinks

This is a truly dumb flick — like an extended Saturday Night Live skit, with spaceships and a set designer that’s into steampunk.

And no nekkidity, which is a problem.

Two coils, for annoying Twitchy people, mostly.

The Devil’s Rock (2011) is much more like it. In this nasty bit of work from New Zealand’s Paul Campion, a couple of British commandos land on one of the Channel Islands just prior to D-Day, to disable a big German gun and generally draw attention away from the invasion.

Seems simple enough, except when the two Tommies get to the castle they can hear all kinds of shrieking, and one of them decides to go in and check it out.

It’s always a mistake to stray from the mission — especially when one of the same bunch of Nazis in charge of getting the Holy Grail is holed up inside with a female demon.

Despite the demon’s habit of ripping the guts out of everybody who gets near, the Nazi still thinks he can control the gal and unleash her on the Allies.

Two demon breasts. Piles of innards, gallons of blood. Brain-eating. Incantations. Book of evil spells. No devil music. Lots of screaming. Claustrophobia. A little long.

Three coils.

In the dubbed version, Weng Weng plays Agent 00, not Agent 3 1/2. I think this is an important distinction.

It’s important because “For Your Height Only” is the greatest film ever made.

You can have your “Citizen Kane” and “Battleship Potemkin.” Spare me your “Rear Window” and “The Third Man.”

Why? Because none of these so-called great films has a midget secret agent who escapes the bad guys by parachuting from a high balcony. With an umbrella.

This flick’s got it all, except breasts. For some reason, the filmmakers demurred in this crucial aspect.

So never mind. It’s the second greatest film ever made. (The greatest is “Zombie Lake.”)

Agent 00 is a big fan of the groin kick, the groin being the nearest area on the personal bodies of his assailants for a man of his height. (Weng Weng was two feet, nine inches tall.)

Although he’s proficient with the mini machine gun and the mini samurai sword.

The real bitch is sitting at the regular person table at the Manila’s fine restaurants. (They have signs that say “Food! You Eat!”)

The flick also features atrocious dubbing in a variety of dialects — Long Island Lockjaw, British dowager, Brooklyn hood.

And the main villain clearly studied at the Moammar Qaddafi Institute of Fashion.

A rare treat, and an even rarer four coil rating, plus consideration for the next all-time Iron Coil list.

The Atlantis Interceptors (1983) is a piece of Italian cheese in which stupid white people go to an island and battle post-apocalpytic biker punks on account of the Soviet nuclear sub they were trying to raise somehow caused Atlantis to rise out the ocean.

Got that?

This movie makes almost no sense. That would be fine if there were breasts, but there aren’t. Beasts, certainly. Magic machine guns that never ever require reloading, check. Plus groovy soul music by the immortal Oliver Onions.

Yes, Oliver Onions. That’s what it said in the credits. I backed it up to be sure.

The flick was chiefly interesting because I thought the female lead would eventually take her shirt off.

Here are some of the interceptors:

Here’s the exciting theme music – “Black Inferno.”

A real turkey. Half a coil, and that’s a gift.