I Drink Your Blood (1971)

I Drink Your Blood is the genuine article in a certain sense. Sure for the uninitiated, the film is just another low-budget 70's oddity but to true horror connoisseurs it's the kind of schlocky, late night treat that greased the late-fee wheel of many a video-rental shop. It's the kind of bizarre outlayer that guys in their thirties sandwiched in-between innocuous titles and backroom porn to not look like some kind of weirdo. Made for next-to-nothing and saying more than most, this little exploitation flick just may be the perfect example of "so bad, it's good."The film is centered on a cabal of Satanic hippies who descend on a small town in upstate New York. After causing considerable panic among the townsfolk (in reality, like five people), the hippies find themselves victims of a revenge plot involving meat pies infected with rabies. Instead of killing them however, the pies turn them into quasi-zombies with a lust for blood and chaos. Can the survivors lead by bakery owner Mildred (Marner-Brooks) and wayward teen Sylvia (Brooks) survive?Much of the film's unintentional hilarity ensues with the constant presence of Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury's Horace, the leader of the group. Something of an analog of Manson Family, Horace's group is glued to his hip due to what should come across as wide-eyed charisma. Yet his wild gesticulations and off-kilter roguishness is so over the moon that he highhandedly derails the film within the first frames. From that point on, it's no holds barred as to where the movie is going and with whom.Or why for that matter, the characters are so poorly developed and simperingly stupid that there's nothing for us, the audience to anchor ourselves to let alone sympathize with. The editing is simultaneously the best and worst aspect of this film. Best because it snaps back and forth between groups of people so quickly that it's impossible to get bored. Worst because so much is built up only to be left by the wayside while certain payoffs seem to come out of nowhere. There's shock but no awe and then awe lacking shock. It's as if we're reading the journal of a lunatic yet the journal has been partially burned in a basement furnace.To give credit where credits due, the film ably cash in on the perceived evils of drugs, free love, cross-racial integration, Vietnam anxiety and teenagers run amok. Then in an act of frightening forethought director David E. Durston married those fears with overt and unabashed devil worship pre-dating the satanic panic of the 1980's. While I won't go so far as to say I Drink Your Blood caused such cultural overreaction and hysteria, the film did ride a pretty big wave of 1970's exploitation films concerning our relationship with a certain dark master.Yet if you're looking for cogent social commentary from the bloodied, drooling maws of an exploitation film like I Drink Your Blood, you might just be connecting dots that aren't there. As it is, this 1970 gorefest is a garbled mess made memorable only because its too inept to be taken seriously and too frenzied to be boring.

A group of satanic hippies doped constantly on L.S.D. wreak havoc on a small town. Soon they end up with rabies and begin savagely murdering everyone, leaving three kids, a baker woman and the foreman of a dam-building corporation to stop the massacre.I Drink Your Blood is great if you want a movie to laugh at,and if you're lucky enough to find a copy with the little psychedelic intro from Cinemation Industries, it's even better. The acting was bad but not so bad that it becomes annoying, and its cheesy plot also makes for a funny movie. It is meant to be scary, but is more the kind of film you'd want to watch at a party with your friends. The actress who played the mute girl, Carrie, was in a similar but much better-made film, the Crazies, where a chemical turns people from a small town into homicidal maniacs.

I grew up with movies dating back to the 80s, but unfortunately, that's as far back as I got. The 80s may have been a great time for movies, but the 70s deserves a chance to be looked at. There are plenty of decent classics from the seventies. Is this movie one of them? Well, the movie is about a Satanic cult, led by Horace Bones (Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) who terrorize a small town and a little kid tries to defeat them by making them rabid. This only ends up making the threat worse, turning them into zombie-like psychopaths... yeah, the plot is stupid, but the trailer makes it sound menacing. In fact, the trailer is probably the scariest thing about the movie. I love the music; it's freaking insane. The music's vibes will almost drive you a bit crazy. The movie is rated X for nudity, sex and excessive gore. The dialogue and acting are horrible. It makes little sense, it's hammy, it's ridicules and it's totally forgettable... but not bad enough to not be funny. It kind of reminds me of Night of the Living Dead. So when the cult sexually assault Sylvia, (Iris Brooks) the ******-off grandfather, Dr. Banner (Richard Bowler) confronts them, only to be dosed with LSD. The kid, Pete Banner, (Riley Mills) shoots a rabid dog and takes a sample of its blood, injecting meat pies with it, and selling it to the hippies. Speaking of which, there's a lot of instances of animal cruelty, such as slitting a chicken's throat in a ritual... wait, WHAT?! That part really freaked me out. And, of course, shooting a rabid dog. Well, after being infected with rabies, the cult members become cannibalistic murderers... well, most of them. Some commit suicide before they turn, and to make matters worse, one cultists have sexual intercourse with a construction crew, spreading the rabies to them. Well, that's as far as I'll go with that for now. Oh, one more thing, what's with the title? I Drink Your Blood? Ironically, there's not much blood drinking in this. Well, this movie is also known as Satan's Bande or Hydro-Phobia. Well, this movie may be bad, but it's interesting, to say the least. I consider this to be "The Room" of the 70s, because I enjoyed it despite it's notoriety. The dialogue is ridicules, the story is unique, and it certainly has shocking moments. I rate this a 7 out of 10; it's not perfect, but I liked it.

Certainly Charles Manson deserves to be in prison the rest of his life, not just because of the murders committed by his "family" but for inspiring a bunch of movies about lethal Hippies, such as this one. (In the book "Fatal Vision," about an army doctor who tried to blame the death of his family on lethal Hippies, there's a line "Four people on acid couldn't even organize a trip to the bathroom, let alone a trip to go kill people.") The leader of this wild bunch is played by a 40-year-old Indian dancer (Indian Indian, not American Indian) who in fact is great, jacking far more enthusiasm into his performance than this flick really deserves. He detects the group ritual being gawked at by an outsider (as per the later and vastly superior "Race with the Devil") who then gets mauled by some of the group. This victim, Sylvia, staggers into the nearby largely abandoned town and collapses; the local baker woman, Mildred (this actress eerily resembles Audrey Campbell from the "Olga" series) assumes that the culprits are some nearby construction workers. Meanwhile the Hippies show up in the same town after their van breaks down, setting off the main revenge plot which is basically a reworking of "The Virgin Spring"/"Last House on the Left" (although the latter appeared a few years later). The "gimmick" here is that the Hippies and the construction workers get rabies, after Sylvia's younger brother Pete injects dead dog blood into some meat pies (Sweeney Todd, anyone?) eaten by the Hippies. According to a medical website, "contact with the blood, urine, or feces (e.g., guano) of a rabid animal, does not constitute an exposure...." But I guess we need to allow for some "artistic license..." As to whether "I Drink Your Blood" is worth your time, there's some nice violence, limited of course by the minimal budget; the mass shooting at the end is unfortunately all off camera. The actors playing the rabies victims have varying degrees of frothing at the mouth---by the way, according to that same medical website, "The rabies incubation period may vary from a few days to several years, but is typically one to three months"---in other words not an hour or less, as per the movie, but again, artistic license... Other than the Indian dude, the best performance is by Rhonda Fultz, who unlike most of the cast has a "real movie" on her credit list ("In Cold Blood"). Since she manages to inject some recognizable humanity into her character Molly, Molly's death (by her own hand) is more affecting than what happens to most of the others, plus her being pregnant and all. Bottom line, "Blood" passes the "free/beer" test---if you can see it for free and have plenty of beer handy, then yeah, go for it. By the way don't bother looking for that scary face on the video cover, it's actually from another movie....