I Drink Your Blood (1971)

That was an excellent one.

hyped garbage

Fantastic!

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

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.

I Drink Your Blood is a cult horror flick that was pretty original for its time and most famous for being the first picture to receive an X rating for violence. When satanic hippies rape a local girl and get the grandfather all wacked out on LSD, an angry kid injects their food with rabies. When the Manson like clan finish consuming their meal, they get sick and go stark raving mad, having the once quiet rural town going hog wild from a rabies outbreak. By today's standards, the violence and gore is quite tame. However, for 1970 I Drink Your Blood broke new ground for this stuff and was quite shocking for audiences in its day. For low budget grindhouse horror, I Drink Your Blood delivers the goods. This very campy and entertaining film has blood, boobs, devil worship and rabid lunatics foaming at the mouth, running around killing people. There is a nod to Romero's Night Of The Living Dead, but I Drink Your Blood kicks it up a notch and is a great and totally outrageous film that horror and exploitation fans should enjoy. If campy, old school hippie horror is your bag I Drink Your Blood will not disappoint and you will shout back, "right on baby" with this one.

The movie is bizarrely ineffective and lacking in flair, like so many nowadays mainstream horror flicks as inept as this one; though quite violent, it doesn't really scare. In a sense, it has some qualities to be praised—like the way it's written, or some good sense in the directing, some form of almost mainstream and practical approach of a sensationalist subject. It has some common sense; but no flair …. I pretended not to notice its side of social awareness—the perils of the youth's dissolute life, the LSD, the debauchery of the workmen as a way of infection …. It tries to be even a zombie movie, and the scene of the rabid, foaming workmen's attack is deeply laughable, such rubbish ….Why does the geezer examine that blood sample? Did he use to examine each stain of blood he ever found? I mean, it's not like he ain't my favorite movie physician, yet …. Anyway, it looks like he examined the blood because he already had inferred from Mildred's description that the blood was on the hands of a possibly rabid human.I DRINK YOUR BLOD was, I think, nicely shot; the makeup for the rabid fellows is bad.No genuine suspense, excitement and gusto whatsoever.'Death by hydrophobia is agony.'

Gory, obscure, raunchy and utterly demented independent cinematic exploitation-trash from the early 70's; that's what I live for! And "I Drink Your Blood" just happens to be one of the most – perhaps even THE most – quintessential titles to answer to this definition! The unquestionably deranged writer/director David E. Durston took as many contemporary sources of inspiration as possible and scripted down a crazed low-budget horror flick that is guaranteed to entertain all fans of the golden "grindhouse" classics. Judging by the title alone already, "I Drink Your Blood" obviously isn't the type of horror film that you watch for its incredibly suspenseful atmosphere (although some sequences are quite intense) or profound character drawings, but to get a lot of horror-related kicks and laughs out of it. This is a pretty sick- spirited puppy in terms of tone and content, but the final result is an often laugh-out-loud funny due to the amateurish acting performances, grotesque make-up arts and errors in continuity. Undoubtedly inspired by the Charles Manson killings, "I Drink Your Blood" introduces a group of drug-addicted hippies who call themselves the Sons and Daughters of Satan and throw devil-worshiping orgy parties in the woods during the middle of the night. The group passes through a little town called Valley Hill. The place is practically abandoned due to the construction of a new dam, but the hippies nevertheless manage to rise amok among people who left behind by raping a young girl and forcing the elderly veterinarian to take LSD. The grandson, who witnessed the hippies' vile behavior, decides to take revenge by processing the infected blood of a rabid dog into meat pies and then subsequently serving them to the hippies. The "prank" runs a little out of control when the hippies become homicidal and go on a killing spree across the area. Hell ultimately breaks loose when one of the female hippies gang-bangs with the construction workers and infects the whole lot of them. The great thing about "I Drink Your Blood" is that you often don't even properly realize how incredibly twisted and offensive it actually is. Many elements are totally bonkers and sick, like the rat-barbecue, forcing the old guy to take LSD, the self-initiated abortion, the dam workers gang-bang and – most importantly – the idea that the whole idea of spreading the rabies was thought up and executed by a 12-year-old kid! The gore is plentiful and outrageous, with multiple decapitations, impalement, disembowelment, stabbings and electric carving knife action! Apparently this was the first movie ever to receive an X-certificate based on violence alone, so I guess that should be enough argumentation for true horror fanatics to check it out. As far as I'm concerned, it's a must- see exploitation/grindhouse classic!