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The Plot: Horace is the leader of his own little cult of satan worshipping hippy drugheads who are busy travelling the country, stealing and gathering money any way they can. After a night out where one of the group invited a young girl from town to one of their satanic gatherings (where the girl was brutally gangraped after Horace found out she happened to be hiding in the back), the group are upset to find their van has broken down. They stop into the next town they can and set up shop in a broken down abandoned building. This turns out awkward, as the building is located close to the home of the young woman who was raped by their group the night before. It isn’t long before she comes out of her shock and tells her grandfather just who committed the act and off Grandpa goes with his shotgun to intervene. Once Horace has his way however, the old man is beaten to a pulp and fed some LSD. The old man is let go however, and it’s up to his other grandson Pete, a young boy looking out for his sister and grandpa, who takes the mission upon himself to set Horace and his group right. After taking a walk with his grandpa’s shotgun he kills a rabid dog in the woods and decides rather than shooting them – he’ll simply poison them. So he takes a vile of blood from the dead rabid dog and injects it into the meat pies that he knows they will be eating the next day – and by nightfall… the group is feeling the side of effect of the rabies. Although it isn’t as quick and painful as the child had hoped, as it turns out that the rabies have given these psychos no remorse whatsoever and a greed for inflicting violence on humans! |
The Review: Thank goodness for Sage Stallone and the fellows over at Grindhouse Releasing. They along with Unearthed Films have been providing those of us in North America with quality releases of films that normally have only been traded by bootleg for so many years. I Drink Your Blood is an obscure title that I actually had very little knowledge of before their release – like many people. A wild case of a film featuring animals being slaughtered, lots of bloody gore and satanic hippies – and yet this title remained so obscure for many years. Ever since I first saw the promotional photo of the construction worker holding up that decapitated head – I have been anxious to get my hands on I Drink Your Blood. Simply a fantastic cinematic moment captured perfectly and to see the trailer afterward with so many other bits of gory fun – well, I was sold. With press items like that, the movie really sells itself. Foaming at the mouth rabid psychos running around killing people and chopping them up, a satanic hippie cult with no care for human life, blood injected meat pies? Do I really need to come up with another six hundred words to convince you that this flick is something you should track down? The plot is somewhat ridiculous, but so much fun in that entirely “exploitation” way that films like this are. You have to take a minute out to just enjoy the sight of eleven grown men chasing people down with foam covering their mouths. The effects are obvious, but that’s the fun of it. The film was made with such simple expectations in order to entertain the audience who would have an interest in such a topic – and when it lives up to such expectations and goes so far above them that it becomes something unique and special.
The imperfections of I Drink Your Blood are often some of the more alluring aspects of it. When filmmakers go out and they do their best to make modern campy horrors, they simply don’t deliver the same atmosphere. Likely due to the fact that films such as this were usually intended to play completely straight. I say it in nearly all of my reviews that “although this film is great, it isn’t perfect…” – trust me even I am tired of repeating it; but I Drink Your Blood is partly as great as it is because of those quaint little goof-ups or bizarre choices in the direction of the film. Small things like when one character tells of Mary being “assaulted” and “beaten”, the man listening immediately steps out of the car and says (and I’m paraphrasing here) “If she’s delirious then how could she have told you” – although we the audience know of this fact – his character, just told of the story had no way of knowing that particular bit of knowledge. The whole film gets pretty silly like that at times, even sillier than grown people running around with foam pouring from their mouths if you can believe that. It’s a charming bit of wild exploitation cinema, the likes of which you do not run into all that often. With these kinds of movies, the fans get more and more excited with the stranger these things get and of course, the bloodier get. I Drink Your Blood definitely doesn’t shy away from the red stuff. It seems all too frequent that films made in the late seventies on limited budgets would go a pretty far distance with the cinematic violence, but aside from the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the late sixties to mid seventies it seems fairly rare to run into horror films of this caliber that feature as many dismemberment’s and shots of intestines. Really Dawn of the Dead and the birth of the dime a dozen slasher film gave way to our more modern gore films – but it seems all this time we had another funky little number running around and I didn’t even realize it.
I’m not here to mislead you on the violence in I Drink Your Blood, the trailer (and if you haven’t seen it, search it out, GREAT stuff!) pretty much hits all of the best spots and it’s that sort of late seventies blood that looks awfully red and reminiscent of paint more than a bodily fluid; so don’t go expecting Lucio Fulci. You do get a lot of bang for you buck though, as we’re treated to hands, legs and heads being chopped off as well as a couple of intestine rippings, a few animals either being killed or already dead and being mutilated along with a whole lot of naked people running around in the first fifteen minutes. Okay, the naked people have nothing to do with the violence – but a gangraping is alluded to! You won’t see anything, but for a film that at times seems so naive in the dealings of mind altering drugs (the whole dialogue about LSD sounds like something from an afterschool special) it deals with sex in a pretty straightforward manner. Heck, even the race issue is brought up once or twice, most memorable the African American fellow who brings up the townsfolk wishing to chain up the hippies like they did slaves in the old days. I don’t doubt that there’s also some kind of symbolism going on with the whole hippie cult being made up of many racial groups (Asian, Black, White and Native American), though don’t ask me just what they were getting at. In another movie the group might represent racial change scaring the older more conservative townies, but since they’re all psychopath satanists I doubt that was the intention. Regardless of any dreams of pretension the film may or may not have had, I’m giving the film a five out of five. It was the most fun I have had with a movie in a while and I hope others can emulate that experience. Definitely check it out if you haven’t already, and beware of any satanic hippie cults who wander into town… bunch of rapists and elderyl beating sociopaths those guys are.
