Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things:I Watch ‘Em So You Don’t Have To

I Drink Your Blood1970Director – David E. Durston”Two Great Blood Horrors to Rip Out Your Guts!”90 min – rated X83 min – rater R

This movie very well could have, for all intents and purposes, completely sucked. Now, I’m not saying that it did, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that when I Drink Your Blood was released upon the unsuspecting world in 1971 and made its rounds at the local drive in circuit, it featured one of the most lurid and memorable double-bill ad campaigns in all of “B” movie history. Coupled with a rather forgettable black and white 1964 exercise in pre-Night of the Living Dead voodoo-zombie genre, which had been rehashed and re-titled to fit the bill, I Drink Your Blood proudly ran as the top half of the I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin double-feature horror bonanza.

To this day, that is exactly how this perfectly gruesome hate-fest is best remembered, as part of the I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin double bill, even though it is the second feature. I Eat Your Skin completely sucked.

I Drink Your Blood has all the ingredients for a truly disturbing horror film that is sure to have your baby sister soiling her panties and then begging for more. Here, for your convenience, I’ve made a chronological checklist for those of you who’ve forgotten their special focus medication at home: satanic cults-nudity-hippies-barbequed rats-sadism involving feet-old people on LSD-10 year old boys with shotguns – meat pies-well, you get the picture.

I Drink Your Blood is clearly a product of its time, and its focus on a motley crew of wayward psycho-hippies and other general lost souls is an obviously direct adaptation of the 1969 murders committed by the Charles Manson “family.” Unfortunately, the film’s 1970 release date was not distanced enough from those events to be seen as ironic, instead coming across as heartless and in bad taste. Luckily, bad taste is my favorite flavor when it comes to this type of movie and its jaded and unflinching approach to perverted degradation and repugnant horror only adds to the film’s base-level sleaze that’s as thick and slimy as a peep-show floor.

As practitioners of peace, love, and ghastliness, the gang of satano-hippies are in the middle of performing their ritualistic rites, when a local girl stumbles upon their half-baked black mass. They don’t take kindly to strangers and she is beaten and humiliated before being sent running back home. The eight-member gang, made up of a wide range of characters, from a native-American looking jerk named Horace Bones as their leader, to a hefty pregnant curly-wigged mama, to an out-of-place older Asian woman in a kimono, and a delicate deaf-mute beauty (apparently the director had already filled the cast when the actress playing this part walked into his studio; she was too attractive for him not to cast her so he made her a deaf-mute so he wouldn’t have write additional dialogue: brilliant!), they take refuge in an abandoned hotel, but they are spotted by the previous defiled girl’s little brother, Pete, who watches as the gang catches, kills, then eats rats. Pete tells his grandpa about the stoners and gramps tries to step up to them but gets a both a beatdown and a mouthful of LSD. It’s now up to lil’ Pete to take matters into his own hands, so he shoots a rabid dog with a shotgun and uses its blood to inject into meat pies that he later sells to the hippie fringe group.

As the road to hell is paved with noble intentions, Pete gets a little more than he bargained for as the nasty little gang of ne’er-do-wells become infected with a case of foaming-at-the-mouth rabidly insane bloodlust. This is roughly the point of the movie when all hell officially breaks loose: friend must kill friend, man must kill squirrel, mother must kill fetus, old Asian lady must set herself on fire (another insensitive historical reference). When one of the female hippies gets freaky with a gang of construction workers, they all become infected and, well, you know where this is headed.

This film merits the prestigious honor of being one of the first films to warrant the MPAA’s X rating. But the brief nudity is mild; it got the X rating on violence alone. Don’t let the harsh rating put you off to I Drink Your Blood, there is a clear sense of morality and meaning that is impossible to overlook: it’s okay to hate