I Drink Your Blood

Year: 1970
Genre: Horror
Directed: David E. Durston
Stars: Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, Jadin Wong, Rhonda Fultz, George Patterson, Riley Mills, John Damon, Elizabeth Marner-Brooks, Richard Bowler, Tyde Kierney, Iris Brooks, Alex Mann, Lynn Lowry
Production: Jerry Gross Productions

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.

What the literal hell 1970s!

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.

Final Grade: F