Satan was an acid-head! (I Drink Your Blood (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	I Drink Your Blood (DVD)
Date:	13/07/09 (58 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, gory, not too badly made

Disadvantages: Some unpleasant scenes featuring dead animals

A review of just the film. A region 1 DVD costs about £10 through amazon.

This is a classic 1970 grindhouse gore flick. In fact it's so gory that it was the first ever film to be X-rated in America purely because of the violence. I don't think the gore is particularly extreme by today's standards, but there are a lot of dead animals on display. Although we don't see them die onscreen, they're obviously freshly killed. This is unpleasant, but not untypical of old exploitation.

It's a sort of cross between Last House on the Left, Blood Feast and Night of the Living Dead. A very small Satanic hippy cult decides to hang out in a practically deserted town (a nearby construction project has driven away most of the inhabitants). They rape a girl and then force her grandfather to take LSD. In order to get revenge, the girl's young brother injects the hippies' meat pies with blood from a rabid dog (brilliant idea!). The hippies develop rabies, of course, which manifests itself by making them foam at the mouth and develop an insatiable thirst for human blood.

There isn't much here that you won't have seen elsewhere (unless this is the first horror film you've ever seen). But the film carries it off with more than enough panache to make it work. It's no classic - it's too cheap to have the hordes of rabid hippies and construction workers it needs to have the panicky intensity of Night of the Living Dead - but as part of a drive-in double bill it must have worked quite nicely. It's more interested in grossing us out than in scaring us, and although there are glimmers of suspense it's never really scary. And the 'good' characters are so bland that it's very difficult to have much concern for what happens to them, but that's OK. I'd suggest that watching a film called 'I Drink Your Blood' for the plot and characterisation would be a bit silly.

The embattled townsfolk aren't very good actors, as is fairly typical in these cheap, regional US horrors. Likewise, a couple of the incidental hippies are a bit wooden. But there are some exceptions. Lynn Lowry is very striking as a deaf-mute hippie (probably more down to her slightly creepy but profoundly sexy elfin look than her acting - she's also in David Cronenberg's Shivers, and is the only cast member I'd seen elsewhere). George Patterson overacts like a maniac as one the hippies, giving exactly the kind of performance the material needs. And Bhaskar, an Indian dancer (Indian as in Asia, not Native American), is fantastic as Horace Bones, the better-than-Manson cult leader. He has real screen presence and obviously relishes every stupid line and gory moment.

The film is only 80 minutes long, but even so, the first half hour is very padded, as it slowly sets things up. The initial satanic orgy scene is fun (the Manson Family inspired a lot of cheap exploitation films looking for some easy notoriety. This is probably the best 'killer hippy cult' film I've seen. It's certainly the best 'rabid hippies' film I've seen, but I've only seen two). But after the opening there's a lull, and things only perk up when the hippies start foaming at the mouth and chopping people up.

But once the violence starts it doesn't really stop until the film does. There's some limb lopping, and a decapitation that looks quite good for the budget. But considering its gory reputation, the film is surprisingly mild, certainly compared to other gore directors of the time, like Herschell Gordon Lewis. Unlike most gore films, this feels like the director actually cares a bit about the plot. There's a story to be told here, rather than just a string of gory episodes. Sadly the ending is a bit of a let-down - it was changed at the insistence of the producer. The DVD I have includes the rather more intense original ending.

It's obviously not meant to be taken all that seriously, but it's not a comedy horror in the way that, say, The Gore Gore Girls is. There's a tendency to assume that cheap old horror films are only there to be laughed at. I Drink Your Blood is a far cry from the witless 'hyuck hyuck his arm done come off' rubbish churned out by the likes of Troma in recent years. It's trying to freak out its audience by filling the screen with intense (for the time) gore scenes, while keeping enough of a twinkle in its eye that it feels more grown up than a lot of similar films. It's also quite conservative, in that the hippies are the bad guys right from the start (seemingly just for the fun of it), while our sympathies are meant to be with the honest, hard-working folk of the town. This is a surprising feature of a lot of exploitation, which was generally aimed at an audience of teens, and so could be expected to take the side of the kids. I guess it just goes to show that the counterculture in 60s America wasn't as universal as you'd think from watching old clip shows like The Rock n Roll Years.

The director, David Durston, obviously had some talent, and it's a pity he didn't make many more films. But that's so often the case with this kind of thing. It kind of looks forward to the nihilistic horrors of the 70s but visually is still a 60s film. The music is slightly ahead of its time, all minimalist electronic stabs (no doubt because that was a very cheap way of doing a soundtrack). The editing is weak, with the flow of the story being disrupted a couple of times (one or two scenes seem to be missing, and not everyone is accounted for at the end).

But there's enough strangeness in the way the hippies have been cast to make this interesting. It doesn't go the usual way that killer hippy cult films go - there's not a lot of nudity or sex (we don't see the rape at all), and nor do we get any lame trip sequences. It treats its rather bog-standard plot with more care than is usual, and ends up being a lot better than you'd expect. It's not a classic, but for the discerning fan of 70s horror it's well worth a look.

Summary: Another cheap but fondly remembered exploitation flick