I Drink Your Blood (1970)
There’s little if any sanguine indulgence in “I Drink Your Blood,” (which apparently at some point was shortened from the more unwieldy but more accurate “I Drink Your Blood, and I Eat Your Flesh”), but there are plenty of cornball hippie Satan worshipping acid heads turn rabid zombies in this sadistically bad flick.
“Blood” is often a creepy bloodbath of a film that is effective in its own ways, with crazed sicko hippie types running around scaring the bejeezus out of the townsfolk with their long hair, bandannas and vests with no undershirts.
But it’s when they terrorize and wantonly assault an innocent townsgirl that things heat up. Her Grandfather confronts them with his shotgun, but that doesn’t stop the cult from forcing him to drop acid and sending him on his way as they continue their strange rituals (which include cutting some poor schmoe’s feet, hanging him from a crossbeam and letting him bleed all over them).
The girl’s little brother enacts the family’s vengeance, though, when he shoots a rabid dog, then drains its blood and injects it into meatpies that the hippies end up eating, turning them into bloodthirsty zombie-like creatures (albeit most likely cinema’s sissiest walking dead).
A late-second act bit of background reveals that accompanying rabies is an intense fear of water, which the uninfected use to their advantage by splashing from puddles or shallow streams at the raging horde of killers and in one scene using a garden hose to keep them at bay (though to be fair, there was a sprayer attachment. Those things can sting).
There’s plenty of human bloodletting if no consumption, and in one scene an organ of some sort spills out of a stab wound. There’s a decapitation with accompanying display of the prize.
There are a couple of memorably manic performances by Bhaskar Chowdhury
There are a multitude of great cheesy lines, from “your damn dam” to overly sensational claims about rabies, but let’s give best line honors to an old standby: the LSD reference, with some Satanism mixed in. “Let it be known, sons and daughters, that Satan was an acid head. Drink from his cup. Pledge yourselves. And together, we’ll all freak out.”
There is plenty here to stretch the bounds of good taste, even for a cult horror film. Just a scant few months after the murder of Sharon Tate, a character writes “PIG” in lipstick on a victim, and a pregnant woman (in the later portion of her pregnancy) kills herself by stabbing herself in the stomach. In one scene it appears that they kill a live chicken by cutting its throat, and it appears that real animal cadavers are used in at least two other sequences.
Rating 4.5 Yaps (out of 5)