I Drink Your Blood (1971)

Great Film overall

An Exercise In Nonsense

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

This starts with a Manson style cult performing a Satanic ritual, which was quite popular in horror movies from this period. But when they force feed young Pete's grandfather with LSD the boy gets revenge by providing them with rabies infected meat pies. Genius! The gang were already violent but now, with froth foaming from their mouths, they embark on a senseless & bloody killing spree. Plenty of gore & action here, fair bit of nudity, a psychedelic soundtrack & some memorable performances make this essential viewing for lovers of cult exploitation. Scream queen Lyn Lowry has an uncredited, relatively minor role (she plays a mute so doesn't even speak), yet she is given much recognition for her part by distributors wanting to capitalize on her name.

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.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.

Like basically all low-budget exploitation flicks (which are all of them) the movie starts off like an incredibly bad one but by the end you're absolutely taken by its insane and extreme events.And this movie is real crazy, which is saying much, since this isn't exactly the first silly exploitation flick that I have seen. It has such an insane concept, with lots of exaggerated violence in it. The movie features a bunch of terrorizing hippies that deliberately get infected with rabies and start to go totally crazy after that, causing even more havoc in town.This movie is definitely an enjoyment to watch for the genre fans. They won't be disappointed with any of its blood, gore and violence as well as some other typical exploitation elements in it, such as the obligatory rape and nudity.But I of course can't really claim that this is a great movie. It's still a very simplistic, cheap looking and clumsily done film but at the same time this of course really still adds to the overall charm of the movie, so it shouldn't prevent any of the fans of the genre from ever seeing this movie.Really not the best or most recommendable exploitation flick out there but it sure is still entertaining, especially more toward its end.6/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

I am one of those who will never forget this movie's ad campaign, which advertised a double bill of this film and a movie called "I Eat Your Skin". If you already know "I Eat Your Skin" contained no eating of skin, then it will not come as a shock to you that "I Drink Your Blood" is not about vampires, and aside from an opening scene where a little blood is swilled, the focus of the film is not on blood drinking at all. It does turn into a freaked-out pseudo-zombie film in the vein of "The Crazies".A weird hippie and his small band of followers spend their time taking acid and conducting Satanic rituals. Their Satanic, wanderin' ways bring them to a little town on the verge of being completely abandoned; when they begin to terrorize the locals, a little kid gets revenge on them by injecting meat pies with the blood of a rabid dog and feeding them to the hippies, who then go on a homicidal rampage. When a group of rowdy construction workers also get infected, the spit really hits the fan.The ultra low budget gives the film a rickety appearance; you will either love it or hate it for that reason. Personally I loved it and think it's one of the best examples of a crazy 70s drive-in flick. It makes no sense, but there's a definite uneasy feeling going on throughout the whole thing, not the least of which is due to the obvious Manson family references. The violence is also often disturbing, and if the special effects are not always convincing, the eager spirit of things is enough to get under your skin.