I DRINK YOUR BLOOD (1971)

DIRECTED & WRITTEN By David Durston 

STARRING  - Bhaskhar Roy Chowdhury as Horace Bones,  Jadin Wong as Sue Lin,  Rhonda Fultz as Molly,  George Patterson as Rollo,  Riley Mills as Pete Banner,  John Damon as Roger Davis,  Elizabeth Marner-Brooks as Mildred Nash,  Richard Bowler as Doc Banner,   Tyde Kierney as Andy,  Alex Mann as Shelly,  Arlene Farber as Sylvia Banner,  Lynn Lowrie as Carrie,  David E. Durston as Dr. Oakes.

PLOT - Horace Bones - self styled leader of a satanic hippy cult and his followers arrive in a small American town. High on drugs and looking for trouble they soon make enemies with several members of the local community.

After attacking a young girl - Sylvia - her grandfather Doc Banner goes to confront them but the old man is beaten, humiliated and force fed L.S.D. Sylvia's little brother Pete swears revenge...

Pete encounters a rabid dog and shoots it dead. He takes a sample of it's blood and injects it into the meat pies that are made at the local bakery where he works. Pete sells the infected pies to Horace's gang.

After eating the pies,  the various cult members become infected with Rabies and go on an insane rampage, driven mad by the deadly disease. However the disease spreads beyond the cult members and into the wider community and very soon the entire town is caught in the grip of rabid madness. Let the killing spree commence...

DIALOUGE  - Horace - "Let it be known brothers and sisters...that Satan was an acid head !"

PERFORMANCES  - As this is a very low budget grindhouse exploitation movie its probably best to not go into watching this film expecting Oscar worthy performances. As a result of this the standard of acting generally ranges from poor to middling at best.

Out of the satanic cult themselves I'd say that Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury probably gives the best performance as Horace Bones - the self styled cult leader. He's every bit as vain, conceited and narcissistic as you'd expect a Charles Manson-esque cult leader to be. He also has a mean sadistic streak and has no reservations about beating and taunting the grandfather of a girl he (is heavily implied) ordered his followers to rape. He also brutally taunts and tortures one of his own followers for being a "misfit" even amongst his own band of misfits. Of course once Horace has ingested the Rabies infected pies he becomes even more unhinged, degenerating into a slavering howling madman. Its a performance that's painted in pretty broad strokes with no subtlety whatsoever - as are all the other characters here - but it does its job well enough and gets the story across.

Another cult member who comes over well is Rollo (George Patterson) who starts off being quite smooth talking and charming (it's Rollo who Horace sends out upon arriving in town to get the locals on side, he's the "friendly face" of the cult). Like Horace, Rollo also becomes an utter maniac when infected - turning into an axe wielding killer. Out of all the cast members I'd say that Patterson definitely does the best "Rabies acting". His mad goggle eyed stare is pretty intense.

The other cult members are all fairly forgettable but they do at least get some decent death scenes. The heroes are fairly bland also with only Richard Bowler as Doc Banner really standing out - the scene where he comes home after being spiked with LSD and he's hallucinating seeing his dead daughter is very well acted, we never see anything... but we can clearly imagine what the poor old Doc is experiencing just by Bowler's agonised facial expressions. Good stuff.

SFX  - Some decent, some a bit ropey. Lots of blood and gore. This film features what is probably the least convincing severed head ever committed to celluloid...

The above photo also illustrates the other main effect in this film's arsenal - want your characters to look like they've got Rabies ? Simple - just make them put shaving foam in thier mouths and drool it out over thier chins. Its absolutely gross but it works I suppose.

SEX & VIOLENCE  - There's the usual 70's style nudity that you'd expect from a grindhouse film of this era, so nothing unusual there.

There is something that I find VERY troubling when it comes to the violence in this film though - and that's the inclusion of what looks to be some genuine animal cruelty. In one scene we see a chicken's throat being cut during a satanic ritual...now this COULD well be stock footage or camera trickery but it looks VERY realistic to me (far more realistic than anything else in this movie by a country mile). I'm fairly sure we do see a poor defenceless chicken's life come to an end at the hands of a B-movie actor and this makes me EXTREMELY uneasy !

I'll quite happily watch make-believe people get sliced and diced in various elaborate make-believe ways but please, please, PLEASE don't let animals suffer - ESPECIALLY for the sake of a shitty B-movie. Its just not on. There's also a load of dead rats and a slaughtered goat depicted onscreen  - these animals are already dead so the filmmakers may well have got hold of them from a taxidermists or abbatoir or wherever...I REALLY hope this is the case as otherwise the alternative is unthinkable to me...

As far as the harmless fun violence is concerned - we get THAT papier-mache severed head...

We also get some other severed body parts...

Theres a ritual stabbing...

And a gory pitchfork-in-neck murder that puts me in mind of Friday the 13th part 3.

Theres also an act of self-immolation, an axe vs sword fight, and like the cavalry, the local cops arrive in the nick of time to handily blow all the rabid lunatics to kingdom come. They kill all the infected at once...or do they ?...

RATING - I Drink Your Blood is a grimy, dirty film. It's got that classic grindhouse feel. You really do feel like you need to have a shower after watching this. 

For the most part it's trashy, undemanding fun. The entire film is like a checklist of 70's phobias and moral panics - Hippies ? Check. Satanism ? Check. Psychedelic drugs ? Check. Rabies ? Check. You could even claim it to be a satire about junk food if you really wanted to.

However, the violence (whether it actually did happen or not) towards animals in this film does make me feel queasy and repelled. It's not a pleasant feeling and whilst this is not supposed to be a pleasant film that lingering doubt does cast a shadow over this movie for me unfortunately.

3 and a half rabid satanic hippies out of 5 - it would score higher...if only it wasn't for those scenes involving animals, but with these scenes left in I can't- as an animal lover - in all good conscience give it any more than that.

ART -