I Drink Your Blood

I Drink Your Blood

1970

Country: USA

Alternate Titles

Blood Suckers

Phobia

La rabbia dei morti viventi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Drink_Your_Blood

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067229/

Director: Dave Durston

Staring Rhonda Fultz

Bhaskar Roy Chowdury

Elizabeth Marner-Brooks

Writing about “I Drink Your Blood” is all about back story.

The idea for the movie started when exploitation producer Jerry Gross hired director/writer Dave Durston to make him an ultra gory zombie/cannibal movie based lightly on the “Manson Family” to be shown along side the 1964 horror film “I Eat Your Skin," which he had just purchased. The two had different views on what the movie should be. Durston wanted a fun gory, twisted ride while Gross wanted a more straight up horror movie. Then to make matters worse the finished project was given an “X” rating for violence alone, meaning it would be hard to get a more respectable drive-in cut made. Since the movie's selling point was it's weird violent reality (something that doesn't come apparent till the last 20 minutes mind you) and Gross wanted to get his film in as many theaters as possible a recut was made. Then Gross told projectionists to make their own cuts to get it past any censorship in their own areas. The result is this movie now exists in just under 300 cuts.

Yes you read that right. There is almost 300 different prints and different cuts of this movie.

Some of them, done by very amateurish projectionists, exist with scenes out of order, important scenes missing, and the natural flow of many scenes severely destroyed. The result is that no matter what version you watch, including a supposed directors cut from the early 2000's, with contains much of the original humor, the movie seems very disjointed.

My particular version has most of the gore but two death scenes seem missing. So two characters just vanish half way through.

The movie itself starts when a band of Satanic hippies (is there any other kind?) attack and sexually abuse a local girl who was invited to their little ritual of lameness by one of their members. She returns to her grandfather, who is the local vet of a dying town. The town seems only to exist for the construction of a dam near by and we learn the population has dropped over the years from 400 to 40.

The hippies take up residence in a abandoned rat invested hotel where they begin to run amok among themselves, even going as far as almost killing one of their own members,

When the grandfather tries but fails to extract revenge the girl's little brother secretly extracts a little revenge of his own. He inserts the blood of a rabid dog he killed into their meat pies which causes them to turn rabid and murderous.

They then run amok in the small town; killing, sexing and spreading the virus whenever possible.

The one immediate problem you will find is although the movie is moving along for the first half it feels really slow. It's probably because scenes at first take too long to play out and it's insistence of relying to much on "Mason Familyxloitation" (I think I just made that up) prevents us in getting to good stuff. There is also a great deal of character development, which does start to seem out of place once you get into the second half.

Once this film gets going however, depending one what version you happen to be watching, it does offer what you would expect from a movie from this era and subgenre, and more. It turns into a great little cult movie of sex and violence, but one that will frustrate those who don't particularly admire this form of film making, but then why are they watching this film in the first place.

Each particular cut also has it's own frustrations, as some scenes play out to a climax which may or may not come, depending on what version of the film your watching.

The different versions range from as low as 70 minutes long to just under 100. There is that much variety. Mine is roughly 90 minutes.

One thing that may give people pause is there is some real animal death in this movie (OK it's a chicken, but still). I do agree that animals should never be killed for our entertainment and it's something I've come to terms with in watching these movies, but I have to warn those who can't.

The last thing to mention is there has been some talk about a remake for some time. I generally hate remakes - pretty much all of them. I find a lot of the creative energy is lost over the years and unless it's a remake in spirit only the remake by definition will lose the original idealistic spark. Thought at first it was tempting to be in favour of a remake for "I Drink Your Blood" since this has never been the film it should have been and the original directer/writer is filming it. On further thought I think it should be left in it's time capsule. The landscape for this form of exploitation cinema has changed greatly and a remake is likely just to become an attempt to recapture a stylistic vision that has long since died.