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.

Two Thousand Maniacs

Two Thousand Maniacs

1964
USA

Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis

Staring Connie Mason
William Kerwin
Jeffrey Allen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Thousand_Maniacs!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058694/

Herschell Gordon Lewis had one really good idea.

Show people's limbs getting hacked off.

It seems so standard now, but at the time no one thought of showing it. He didn't do it to make any grand artistic statement or purge his psyche. He did it simply to make money.

An exploitation director in the 60's he made a series of rough sex flicks until he became curious if someone would pay to see pure gory violence. It turns out, he was right.

His first “gore” film “Blood Feast” was huge success on the grindhouse circuit and it inspired an attempt at a much better movie; “2000 Maniacs.”

Herschell “discovered” playboy playmate Connie Mason and she stared in both “Blood Feast” and “2000 Maniacs”. Filmed in a 2 week period “2000 Maniacs” would become one of Herschell's most celebrated “films”, inspiring cult status, and a Robert Englund remake.

The “plot” is simple. Two “Yankee” couples, Connie Mason's character and a hitchhiker are diverted off the highway into a small southern town celebrating a centennial. They become guests of honor and the town people go about delivering that world famous southern hospitality - by breaking up the couples and then killing them. The hitchhiker and Connie Mason start a romance of sorts and find out that the town was destroyed by Yankee soldiers at the end of the Civil War (the war of the States as the movie calls it occasionally) and the centennial is that of the destruction of the town. This is a sort of revenge upon the northerners plot.

Plot aside the real reason for watching this is to be caught up in the silliness of it all and be entertained by gore and violence. A sort of pre-slasher slasher. Although the gore is rather silly, for example Lewis was still experimenting on making convincing blood, the death scenes are far more “inspired” then most modern slashers, or even slashers of the 70's and 80's.

Most of the extras and “actors” were basically inhabitants of the Floridan town which they were filming at, making their whole deliverance really bad and kind of silly.

But that's all in good fun.

What also is in good fun is the soundtrack which is a rocking hillbilly hoedown, some of the music actually performed by Lewis himself.

I think the worse thing to say about “2000 Maniacs” is also it's greatest strength, and that is that “2000 Maniacs” is “pure” exploitation. It exists only to show you a form of sleaze you can't get from the mainstream.

It does try to slowly move at first, as if to create suspense, but since we already know what is going on it turns the first half of the film into a overly goofy black comedy.

There is also a padded on ending. It's almost as if he didn't have enough material to full out an hour an 20 minutes so he kept the movie, which had already ended, going in an attempt to deliver one last bit of weirdness. It doesn't work.

There's a scene in “2000 Maniacs” were a woman gets her finger cut off from a pocket knife. It looks cheap and silly, but it's there. There's a scene where the same woman gets tied down and has her arm hacked off with an axe, It looks cheap and silly, but it's there. There's a scene where a boulder crushes a woman's who is tied to slab. It looks cheap and silly, but it's there. They couldn't even find a way to shot the scene of a man being torn apart by four horses so they only suggest that it happened. These archetypes seem standard now but at the time Lewis was making everything up on the spot.. The point I'm making is that “2000 Maniacs” for better or for worse was blazing new ground of acceptable film making, and people were watching it. Giving it a well deserved place in movie history.

So pick up a copy and next time you have a friend who really enjoys to "descant" and "contemplate" the great classic movies over fine wine and import coffee you'll know which one to show him/her.