Grindhouse Weekly: I DRINK YOUR BLOOD (1970)

During the exploitation boom of the late sixties through the seventies, many low budget gorefests achieved notoriety through playing at the grindhouses on Times Square.  One such film that became a cult hit was David E. Durston’s I Drink Your Blood from 1970.  It was the first film given an X rating by the MPAA due to violence, though the level of brutality and gore seems pretty typical for today’s standards.  Either way, there’s tons of blood, though oddly there’s not a lot of drinking of said blood, in fact I don’t recall that happening even once. 

The film revolves around a group of Satan worshipping hippies, much like the Manson Family, who drift into a small town and take refuge in an abandoned hotel.  One night a local girl spies on one of their rituals, and get caught and sexually assaulted by two of the men in the group.  After telling her grandfather and little brother what happened, the grandfather thought it would be a good idea to grab his gun and go yell at them.  This leads to one of the film’s more humorous interactions wherein the boy warns him that it’s eight crazy drugged out hippies to which the old man responds, “I know what I’m doing.”

If his plan was to immediately be beaten up and fed LSD, then his mission was a success.  After that, the portly grandson quickly takes matters into his own hands by killing a rabid dog, extracting the blood from it, then feeding the blood to the group in the form of meat pies.

Naturally, everyone gets rabies and the film turns into a zombie movie, with the hippies infecting everyone else in the town with their rabies.   It’s a completely ridiculous concept, yet it’s extremely fun to watch.  Though the film is played like a straight horror picture, it’s impossible not to laugh at most of what’s happening on the screen.

For instance, apparently a symptom of rabies is hydrophobia, the fear of water, so there are several scenes involving people escaping charging infected simply by walking into a stream.  They then start splashing the rabies people who immediately cower and flee.

While the camera work and cinematography looked fairly good for being such a low budget film, the sound and score was all over the place.  Sometimes it was great and complimented the scene perfectly and other times it was entirely too overwhelming.  There’s one scene in particular that involved a fight between two of the hippies.  There were no sound effects, only music, but the music consisted of just a shrill squeal that kept escalating in pitch.  This was horrible and I can’t believe they thought it was a good idea to hold that note for so long.

It should also be noted that this was the first role for Lynn Lowry, who would later go on to star in David Cronenberg’s They Came From Within and George Romero’s The Crazies among many others.  Her role was uncredited and she played a mute so she didn’t have any lines.  She did, however, chop off an old woman’s hand with an electric carving knife.

Despite the misleading cover and title, I Drink Your Blood is a great piece of exploitation history that seems to only get better with age.  The over the top violence has the potential to still offend and/or revile some viewers, but the overall goofiness of it dilutes the horror that you’re witnessing.  If you’re looking for something to scare you, this isn’t it, but it’s definitely good for some laughs and a few wtf moments.