“Let it be known, sons and daughters, that Satan was an acid head. Drink from this cup. Pledge yourselves. And together we’ll all freak out!”
A groovy guy in an old house brings out a bunch of fine, furried friends on a long shishkebab stick. Fat, furry bodies and dangling, skinny tails all pay testament to the fact that these are a collection of killer rats—and when they’re put on the barbie like a half-dozen shrimp, they are going to smell undelectable as their fur and fat are scorched.
Anybody hungry? How about thirsty?
I really should have written about I Drink Your Blood a few days ago, when it was still fresh in my mind. As of now, I’m running on fumes about it, digging up my memory for the foulest, most odious examples of its cult blood-and-guts exploitation cinema—an attempt to cash in on the bloody mutilation murders committed a year previously by La Famille Manson.
Nicholas Schreck, performance artist and musician famous for Radio Werewolf—a gentleman who was always nice to me whenever we encountered each other on Facebook—featured it briefly in his epic Manson documentary Charles Manson Superstar. Such early Mansonista cinematic gems as this and The Other Side of Madness exploited the twin horrors of mass murder and Satanic psychedelia in a way that only a film called I Drink Your Blood could really represent.
I drink your blood & I eat your skin/drive in trailer
Horace Bones (Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) and his rag-tag weirdo Satanic hippie cult—which features an ambiguously implied gay Black man (George Patterson), an elderly Oriental woman (Jadin Wong), an obese woman implied to be a lesbian , and a weird assortment of others—conduct the Devil Mass out in the woods while Sylvia watches from the safety of a tree. Not so much, though, because once she is recognized, a couple of nude acolytes chase her down in the darkness and rape her.
Horace, a seriously buff guy dressed like a hippie Native American from an old comic book (perhaps Coyote, with a hawk on his arm or something), is charismatic, psychopathic, and cheerily threatening to the guy who brought her out to the Black Mass.
Sylvia (Arlene Farber) makes her way back, traumatized, to the general store—mercantile, whatever—run by her granddad and her little rolly-poly brother Pete (Riley Mills), a rather good child actor who later injects the meat pies that granddad (who gets roughed up by the cult) sells in his roadside shop with the blood of a rabid dog he goes out and shoots, leading to the crux of the mosh, so to speak.
In between, the cult lounges around a dilapidated building, killing and barbecuing rats in scenes that are grotesque and memorable—the rats do appear to have been the genuine article. The whole damn town is deserted because of construction on the dam, and so there are a bunch of heavies working construction who drink at a bar, rape some girl (I think), and then all contract the rabid drool-a-thons where they go around crazy, and some shit that looks like Burma Shave drips out of their mouths.
As you can already tell, it’s a rabid take on Night of the Living Dead—and it does have its memorable points, I might add. It’s ridiculous to watch a bunch of drooling, retarded rabies sufferers go ambling around like a zombie apocalypse, but hey, just what the HELL do you expect with a movie called I Drink Your Blood?
Merchant-Ivory?
Nah.
The opener establishes Horace right away as one far-out dude, after he does some Tommy-level guru sign-language fu that is as strangely bizarre as the performance itself. But this is a Satanic cult worth its blood pot pies, and Burma Shave or no, it’s got Asian MILFs, overweight lesbians, bratty child actors with shotguns, and rat pâté working for it.
And brother, I’ll take a long, tall glass of that, I guar-an-tee.
Written and directed by David Durston, BTW.
I Drink Your Blood (1971) Hippie horror meets viral madness in this cult classic!
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About the Creator
Tom Baker
Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
Comments (2)
Yummy to flesh eating, a lot of protein. Hugs to demons.
Power to blood drinking. Here are real people who drink blood, they buy it. My student did he PhD on people who believed they were vampires.