Review: I Drink Your Blood (1971)

Directed by: David Durston
Starring: Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, Jadine Wong, Rhonda Fultz
Written by: David Durston
Music by: Clay Pitts
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Grindhouse Releasing)
IMDb

David Durston’s I Drink Your Blood is probably the best-known “hippie exploitation” horror flick, although it’s not a crowded subgenre. This wacky-ass movie is pretty much exactly what you’d anticipate from something with that label: a bunch of cultish hippies, fucked up first on LSD then rabies, who embark on an increasingly murderous bout of insanity. Bhaskar Roy Chowhury plays Horace Bones, the would-be Charles Manson of this groovy Satanic cult, and his performance alone is worth watching this thing, which really doesn’t have much of a plot except that said hippies cause trouble in a small town and get purposely infected with rabies by a vengeful resident. Other than that, it’s basically 90 minutes of escalating mayhem, amplified by a psychotic freak-out score that would drive any tripping hippy to kill. But yeah, Chowhury’s Horace is carelessly crazy, and comes across as genuinely scary thanks to his willingness to commit any heinous act against anyone without hesitation. But each member of the cult gets a chance to let their derangement shine here, and things get pretty aggressively depraved and gory, especially for a movie from the early ‘70s. I Drink Your Blood plays like a Herschell Gordon Lewis joint, if ol’ HGL were a sadistic junkie. This movie is grimy as hell. I can’t remember feeling this dirty after a movie since maybe I Spit On Your Grave (1978)? The whole affair feels like you dropped acid, shot yourself in the head, then dropped more acid just before your ferry ride across the Styx. And I don’t think that’s an accident, since it’s also made just well enough to remind you this isn’t purely drug-spurred self-destruction put to celluloid. If you want to test your senses and sensibilities, this’ll do ya.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10