Film: I Drink Your Blood directed by David Durston (1971)

I dunno if this was ever released in the UK, but I can remember thinking it looked way cool after seeing a poster for it (double billed with "I Eat Your Skin") in an American movie magazine when I was about 12 years old. So 32 years later I finally got to see it.

"I Drink Your Blood" starts well with the leader of a bunch of hippies who are engaged in a black mass announcing: "Let it be known that Satan was an acidhead". A girl spying on this bad craziness from behind a tree is spotted, chased and caught. We don't see what happens to Sylvia but she's found the next day after being beaten and assaulted. Sylvia's grandfather, the local vet, goes after the hippies with a gun; he's disarmed and force-fed LSD.

As a result of this, Sylvia's ten year old baby brother Pete decides to do something about the hippies who made his grandpop crazy with 'the L stuff'. Pete proceeds to poison the hippies with rabies infected blood by injecting it into their meat pies. The long hairs go crazy and start killing each other and anyone else they encounter. Unfortunately writer/director David Durston completely looses the plot by allowing a rabid hippie chick to pick up members of a construction crew. She screws about four guys behind some bushes, then goes back to their dormitory accommodation to be gang banged by all their work mates. In the pre-AIDS era when "I Drink Your Blood" was made rabies was presumably the most scary sexually transmitted disease Durston could dream up.

The behaviour of the infected construction crew quickly degenerates to the point where it is almost as manic and murderous as that of the rabid hippies. Unfortunately the butch geezers (with accessories like yellow hard hats) look more like refugees from the Village People than the cast of a horror movie, and if you're into 'bears' you'll probably want to cuddle them. Likewise, the soundtrack is awful and the shaving foam around assorted rabid mouths is utterly unconvincing as a special effect.

For Satanic hippies "Dracula AD 1972" is better, and it has the twin advantages of being set in Chelsea (west London) and the attractions of Marsha Hunt and Stephanie Beacham. For LSD horror, I prefer "Blue Sunshine", where it is the acid itself which turn users (after a delay) into homicidal maniacs. I'm not sure if there are any legitimate video copies of "I Drink Your Blood" in circulation but don't bother chasing it unless you really wanna see some sub-Texas Chainsaw action with an electric carving knife, a pregnant woman killing herself by sticking a stake through her belly when she discovers she's rabid, and a self-immolation presumably motivated by a desire to avoid the agony of dying from hydrophobia. Describing this movie makes it sound much better than it actually is, the direction is slack and the FX dull. A sleazy farce.

Sleaze Cinema

Weird World Of LSD

Psychedelic Art & 1960s London Drug Culture

Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

Christine Keeler Affair

Dangerous Seductress

Occulture

Film