Writer(s): Durston
Starring: Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, Jadin Wong, Rhonda Fultz, Riley Mills, and Lynn Lowry
I hated David E. Durston's I Drink Your Blood the first time I saw it; I was in my late teens, if I recall correctly, and purchased it, sight unseen, on VHS from some online rarities site. Obviously, this was before the days where downloading a movie was just a few clicks away. I had heard rumors of its insane violence—supposedly it was the first film to be rated “X” solely for graphic violence—and, being an insatiable gorehound, couldn't get my paws on it quick enough. After I saw it, all I remember was the feeling of intense disappointment; there wasn't much blood and the story wasn't nearly as cool as I thought it would be. But that was then.
Flash-forward to the present day. I've grown up quite a bit, and while I still enjoy some good movie violence, my tastes have also evolved to include many other styles and genres. So when I saw that a movie streaming service that I subscribed to was offering this as part of their library, I made a date with myself to review it, and to see if time had tamed my opinion of it. If anything, I hate it even more now.
I Drink Your Blood is the kind of film where the only compliment you can give it, is that it has moments of competence, but even these are few and far between. The story itself—that a band of hippies brutalize a family, who retaliate by serving them meat pies injected with rabies—is a thing of simple brilliance. How in the world can you screw that up? Somehow, writer/director David E. Durston (who would end his directing career less than a decade later with two gay porns) manages with alarming gusto: never have 84 minutes felt so agonizingly long, and never have so many ideas amounted to so little.
More fascinating than the movie itself is the life of lead Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, who was born in India in February, 1930. He was pushed into boxing by his father, but after getting pummeled during a fight (in which he broke his nose and lost both of his front teeth), he hung up the gloves for good, and focused on his true love: dance. He ended up mastering four different styles of Indian dance, and after migrating to the U.S. to accept a role in a Hollywood adaptation of Marco Polo, eventually opened his own dance studio here, where he taught his students free of charge. (In a tragic twist, he would later become paralyzed after falling 36 feet during a practice in 1977, and would spend the rest of his life confined to a wheelchair.)
How he ended up in this role is completely beyond me: he plays a non-dancing Satanic cult leader who somehow holds sway over six followers, who believe that he is the direct descendant of the Devil. One of them, curiously, is a Chinese woman who wears a traditional dress and rarely speaks: the others are Rollo, a black man; super-white boy Andy (played by Tyde Kierney, whose Hollywood career peaked in the '90s with some small roles in big movies); Shelley, a tough guy whose cockiness irks Horace; Molly, a permanently-horny woman who really serves no purpose until later; an unnamed pregnant hippie who is carrying Horace's child; and Carrie, a mute woman played by Lynn Lowry (of Shivers fame...or infamy).
One night, Horace and his followers are taking part in a Satanic ritual, unaware that Andy's girlfriend, Sylvia, is watching them from afar. The pregnant hippie notices her, and two men from the group give chase, catching up to her and brutalizing her. The next morning, she staggers out of the woods and back into town; from the looks of things, she has been raped and beaten. Mildred Nash, the town baker, sees her and, along with Sylvia's annoying younger brother, Pete, they take her to Sylvia's grandfather's house, where he swears revenge.
Hearing that they took up residence in an abandoned hotel, grandpa, known as Doc Banner, pays the Satanists a visit with a shotgun. But the senile old man does not play the advantage well—his gun is taken away in the simplest overpowering in film history (he literally gets so close to Horace, that Horace grabs it, seemingly without gramps even noticing); he is then beaten, given LSD, and after annoying Pete comes by looking for his grandpa, released.
Pete is pissed, so now HE grabs the shotgun looking for vengeance, but only happens upon a rabid dog, whom he shoots and kills. This gives him an alternate idea: get some tainted blood from the dead dog, inject it into meat pies, and then serve them to the hippie Satanists. But things do not go well, and before you know it the town is overrun with infected construction workers (because a rabid Molly slept with them all) and hippies who will stop at nothing to kill the living!
Pardon me for making it sound good, because it's terrible. By the time they are even fed the rabies, we're well past the halfway mark, and it still takes another ten or fifteen minutes of screentime for them to be completely overtaken. Once the disease sets in, it feels like an uncontrolled mess: the hippies attack anyone they see, including each other, and the supposedly “gruesome” attacks are almost completely bloodless. The whole thing moves along at a snail's clip, ensuring that the brilliant story is as unengaging as physically possible, while the violence is so tame, that, aside from maybe two scenes, I can almost guarantee it was tame back in 1970.
The only scenes that are still shocking are scenes undeserving of attention: unsimulated scenes of animal cruelty, in which a chicken has its throat slit, a dog is shot (this is more than likely simulated, but still disturbing), some rats are killed (kills happen offscreen, but a couple ripped-up corpses are shown), and a goat's corpse is dragged around during the chaotic finale. I don't mean to sound like a prude, but there about as many justifiable reasons for killing an animal onscreen as there are for killing a human. The cinematic world is based entirely on illusion and trickery—actors play other people inside a setting that often pretends to be an entirely different place than it is—so then why is it that some directors get off on the slaughter of innocent animals? And I don't give a shit what their fates were going to be, or how much use of the corpse the cast and crew used afterwards—they are moot points. I don't care to see it, and it's something that needn't be shot or shown.
Moving on from that public service announcement, even worse than the acting is the story, in which Andy defects from the group, and immediately rekindles his romance with Sylvia, who....you know, WAS JUST RAPED BECAUSE OF HIM. I'm not one to tell rape and trauma survivors how they should act, but the thought of a woman who was sexually assaulted not three days before, openly willing to continue a sexual relationship with the man who invited her to a Satanic ritual, isn't just in poor taste—it's flat-out disgusting. Between that, and the character of Molly, who has sex with a group of construction workers (mostly implied and off screen), I Drink Your Blood gives off a disgusting, misogynistic vibe in which women are nothing more than objects to be used solely for the delight of men. I understand that's probably more a sign of the freewheeling, drug-soaked time period--and I get that mindset is still disturbingly prevalent today--but it was a little discomforting, to say the least.
Its sole saving grace, besides the fact that the photographer actually knew how to frame scenes, is the soundtrack, which is a cacophonous, completely amelodic mess of repetitive, high-pitched noises that somehow works. This movie is neither intense, nor scary, but it's through no fault of the music—it's very simple, yet in the company of a much better movie, it would have been considered a masterpiece. Or maybe it actually sucks, yet the movie was so much worse it makes it look good in comparison—either way, I found it to be the strongest link in a movie completely bereft of anything worthwhile.
This is nothing more than a juvenile, amateurish mess of hippie cinema, filled with bad acting, despicable characters (and I don't just mean the bad ones), unjustifiable scenes of authentic animal cruelty, and a pace so slow that it could put a giraffe to sleep. For serious lovers of grindhouse cinema only.
RATING: 1.5/10
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