Pete Banner (Riley Mills), his pretty older sister Sylvia (Iris Brooks), and their gramps, Doc. Banner (Richard Bowler), sure don't have much in the way of smarts.
When Sylvia catches hippie Andy (Tyde Kierney) stealing a chicken for use in a black magic ritual, she doesn't call the police: instead, she lets him take the bird, just so long as she can spy on Andy and his pals performing their ceremony. Spotted lurking in the woods by the naked Satanists, the girl is pursued, beaten and abused. In retrospect, calling 911 would have been the wiser option.
Gramps also displays a remarkable lack of common sense. When Sylvia is found in a catatonic state, he quite rightly thinks that the gang of hippies staying at the local deserted hotel are responsible. However, rather than contact the sheriff (does this family not own a phone?), the old man grabs his shotgun and goes it alone to have it out with the drug-crazed drop-outs. One doddery pensioner against eight devil-worshipping lunatics on L.S.D. -- unsurprisingly, it doesn't go well for Doc. Banner.
As for young Pete, he has to be the stupidest of the lot: in order to take revenge, the lad extracts blood from a rabid dog and injects it into a tray of meat pies that he sells to the hippies. Soon, instead of lawless Satanists, the town is under siege from crazed maniacs foaming at the mouth (I wonder how many tubes of toothpaste went into the making of this film) with a lust for blood who can pass on the deadly disease via a bite. Pretty soon, there are machete wielding maniacs everywhere!
Produced by exploitation movie legend Jerry Gross, and written and directed by David Durston, I Drink Your Blood is exactly what a drive-in/grindhouse movie should be: cheap, totally trashy, with over-the-top performances, gratuitous nudity and plenty of gore. It takes until the halfway point to really get into full swing, but when it does, the film is an absolute blast.
The mayhem starts proper as Manson-like cult leader Horace (played with wild-eyed relish by Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) and his followers start to feel the effects of the rabies, black Satanist Rollo (George Patterson) being the first to go full-on bonkers, stabbing fellow hippie Shelley in the gut with a dagger and then hacking off his foot with an axe. The rest soon follow suit, with cultist Molly (Rhonda Fultz) infecting a whole crew of construction workers (with rabies, although they might well have contracted something else as well), making matters even worse. Meanwhile, Sylvia and uninfected Andy (now a couple, the girl having bounced back from her earlier ordeal) and Pete try to avoid being sliced and diced until construction site foreman Roger Davis (John Damo) can alert the authorities.
I Drink Your Blood was one of the first films to be rated X by the MPA based on its violence, and its easy to see why: there are plenty of shocking scenes of brutality, with an evisceration, an uncredited Lynn Lowry (who appeared in George Romero's similarly themed The Crazies) cutting off a woman's hand with an electric carving knife, a pregnant woman impaling herself with a stake, self-immolation, a pitchfork in the throat, a sword in the back and out of the mouth, and my favourite moment, the shock decapitation of a major character, the victim's head carried around by the killer. As I watched the violence escalate, my rating kept getting higher and higher!
A neat downbeat ending tops off what is a hugely entertaining exploitation classic that demands to be seen by any self-respecting gore-hound or trash movie aficionado.
