Some Saturdays, nothing hits the spot like a heartwarming coming-of-age movie. One of my favorites is about a boy who learns how to overcome obstacles, deal with bullies, and who comes to understand the importance of family. Doesn’t that sound nice? Then, by all means, search out the beautiful low-budget masterpiece, I Drink Your Blood.
In case you haven’t figured it out from the title, the following trailer is not safe for… well, anywhere.
Happy childhoods are few and far between and no one knows that more than the film’s young protagonist, Pete Banner (Riley Mills). Pete lives with his family in a dying town filled with abandoned, ramshackle buildings. Construction on a nearby dam is well underway. Employment on the build site is the only game in town, save for a few small businesses. Pete’s sister, Mildred (Elizabeth Marner-Brooks) runs the local bakery. An old drive-in ad hangs forlornly on the wall behind the dusty counter. This town is looking like a ghost town.
Nothing livens up boring, small American towns quite like the arrival of poverty-stricken transient hippie Satanic cults. SADOS (Sons and Daughters of Satan), led by the charismatic and defiantly shirtless Horace Bones (Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury), make a smashing entrance by dropping acid and raping Sylvia (Arlene Farber), Pete and Mildred’s sister, during a nighttime ritual. When their grandfather, kindly local veterinarian Doc Banner (Richard Bowler) learns of the assault, he seeks revenge on the cult members. They beat the hell out of the old man and forcibly give him a dose of LSD.
Pete takes up the mantle of Man of the House and begins tromping through the woods with Doc Banner’s shotgun to hunt down the wicked cult. Nothing shrieks Americana like the image of a young man holding a firearm, hellbent on murder. On the way, Pete runs across a rabid dog. In an act borne of both fear and mercy, Pete shoots the dog. Instead of attempting to bury the wretched creature, Pete hightails it back to Grandpa’s house to retrieve a hypodermic needle. Pete has an idea, morbid and life-changing, and he needs the dog’s blood.
When the cult members visit the bakery looking for free food, Pete allows them to have some fresh meat pies. Unbeknownst to the cultists, Pete has injected rabies-infected blood into all of the pastries. It seems like such a simple plan. One would think the evildoers would die off like a colony of mice eating sweet, deceptive poison. That is not the case. Pete’s act has a ripple effect, altering the lives of everyone around him.
If you think standard-issue drug-addled hippie Satanic cultists are bad, then wait until you see standard-issue drug-addled Satanic cultists with rabies.
Even by modern standards, the violence in I Drink Your Blood is shocking. When it was originally released in 1970, I Drink Your Blood became the first film to be rated X for violence instead of on-screen intercourse. Producer Jerry Gross, no stranger to controversy after working on exploitation films like Teenage Mother and Girl on a Chain Gang, released the film anyway. Gross encouraged local theaters to edit the film to fit their community standards.
Limbs are severed. Clothes are removed. Heads are removed. Good times, y’all. Good times.
Hitting screens only two years after George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, I Drink Your Blood portrays the spreading rabies infestation like the zombie virus that raised the dead. Infection happens quickly and the results are almost instantaneous. It could be said that Romero’s 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead, owes as much to I Drink Your Blood as it does to Romero’s own work.
Cult leaders rely on a mixture of personality and gaslighting to exert their insidious power over their followers. Chowdhury’s portrayal of Horace Bones encompasses those two aspects in a slimy, serpentine fashion. Bones gyrates through the movie like a cobra entranced by music. Evil and lunacy ooze from his highly-defined abs and lunatic face. It is a masterclass in the depiction of insanity.
Listen: just because the movie includes depictions of dismemberment, decapitation, and barbecuing dead rats over a trash barrel fire, doesn’t mean I’m wrong about my interpretation. I Drink Your Blood is a coming-of-age story in the tradition of great depressing and traumatizing tales like Where the Red Fern Grows or Old Yeller.
Pete feels the only way to protect his family is to remove the attackers from his town. His plan has horrific side effects, producing life lessons that Pete probably spent years trying to process. Like most young people, Pete’s bravery hides behind his naivete. He faces his fears, but those demons are not afraid to stare back at him. By the end, Pete has achieved a form of maturity, borne in foolishness, bearing trauma.
I Drink Your Blood is one of the crowning achievements of exploitation cinema in that era, and it is not for everyone. Beneath the mayhem and questionable actions of the characters lies a deeper story. Pete tried to do the right thing, which was the wrong thing, and that became a dreadful thing. We’ve all been there. It is part of the human condition.
There is no true moral to I Drink Your Blood, a film that revels in its immorality. If there is a lesson, though, maybe it is to learn from your mistakes and try to move on. That is, if you can make it past all the bodies cluttering the streets.
I Drink Your Blood is available for free via multiple streaming services like Tubi, Plex, and Sling TV. You can also buy the amazing Blu-Ray of I Drink Your Blood from Grindhouse Releasing. I own that Blu. I will vouch for its glory.
