Originally released in February 1971, I Drink Your Blood was one of the first motion pictures to be rated X for violence. Trying to beat Night of the Living Dead at its own game, this film is shot straight from the gut. This film was originally distributed on a double-bill with a cheap zombie film, Zombie: Voodoo Bloodbath, originally made in 1964, which was retitled I Eat Your Skin. I Drink Your Blood, though, is far from black-and-white tame: it’s an explosion to the bone marrow. Rabies, meat pies, hippie killer maniacs, rednecks foaming at the mouth-it’s all in their!
Witness these amazing scenes: a dead goat is dragged across the screen, an old man in his underwear vomits up his dentures while he’s being strangled to death, an electric knife slips from a side of meat and….well, you get the picture.
Between the bad-taste instincts of exploitation legend Gross (who gave the film its lurid title and distributed it on a double-bill with an cheap black-and-white zombie film he’d rechristened I Eat Your Skin- a.k.a. Zombie, Voodoo Bloodbath, 1964) and Durston’s twisted imagination (rabies, meat pies, LSD, hippie maniacs, construction workers foaming at the mouth), I Drink Your Blood plays like a double-barreled shotgun blast, a sugar fix for gore freaks. Just when you think Durston can’t push the delirium any further, somebody drags a dead goat across the screen…or an old man in long underwear pukes up his dentures while being strangled…or an electric carving knife strays from a side of ham with disastrous results…or…well, you get the picture.
But the MPAA did not approve. Graphic scenes of dismemberment, stabbings, self-immolation, barbecued rodents, decapitation, and stake impalement upset the censors of the day. The film was originally released uncut, anyway, despite the code of authority, but prints of the film were heavily edited by projectionists, theater owners, and small-town vice squads.
Its ad campaign read: “Two Great Blood-Horrors to Rip Out Your Guts.”
Here is a movie that begins with the demonic howl of one Horace Bones who tells his disciples: “Satan was an acidhead. Drink from his cup. Pledge yourselves, and together, we’ll all freak!” What else is there to say?
