Horror Movie Review: I Drink Your Blood (1970)

Clearly inspired by Charles Manson & his family, I Drink Your Blood (also known as Hydro-Phobia) is a story about evil & madness.

Also rabies.

The story & performances are so over the top that the cheapness of it all gets completely forgotten about. Instead you’re just left mouth agape as the madness unfolds before your very eyes.

Horace Bones (Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury) is the leader of a cult that worships Satan. A young woman called Sylvia (Iris Brooks) spies on them as they conduct a satanic ritual but she is caught & raped by the group. They leave her alive & she makes it back to her town bloodied & beaten where she is found by her younger brother, Pete (Riley Mills).

Pete is furious so when the group (who deny everything & come across quite charming) arrive in town he sets about getting his revenge. With their van broken down the cult are forced to stay in the town. Pete shoots a rabid dog & takes some of its infected blood before injecting it into meat pies that are given to the cult.

Awesome idea, stupid in reality but awesome for this movie!

The cult get sick from the pies before attacking & trying to kill one another. One member of the cult, a female, has sex with a group of construction workers before biting & infecting them too. The infection spreads throughout the town resulting in anyone bitten turning into a frothing maniac.

The survivors from both the townspeople & the satanic cult are forced to band together to fight off the threat!

I Drink Your Blood is a movie that could never be made now. The absurdity of it all, the cheap effects, the absolutely hilarious bat-shit crazy acting…it’s a movie of a time. Considering it’s nearly 50 years since it was first released it holds up very well!

The movie is just a blast to watch, especially once you get through the first 15 minutes or so. The beginning is far darker then it needed to be, the rape & cult behaviour making for a uncomfortable watch. It works in guaranteeing that you’ll have no sympathy for them later. Even the not-so-violent ones get what’s coming to them as they were happy to be complicit with the events.

Where the movie does run into a few issues is with some of the effects. Looking incredibly cheap, a severed head at the end is hilariously fake looking.

Still it’s easy to forgive thanks to the quality of everything else. The sort of film that would seriously divide opinion. One side saying it’s highly entertaining & proof of the risk taking that used to exist in horror. The other saying it’s poorly made, cheap to look at & its absurd story is too much.

Each to their own. We think it’s great!