I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin (1970)

I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin is probably one of the most infamous exploitation double bills of the early seventies.  I recently watched the two movies back-to-back, recreating the experience of 1970 -71 grindhouse audiences.  To state the obvious first, nobody actually drinks anybody's blood, let alone eats any skin, in either of the films.  Both were retitled by producer and distributor Jerry Gross to provide a memorably titled double bill - director David E Durston had originally wanted to title I Drink Your Blood Phobia, or Hydro-Phobia, while I Eat Your Skin had originally been titled Zombies, but was rechristened with its new title after Gross bought it to form the lower half of his double bill.  The films present a startling contrast - most obviously I Drink Your Blood is in glorious colour, whereas I Eat Your Skin (which had been sitting on the shelf, unreleased, since 1965) is in monochrome.  But the two are also a stark contrast in style and quality.  It has to be said that I Drink Your Blood is a surprisingly well made film for its era and genre.  It has excellent colour cinematography and sound quality, a far cry from the usual cheap colour processes, grainy film quality and tinny sound encountered in many seventies exploitation pieces. The editing is also far more professional looking than the usual choppy cutting of low budget schlock.  Indeed, the whole thing is very neatly cut into a surprisingly slick looking package.  While the cast might be unknowns and amateurs they are, on the whole, not at all bad.  In particular, Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury impresses as Horace Bones, the film's Manson-like main villain.

While by current standards the film's content might seem relatively tame, back in 1970 it was pretty strong said.  The action is pretty brutal, with decapitations, shootings, stabbings, pitchforkings amongst the various ways in which characters are dispatched.  The violence is graphic with plenty of gore flying about.  It seems clear that the main influences on the film were George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, released a couple of years earlier, and the crimes of the Charles Manson family.  The plot is kept simple - a group of hippie satanists led by Horace Bones rock up in a small town, which is near deserted and scheduled to be demolished as part of a nearby dam-building project.  A young local boy, whose sister and grandfather have been victimised and abused by the gang, (the sister was drugged and raped, the old man beaten and fed LSD), injects blood from a rabid dog he has killed and injects it into some meat pies that he sells to the hippies.  (Luckily, they weren't vegetarians).  The rabid hippies go on a violent rampage, clashing with some of the construction crew, who they also infect - the remaining uninfected local residents find themselves under siege as the construction crew's manager tries to find help.  There are some unintentionally amusing moments, such as when some of the locals fend a band of rabid hippies by splashing water from a lake at them, (one of the symptoms of rabies, of course, being hydrophobia), but, on the whole it is pretty intense and harrowing stuff, with the hippies turning on each other and sympathetic characters ruthlessly dispatched.  It all culminates in a siege at the bakery (the origin of the infected pies) before the police finally turn up and gun down the remaining rabid hippies and construction workers.

I Drink Your Blood's true significance lies in the fact that it is one of a number of films of its era which marked a turning point in horror and exploitation film development.  Whereas the genre had, up to this point, focused either on Gothic tales featuring supernatural menaces, or cheap monster flicks aimed at adolescents, with Night of the Living Dead (1968), the emphasis switched to contemporary set stories featuring very human monsters, clearly aimed at more adult audiences.  The supernatural was banished in favour of more mundane explanations for their horrors - psychological disorders, infections, or sexual depravity, for instance.  Even the zombies of Night of the Living Dead were explained away in pseudo-scientific as being the result of radiation rather than traditional Voodoo.  Plots became subservient to serving up a spectacle of brutality and realistic violence.  In the case of I Drink Your Blood, events aren't even set in motion by some malign external influence, like shady government experiments, but instead by an angry child's desire for some kind of justice against those who have harmed his family, with events quickly spiraling out of control and, thanks to his actions, even more harm is visited upon his community.  These were horrors which, it seemed, really could intrude into the audience's real lives.  I Drink Your Blood was one of the first films to follow Night of the Living Dead's lead, ramping up the blood and violence, presenting them in colour and providing a plausible threat that recalled the still recent events of the Sharon Tate murders.

By contrast, while I Eat Your Skin might date back to 1965, it could just have easily have been made twenty years earlier.  A tepid tale of Voodoo in the Caribbean, it breaks absolutely no new ground.  With its grainy black and white photography, poor sound quality and cheap make up, it encompasses all of the usual faults of B-movie production that its companion piece avoids.  It is old fashioned in every department, featuring a plot by a local official - aided and abetted by the local mad scientist - to create an army of zombies with which he hopes to achieve global domination.  Featuring little in the way of action or suspense, it creaks its way through ninety or so minutes of tedium.  Believe me, after watching I Drink Your Blood, which sprints through a similar running time, I Eat Your Skin comes as a real downer.  You can see why it was the lower half of the double bill - even in 1970 few drive in audiences would have been prepared to sit through it to get to the main feature.   So, although it was fun to recreate this classic double bill in the comfort of my own home, I have to say that I wouldn't have been disappointed if I hadn't seen I Eat Your Skin.  I Drink Your Blood, by contrast, remains essential viewing for aficionados of seventies exploitation and remains a highly entertaining piece of B-movie action.