"Let all the spirits hear. I am the first born Son of Satan. He commands my thoughts. I speak his words. The Book of the Dead! Sons and daughters of Satan. Put aside your worldly things and come to me. Let it be known, sons and daughters, that Satan was an acid head. Drink from his cup; pledge yourselves. And together, we'll all freak out."

Has a movie ever started better? I don't think so. I Drink Your Blood will take you prisoner, stab in the stomach with a fork and write on the walls with your blood!

In fact, I watched that opening at last year's April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama in the middle of the night, surrounded by fog and inebriated on a variety of vices. It was a transcendent moment.

Horace Bones leads a cult that worships Satan and drops acid. A young girl, Sylvia, watches from the woods but is caught, then raped by the cult members before she escapes. She's found the next morning by Mildred, a baker, and Sylvia's brother Pete. They get her back to her father, Doc Banner, the town's veterinarian. And oh the town - it's been abandoned due to dam project. The hippies break down and decide to stick around.

The only food in town? Meat pies from Mildred's bakery, which Horace and family take as they set up their home in a house scheduled for demolition. And when Doc comes for revenge, the gang smashes his glasses and force him to take LSD.

So how do you get revenge? Well, if you're Pete, you kill a rabies infected dog and inject the blood into meat pies, which infects the gang and makes them go crazy. They begin to attack one another as Molly runs away, finding the mill workers, who she ends up having sex with all night long until she bites one of the men.

Horace goes full-on insane, even more insane than the beginning of the film, attacking two of the construction workers. Only Andy from the group is not infected and he finds Sylvia and Pete. Meanwhile, the infection spreads to the rest of the town.

Banner gets impaled. Horace is stabbed by Rollo, the African-American member of the family. Mildred is barricaded inside her bakery and Andy is beheaded before they get in. The Japanese member of the family sets herself on fire. Everyone other than Mildred, her boyfriend Oaks (who comes to save them),Sylvia and Pete dies horribly.

Director David Durston worked with producer and CEO of Cinemation Industries Jerry Gross to write and direct this film. He said that "wanted to make the most graphic horror film ever produced, but he didn't want any vampires, man-made monsters, werewolves, mad doctors, or little people." The director couldn't come up with an idea until he read an article about a village in Iran where a pack of rabid wolves infected several villagers, making them insane and homicidal. Dunston found a doctor who had been to the village and that had filmed the evidence. He was further inspired by the Manson family trials.

This is the first film to be given an X rating for violence instead of sex. And while originally entitled Phobia, the name change to I Drink Your Blood and pairing with 1964's Zombies, also retitled as I Eat Your Skin, proved a potent blend for audiences. The two movies are almost always thought of together.

This film is unafraid to be the exploitation junk that normal people avoid. It's grimy, filthy and ultimately entertaining as hell. It takes everyone's worst fears of the hippies and shows you in graphic detail what happens when those fears come true.

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.

David E. Durston's most readily available motion picture- which means it's the only one that isn't either an obscure porno or others- is I Drink Your Blood, a quickie made for peanuts and meant to be artful to those who have said peanuts in their brain. All you need to know: satanic hippies- a winning contradiction of course- find an abandoned house, beat up grandpa (who looks very oddly enough like Luis Bunuel),and the grandson gets angry enough to shoot a rabies infected dog, draw out its blood with a syringe, inject the blood into MEAT PIES (yes, meat pies, what kind of meat is meant as an eternal mystery),and the Charles Manson wannabes eat em up. The response: they all become, to one extent or another, ravaging quasi-zombies who go after the rural folk one by one, some with a pure ravenous delirium like the black hippie or the native American, and others who's madness grows more steadily (the women in the group). There's even one, I won't say who, goes almost Shaolin-style on the situation.

Filled with nobody actors who probably all knew they were going nowhere all the same (save perhaps for Lynne Lowry, who had somewhat of a successful B-movie career with her cat-eyes appearing later on in the Crazies),it's a cheapo attempt to cash in on Night of the Living Dead, but it does have some really f***ed up ambition going for it in hindsight: it's quite possibly the very first (un-official) Troma production. Spared all expense, I Drink Your Blood shoots its financial wad on what little special effects and gore and make-up there needs to be, and that alone. No need to get things like the *foam* from rabies infected people right, just dab some shaving cream. And why bother rehearsing (at least, that's what the way it seems of course),which is more than evident in possibly the worst child actor I've ever seen in a schlock fest playing the kid who starts this whole she-bang. Yet it is, living up to its hype, a very violent movie, however without a single socially redeeming statement in the process.

But unlike some other ultra-violent horror fests of the period (Last House on the Left immediately comes to mind),I Drink Your Blood isn't really out for loftier goals than to shock, and Durston's most significant achievement, if nothing else, is to make all of this bad crap really, hysterically funny, if only in big bursts amid scenes that are also, predictably, dull. The aforementioned Chinese character is the oddest one to have in a satanic LSD cult, though it's also a lot of fun seeing how sleazy the director can get in exploiting racial stereotypes. Of course, due to budget constraints, no "daring" exposes of what it MUST be like to trip, however just watching the hippies chow down on the meat pies is enough to get some chuckles. It might even make for a decent do-it-yourself Mystery Science Theater night, as the ultra-violent rabies-infected LSD-satanic-hippie movie was sort of left in the dust during the show's run.