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If
you were in the vicinity of the
intersection of Blaine and Division
streets in the slightly misnomer'd town of
Grand Island, Nebraska last Monday, that
rhythmic thumping you heard was the sound
of my head banging on my a desk after
seeing the line-up for B-Fest
'05. For there, nestled in between
Peter Cushing's mutant silicates gone amok
Island
of Terror
and Irwin Allen's attack of the killer
bees anti-classic The
Swarm,
sat The
Apple;
the cause of my multiple brain bruises.
What's
The
Apple
you say? Well, The
Apple
is Cannon Films tandem of Menahem Golan
and Yoram Globus's glam-rock craptacular/biblical
allegory musical about man's fall in the
Garden of Eden. About as subtle with its
metaphor as using a sledgehammer to change
a light bulb, the film starts out bad
enough, but when "God" shows up
in his flying, solid gold Cadillac, then
it just gets weird. If you've seen it,
like I have, and are about to drive over
700 miles to see it again, you'd probably
be banging your head on something hard,
too.
And,
unfortunately, this week's film, David
Durston's I
Drink Your Blood,
isn't going to help my headache any at
all. *sigh*
Let's
get to it...
As
the Sons and Daughters of Satan prepare
for their evening ritual of general
debauchery, they drop some acid and then
sacrifice a chicken to the great Cloven
One -- because, according to their head
guru, Horace Bones (Bhaskar),
Satan was an acid-head who apparently
didn't like chickens all that much. When
they catch a local girl spying on them,
the gang of hooligans chase her down. The
next morning, the girl, Sylvia
Banner (Arlene Farber),
stumbles back into town, and judging by
her composure and painful posture, the bad
guys did a little more than play tag in
the dark. Yikes. Since there's a new dam
being constructed nearby, the
town itself is nearly abandoned because
when the project is done, the town will be
under water. Most of the villagers have
already relocated, leaving only Mildred (Elizabeth
Brooks), of Mildred's Bakery, and
old Doc Banner (Richard Bowler),
the local vet, and his two grandkids,
Sylvia and Pete (Riley Mills).
Mildred hasn't left yet because she
provides all the food for the construction
workers at the dam and is romantically
involved with the foreman, Roger Davis
(Jack Damon).
(Why the Banner's haven't left yet, who
the hell knows.) She
finds Sylvia faltering around and takes
her home; but the girl refuses to say what
happened.
Meanwhile,
Horace and his troupe, about eight of them
all together, have moved into town and takeover
the abandoned hotel. Young Pete warns them
about all the rats, but the group just
storm the building, banging into every
nook and cranny, driving the rats out into
the open, where they catch and kill them
and, eventually, throw them over a spit
and eat them. (Hey, geniuses; it
might help if you skin them first!)
Soon tiring of rat-meat, the group starts
raiding Mildred's bakery for some of her
hearty meat pies. Realizing it must have
been these hoodlums who attacked his granddaughter,
Doc Banner, with shotgun in hand, heads
over to the hotel to confront them.
Inside, Horace and Rollo (George
Patterson) have
turned on Shelley (Alex Mann),
one of their own, whom they're torturing
when Banner arrives. Quickly, the old man
is disarmed and Silke (Iris Brooks)
feeds him some LSD while the pregnant
Molly (Rhonda Fultz), the
mute Carrie (Lynn Lowry),
the enigmatic Sue-Lin (Jadine Wong),
the reluctant Andy (Tyde Kierney),
and the bleeding Shelley watch and laugh.
They let him go and Pete, who saw the
whole thing, takes him all the way home
before grandpa finally has his freak-out.
Not
one to let his family be taken advantage
of by Satanic Hippies twice in one day,
Pete takes up the shotgun and heads back
to the hotel to go all John Wayne on their
hippy asses. But on the way, he is
confronted by a rabid dog, and when it
attacks, he manages to kill it. Shaken, he
heads back home. Overhearing the shots,
Sylvia scolds him first, and then warns to
stay away from the carcass or risk the
danger of a rabies infection and the
horrors of -- HYDRO-PHOBIA! (Cue
dramatic sting!)
Pete
then hits upon a plan. Stealing some of
his father's vet equipment, he fills a
syringe full of the dogs tainted blood --
or slobber, or whatever -- and secretly
injects it into the pies Mildred baked for
the commune. Soon enough, they're chowing
down on them -- except for Andy, who is
feeling guilty and sneaks off to apologize
to Sylvia.
"Sorry
about that whole gang-rape thing. But do
you think there's any chance we could
still go steady?"
Those
who did eat the infected pies are soon
sick with the dreaded HYDRO-PHOBIA!
and rapidly go stark-raving bonkers.
Everybody starts drooling, badly, and most
of them express themselves with homicidal
tendencies. The first to go is Shelley,
whose dismembered leg Rollo takes up --
and then chases Silke out of the house
while swinging the leg over his head! The
infection spreads quickly, and soon the
town is overrun with rabid, drooling and
spluttering hippies. Watching all of this
from her store, Sylvia grows worried, and
not realizing the true scope of the
danger, she calls Roger who
sends some of his crew over to check on
her and roust the hippies out of town.
While
heading to the rescue, the posse stumbles
upon Silke -- who is hot to trot (in
a biblical sense). And as most of
the crew go with her for a roll in the
bushes (in a biblical sense),
two of the men check out the hotel before
their turn (in a biblical sense).
Once inside, they're ambushed and killed
by Bones (in a not so biblical
sense). The others take Silke back
to the construction site where she
basically -- well, she takes all takers (in
a biblical sense). Wow. Then the
long night gets
even longer as all the workers she has sex
with contract the disease, too, leaving
Roger, Mildred, Andy, Sylvia and Pete as
the only ones not infected. And Doc Banner
-- but he's currently stuck to the barn
door with a pitchfork through the neck.
As
the infected ransack and rampage through
the town, you'd almost think the director
was trying to draw a correlation between
these scenes and the early scenes of the
rat hunt, but it's not quite
deliberate enough. Sheesh. We GET it. (We're
using sledgehammers to change light bulbs
again.)
And
as we spin out of control toward the
climax, Roger inexplicably abandons his
girlfriend to go for help; Sue-Lin
immolates herself to be topical; Bones and
Rollo, who at some point abandoned the
dismembered leg for an axe, battle to the
death to see who can slobber the most;
Carrie attacks a woman with an electric
carving knife; then Molly takes drastic
measures before she fully succumbs to the
rabies by stabbing herself through her
belly -- and I remind everyone she was
critically pregnant; and Andy, Sylvia and
Pete try to hole up with Mildred in her
bakery -- only the owner's so scared she
won't let them in!
Under
siege from all sides, Mildred finally
snaps out of it and lets the others safely
in -- but it's too late for Andy, whose
head gets lopped off and carried around by
the mindless attackers for
its intrinsic shock value, and it will now
be waved in front of the screen as often
as possible. (It was either that or
a real dead goat. Booga. Booga. Boo--Gah!)
As the mob breaks into the store, the last
survivors make a run for Mildred's station
wagon. They make it, but Mildred is bit. (More
on this in a second). They get the
car started, but the rabid mob flips it
over before they can get it in gear.
Luckily
for them, Roger returns with the cavalry/State
Police who immediately open fire on the
mob. When the shooting finally stops and
the carnage finally settles, all the
infected are blown to pieces and Pete,
Sylvia and Mildred are rescued from the
wrecked auto. And as the film ends with
the two kids (but not Mildred?)
being loaded into an ambulance, the
paramedic (Director
Durston) confers
with Roger and officially puts the film to
bed, saying, "Well, what can you say?
At least the poor bastards have been put
out of their misery. [Because] death by
HYDRO-PHOBIA! is agony."
The
End
And
with that, the viewer is put out of
his/her misery, too.
So,
is watching I
Drink Your Blood
sheer, sheer agony? No, not really. Is it
as great as some folks would have you
believe. Again, not really. But it's
closer to the latter than the former.
Jerry
Gross was a frustrated film director who
finally found success as a producer and
distributor of grindhouse and drive-in
fodder for his own company, Cinemation
Industries (Shanty
Tramp,
The
Cheerleaders,
and Mondo
Cane 1 & 2).
Turning to director David Durston, Gross
asked him if he could deliver a horror
film to top Night
of the Living Dead.
No small task, but the only limitations
Gross had for Durston was he didn't want
it to be a monster movie; no zombies,
vampires or werewolves; the producer
wanted it to be a modern, realistic
shocker. Durston, who up until then was
probably most famous for the similarly
grounded science-fiction TV show Tales
of Tomorrow,
felt he was up to the task. Having
recently seen footage from the Middle East
of several children who had contracted
hydro-phobia/rabies, Durston felt it would
make a great basis for a horror film.
His
original premise was to have a small,
isolated town face a violent rabies
outbreak. However, right around the same
time, Charles Manson and the Spahn Ranch
irregulars were also making bloody
headlines, so Durston added the group of
hippie Satanists into the mix. (I
assume he made them Satanists to separate
them from the good hippies although I'm
not convinced there are such things.)
He delivered a script, under the working
title Phobia,
it was approved, and shooting commenced
at an abandoned sanitarium clinic --
kind of like the Kellogg Clinic
from The
Road to Wellville,
and the dilapidated state of the buildings
basically allowed the production a free
hand to run amok and do as much damage as
they pleased.
Durston's
stable of actors are raw but don't lack
for enthusiasm. The special-effects hold
up in the gore department. Well, the
foaming and slobbering break down a bit
when it slops all over. I've had some
experience with rabid animals -- a dog and
a 'possum, and I honestly can say they did
froth quite a bit, just not that much.
Now,
one of the biggest complaints about the
film are the scenes of animal cruelty and
torture depicted on screen. I have no
patience for that kind of crap, either,
but Durston swears they ate the chicken
killed for the opening ceremony and the
rats (shipped in from a lab)
and the goat were already dead. In fact,
Durston says, all the rats used in the
hotel were under the, well, rabid
protection of their trainer, and actually,
most of them went on to appear in both Ben
and Willard.
(I
thought that big, chubby rat looked kinda
familiar.)
 When
filming was finished, Durston turned the
film over to Gross who didn't like the
film's black comedy elements and cut the
film without Durston's consent. The
tinkering continued when one of his
assistants, Barney Cohen, inadvertently
gave it a new title, I
Drink Your Blood,
to match its double feature, I
Eat Your Skin:
Two Great Blood Horrors. To Rip Out Your
Guts. (Of
course if it were released today it would
read: 2 Great Blood Horrors / 2 Rip Out
Your Guts.) I
also understand that the original ending
had Roger checking on Mildred after the
clean-up. And that version ends with the
infected Mildred attacking Roger, ending
in a freeze frame. Yep, another cheesedick
ending. But Gross didn't like it and
chopped it off. I'm glad he did because,
personally, I hate cheesedick endings (The
original ending is a bonus feature on DVD,
though.) And judging by the other
deleted scenes, especially a bit where
Pete tries to confess to two troopers, I
think we owe Gross some thanks for cutting
out the comedy bits.
To
make matters even worse, I
Drink Your Blood
was slapped with an X-rating for its
violent content by the fledgling MPAA. And
since the prints were already made and
distributed to theaters, and most of them
refused to show it, a drastic decision was
made: Gross gave the theater operators the
OK to cut the film, themselves (!), down
to what they felt would equal an R-Rating
or less; whatever it took to get it on the
screens and butts in the seats.
So
the big question is, Has anyone ever seen
this film completely unmolested?
Most
of the early copies that circulated around
on the home video market were culled from
the severely hacked-up and censored prints,
causing much frustration and irritation
amongst the horrorphiles. Finally, thanks
to Fangoria
magazine and Grindhouse Cinema,
working in conjunction with Durston, the
film has been fully restored on DVD. And I
encourage everyone who've only seen the
chopped up version to give the film
another look. I think there's a modest, if
unrefined, horror flick that's lurking
just underneath the surface here, though I
think it would have been better if Durston
had left the hippy Satanists out and
concentrated solely on the small town
epidemic angle. And it's too bad that
Durston never tried his hand at horror
again. With a little more refinement and
fine-tuning, we would probably be
mentioning him in the same breath as other
gritty-n-bleak-n-unrelenting '70s
horrormeisters Hooper, Craven and Romero.
Honest.
I
swear, I
Drink Your Blood
is [----- this close -----] to being an
all-time psychotronic classic, but
something that I can't quantify in my own
head, let alone explain to y'all, prevents
it from accomplishing that goal. It's not
for lack of talent or budget, cast, crew
or script. And the harder I think about
it, the more elusive the answer as to why
is -- and the more I think about the film,
the easier it gets to glaze over and
ignore its shortcomings.
Gah!
Man,
my head hurts.
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