I Drink Your Blood (PAL/VHS)
                               (aka. Die Satans Bande)
                                           (1970)
                                               review by Krug Stillo

SPOILERS ALERT!!!

A DVD collector's edition of this 1972 horror (some call it black comedy) will be released soon and for those fortunate enough to have seen this film, I’m sure they’re anxious to see the never seen definitive version. I Drink Your Blood: The Director’s Cut may well be a true credit to modern entertainment and shall hopefully glorify this forgotten gem, making it more enduring to contemporary fanatics of the macabre.

The problem with the film as it is now, as some of you true horror junkies may know, is it's disjointment, splicing together of old and new footage. In 1972, threatened with an X certificate (the original version of I Drink Your Blood is a landmark film being the first to be threatened with the dreaded X’ certificate on account of violence rather than sex), five minutes of footage was removed and a further ten minutes of ‘tamer’ scenes were spliced in to gel the pieces together. Unfortunately, these added scenes just made a mess of things towards plot , character and structure. The end of the film seems alien to first two thirds, which gradually build to a horrifying climax which never happened. Critics of horror have recognized that if I Drink You Blood hadn’t suffered tamping during its release, then it would today stand alongside the likes of Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left.

The first half of the film depicts a group of satanic hippies venturing into an almost deserted village and squatting in an old, abandoned hotel. Being a boisterous and “savage pack of hyenas”, the group attract the attention of an old timer, who goes round with a rifle to do the village, ValleyHills, some justice. His rage is already at boiling point as the group have viciously attacked the old boy’s daughter earlier in the film ("Local girl, my ass!" - Horace Bones). They mock him and one of the group give him LSD. In the name of revenge, the man's grandson and girl's brother injects the blood of a rabid dog into meat pies and gives it to the hippies. (MISS NASH: We'll make a baker out of you yet, Pete. PETE: No! I'm going to be a veterinarian.) Soon the group are twitching and foaming at the mouth. They disperse into the village, one armed with a sword and another with an axe. (Horace: You're beautiful, but if you ain't careful I'm gonna skin your ass alive.)

Until now the story has developed well, tension has escalated efficiently and the characters were developed perfectly for this type of film. From here on though, with the new footage replacing what I'm sure were gory set pieces, the whole film becomes a little incoherent and pear shaped; People die, including a bloke in his pyjamas who loses his teeth while being strangled by Harace; The local work force are infected by the rabid nymphomaniac hippie and soon give chase with machetes and a dead goat (?); the pregnant hippie kills her unborn baby for fear of it being born with rabies...etc. The film suddenly ends with a doctor vehemently stating, "At least the bastards have been put out of their misery, 'cause death by hydrophobia is agony!" and you find yourself asking ‘What the Hell happened to that film that started so well?’

The ‘black comedy’ accusation, I call it such as the cast play this film straight so all the hilarity I’m sure is unintentional, emanates from the fact that every few minutes something really daft is either said or done. Note: The wafer thin walls that collapse when the rabid workforce invade the bakery. Perhaps if the Director's Cut DVD eventually does surface, I Drink Your Blood will get the reverence it deserves because one really gets the impression from the truncated version that it had the potential to be a true classic.