I DRINK YOUR BLOOD

d. David E. Durston (1970)

From the sensational title down, this fun and fast moving film is not what you’d call family viewing,  but the violence - a severed foot, a severed hand, a severed head - a stabbing where some guts falls out of the hole - is almost quaint, relying on unconvincing paper mache body parts and chunks of raw liver. Despite this, it has a reputation as a nasty film, perhaps because its main plot point is that a child injects meat pies with the dirty blood of a rabid dog in order to get his own back on the Satan worshipping hippies who raped his sister and made his granddad take LSD. That's the most unsavoury sentence I have ever written.

The Satan worshipping hippies are a multiracial Mansonesque group of scumbags who travel around backwoods America in a smelly black van stealing, squatting and spreading STDs. They’re despicable and cruel people who, in their desire to be utterly free, oppress everybody they come across, including  rats, which they hunt down and kill with great glee and sadistic violence. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t condone infecting anyone with a fatal disease but, in this case, they more than deserve it. Justice is a fickle thing, however, as the rabies doesn’t kill them straight away, instead turning them into dribbling kill and sex crazy zombie death bombs, staggering about biting people and spreading the infection like wildfire. Like all hippies, rabid or otherwise, they retain a great fear of running water, and this comes in handy for the few beleaguered residents that they haven’t managed to nibble on, include the ingenious lad who put the poison in the pie in the first place. Let’s hope somebody calls the army or, at the very least, the dog pound.   

Obviously cheap but well made, with some surprisingly good performances, I Drink Your Blood is trashy, and not exactly nice, but neither is it nasty, so pantomimic and gleeful is it in its mayhem and gore. I really enjoyed it, but then there’s something wrong with me. Fact.    

A special note about the film’s earthy synthesizer score, which is smeared all over and is completely off the chain. It was written and performed by Clay Pitts, who usually worked on Christian rock records and was clearly not a man afraid to diversify. Good work, Clay. 

SPACE AMOEBA

d. Ishiro Honda (1970)

Japanese monster movies are a little like sushi: they look great and they are lots of fun, but they’re not exactly what you might call filling. Nevertheless, like sushi, I enjoy them very much. I like the rubbery monsters, the comical mugging, the stock characters. I like the way that the films only really come to life when the monsters are on the screen, and only really catch fire when you have one or more fighting and smashing things up.

The Space Amoeba in question attaches itself to an unmanned space probe, which crashes into the sea near a desert island, one of the many isolated atolls in the archipelago of greater Japan. The amoeba resembles an electrical current, or a neon sneeze, and attaches itself to living organisms, taking control of their minds and greatly increasing their size and aggression levels. Over the course of the story we see a giant cuttlefish (erroneously described as an octopus), two giant crabs and a giant turtle. They are all angry and like the taste of human beings, particularly the wriggling, screaming ones.

The amoeba clearly has its red beady eye on world domination but is somewhat thwarted by its inability to conquer a small island populated only by a superstitious native tribe and a half dozen city slickers with guns, grenades and lots of petrol. Eventually, it takes over a human being, who gains super strength and a maniacal glow. In the version I watched, this character is dubbed by an Australian, which is slightly confusing for a Japanese man but not a disaster. The problem is that, along with his chin beard, black glasses, white safari suit and constant chuckling to himself, the Aussie twang only accentuates his resemblance to Rolf fucking Harris. Happily, he throws himself into a live volcano when his humanity briefly returns. Maybe Rolf could go and do the same.