Coroner’s Corner
Meat Pies and Rabies
by John Bikowski
Illustration by Eric Johnson
People are finally listening to my ranting about horror movies. Some folks with power are realizing that they just can’t make ’em like they used to. So you do the next best thing: remaster them, repackage them, and re-sell them. Now you can buy primo copies of such genre classics as Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, and Martin for a few measly bucks. Some companies are even adding in deleted scenes like in Texas Chainsaw II and III. A true freak-out classic on the drawing board is the seldom seen I Drink Your Blood. When this sick puppy comes out, suck it up quick.
Our cautionary tale begins with a horde of Satanist hippies engaging in a little campfire ritual. A young girl spies on the spectacle but is caught by the group and, naturally, is gang raped. The diverse group of loonies includes a mean-spirited Indian leader, an especially crazy Black guy, an Asian woman, and a few white freeloaders. They seem to all be living together in a van and driving around ruining peoples lives. You know… typical hippie Satanist shit. Outside a secluded and sparsely populated town, their lovemobile craps out and they are left to hoof it. For lack of something better to do, they shove the van down a huge ravine with their unsuspecting friend still asleep inside. They almost stop laughing long enough to see if he is still alive.
The morons soon enter the town that houses the girl they raped. Originally, the townsfolk had assumed she was violated by some horny construction workers. But once the hippie freaks show their faces, it becomes obvious what really happened. The girl, who is now catatonic, lives with her grandfather and her teenage brother.
Well, Grandpa gets pissed off and grabs his shotgun to go blow the crap out of the psychos, who have set up camp in an abandoned house. Unfortunately, Gramps proves too slow a foe and gets his bifocals pulverized, his gut punched in, and his world rocked by a serious dose of force-fed LSD. He is then sent home to trip and puke his brains out. Feeling that he alone is left to defend the family honor, the grandson devises a grisly plan. Earlier in the evening, the boy snuffed a rabid dog with a shotgun blast. He returns to the scene with a medical bag filled with hypodermic needles which he then proceeds to fill with the hound’s polluted hemoglobin. Knowing full well that the hippies will come around in the morning to scrounge some grub, the kid shoots the poison blood into a fresh rack of meat pies. Sure enough, the hippies show up and take the nasty pies home for a real feast that will probably nauseate you if you think of the implications.
Within a few hours, most of the hippies have turned into mouth-frothed psychopathic butchers that will kill anyone they meet. As they kill more and more people the contagion keeps spreading until the lone survivors are left to fight almost the entire town. In the ensuing bloodbath, we are treated to such sights as a sword shoved through someone’s back and out the mouth. For some reason, the rabies-infected zombies freak out when they have contact with water. This is cool because we get to watch grown people screaming and twisting all over while getting sprayed with a lawn hose. Awesomely stupid stuff like that makes this film an instant classic. To complete I Drink Your Blood‘s total package, during the action there are those sweet ’70s synthesizer hits to really make you trip out. Groovy.
