United Color of Benetton…Satanists? A black guy (looking a little like Jimmy Cliff from The Harder They Come), a Native American guy (looking like Apache Chief from the Super Friends), an Asian woman, three white women and two white guys — all hippies, all with a love for Satan! This movie feels like an extended school film strip about the evils of LSD, the Devil and free love.
Alongside such brutal revenge pics as I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left and The House on the Edge of the Park, this one seems tame in the motivation for revenge (Granted, this predated Last House by two years.). Maybe I saw an edited version with the assault on the granddaughter Sylvia (Iris Brooks) cut out. Also, when the hippies catch the grandfather, Doc Banner, snooping around their new Satanic stomping ground, they just rough him up a bit and feed him LSD. They don’t even beat up the grandson, Pete (Riley Mills), who frankly could do with an ass-kicking. The pissed-off kid pulls the old “fill the meat pies with rabid dog blood” gag, turning the hippies into rabid killing machines who spread the disease to the town folk.
It’s sort of like a simple-minded precursor to The Crazies and Rabid. The slack-jawed, bug-eyed, froth-mouthed black hippie on the prowl is potentially offensive (straight outta Birth of a Nation), although several others of the infected are similarly odious (Still, the black guy and the Native American are the most crazed. The women are less overt.). Ironically, while the eating of skin seems more explicit than the drinking of blood, Blood is much more graphic than the corny black-and-white zombie flick I Eat Your Skin. The now out-of-print off-shoot I Chew On Your Tonsils never quite caught on.
