A Bucket of Blood (1959) dir. Roger Corman
In 1959, the cool place to be was the Yellow Door, a beatnik coffee house. (For our younger readers, beatniks were the predecessor to hippies, but more focused on artistic expression; both hipsters and goths are distant descendants.) You could listen to word salad poet Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton) deliver his latest opus to the saxophone accompaniment of Paul Horn, or hear a murder ballad, or view the many paintings on the wall, available for the right price. But not everyone at the Yellow Door is cool. Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), the busboy, is generally ignored and put down both by the patrons and his boss Leonard de Santis (Antony Carbone). Only fellow employee Carla (Barboura Morris) is kind to him, in her way.
Walter would do anything to be cool and to be respected by the beatniks. But he’s a naïve dimwit, even rejected by the draft board for lack of smarts, and hasn’t a clue how to be creative. His clay sculpting is getting nowhere. That is, until he accidentally kills a local cat, and in a panic covers it in clay to pass it off as a statue. The startling realism of “Dead Cat” gets Walter recognizes as someone with artistic potential. But what to do next?
The decision is taken out of Walter’s hands when an undercover police officer tries to bust him for drugs Walter didn’t even know he had. Walter panics when he sees a gun, and the next piece is “Murdered Man.” Walter’s on his way to being a local sensation!
But now Walter’s under pressure to produce new material, and de Santis has figured out at least part of Walter’s production method.
Over the decades, producer/director Roger Corman has made dozens of movies, the vast majority of which made more money than they cost. This low-budget quickie used redressed sets from his previous film, which would then be used again in the next movie. Witty writing and some good performances make this horror-comedy shine.
It’s easy to sympathize with Walter at first, the put-upon loser at the bottom of his social circle. He means well, and life is rotten to him. But as he tastes success, his head swells and he starts justifying worse and worse behavior. Plus, he does that thing where a man assumes a woman is romantically interested in him just because she’s nice to him.
Maxwell is an interesting character too, the swollen ego who actually has some talent to pull off his “center of attention” lifestyle. He’s genuinely interested in feteing Walter…as long as he also gets to be on stage. de Santis wavers between turning Walter in for his crimes, and profiting from them.
There’s also some amusing minor characters, like the pair of derelicts who are probably stoners, but are a little too early for that cultural scene. One of the undercover cops (the one who doesn’t die) dresses in an outfit that would scream “pimp” a decade later but here just says “trying too hard.”
The black and white photography keeps the blood (it’s really more of a saucepan than a bucket) looking relatively tasteful.
Content note: harm to animals, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide.
At just over an hour, and not overstaying its welcome, this is a good choice for an old-fashioned horror double feature.
Oh, and here’s the murder ballad sung in the background of one of the scenes–be sure to stay for the twist ending!
