After releasing a high quality DVD of Roger Corman's 1959 production of A Bucket of Blood in 2018, Olive Films has upped its game in a big way with a Signature Blu-ray release of the film. I’ve already enjoyed the Olive Signature release of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which with its wealth of special features, much like a Criterion Collection release, was so robust that taking it all in felt like attending a film class. A Bucket of Blood gets the same treatment here. In giving genre films this level of attention and respect Olive is properly recognizing their importance in cinematic history.
Though mastered from a new 4K scan, the disc image is clear, but not sharp. It retains a sufficient amount of grain, so that the film doesn’t lose the seedy feel that is the core of its appeal. I found it to be a good middle ground between providing an improved viewing experience and keeping the film firmly in its time and place.
Beloved bit player Dick Miller had his best role as Walter Paisley, the Beatnik coffee shop waiter who finds success as an artist when he covers corpses in clay. Not only was it his most celebrated part, but his character name would follow him to several other films. Fortunately, this seems to have amused him.
With a nod to horror classics including Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and House of Wax (1953), screenwriter Charles Griffith takes the horrific idea of stealing life to make art and connects it with a man who feels an intensely relatable sense of inadequacy. This concept is especially powerful in an age of social media stardom, where many struggle with feelings of inferiority in the face of easy, but uneasily held fame.
Miller is the perfect actor to embody these feelings of unfulfilled creativity and low self-esteem. Having struggled to be a screenwriter, before barely making a living as a character actor, even this early in his career he had experienced the frustration of having more to offer than the world cared to embrace. As adored as he was, he always wanted, and deserved a little more out of his career.
The special features on the disc are especially remarkable because the key players in this production are all such fascinating characters. A typically measured interview with producer/director Roger Corman is nicely complemented by a livelier interview with Dick Miller conducted by his long-time wife Lainie Miller. An archival radio interview with screenwriter Charles Griffith about his career neatly fills in a little more detail. You can sense the unity in a Corman production, because so often the individual memories they share are remembered the same way.
An incredibly goofy prologue filmed for the German release of the film in 1962 attempts to present A Bucket of Blood as the sequel to House of Wax, though the German release trailer also included on the disc more effectively presents the film as a horror production than the also included US trailer which makes it look like a wacky Beatnik sex romp.
Features also include an interesting gallery of newly-discovered on-set photography, and a silent Super 8 “digest” version of the film, which has the nice touch of being backed by the sounds of a film projector running. An essay by You Don’t Know Me, But You Love Me: The Lives of Dick Miller author Caelum Vatnsdal is an interesting review of the different stage and screen adaptations the production has inspired over the years.
Many thanks to Olive Films for providing a copy of the film for review.
A Bucket of Blood (1959) perfectly illustrates why producer Roger Corman never lost a dime on a film. Produced in five days, with a budget of $50,000, this dark comedy took a playful swipe at beatnik and art culture with thrift and efficiency, relying on sensational content and bizarre characters for impact. I recently revisited this darkly quirky film on a new DVD release from Olive Films.
It saddens me to live in a world where an intriguing face like Dick Miller’s isn’t considered matinee idol material, but sometimes life gets things right. Often a supporting player in Corman productions, A Bucket of Blood was one of a few films in which the actor starred.
Miller is Walter Paisley, a busboy in an arty beatnik café who aspires to be a sculptor, despite the mocking of his workplace patrons. After struggling hopelessly with a lump of clay, Paisley discovers a novel way to make art when he mistakenly stabs a cat to death and decides to cover it in clay. The resulting sculpture is a hit at the café and, much to his horror, he soon finds himself following up with human subjects. As his reputation as an artist blooms, the hapless busboy suffers guilt and fear of discovery.
In this twist on the House of Wax concept, the villain is neither imposing or outwardly horrific. He’s just a weak, unlucky, and untalented man. The horror is in what he is willing to do in order to escape being ordinary.
This is one of the best films Roger Corman directed, primarily due to the one-two punch of Miller as lead and Charles Griffith as screenwriter. Griffith was expert at creating oddball characters who would never dream that the strange things they do are unusual in the least. He creates a ridiculous world, made all the more wild by the fact that these people are actually quite familiar.
A year later, Corman would direct The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) under much the same conditions, with Dick Miller in a small, but memorable role as a man who eats flowers, Charles Griffith as screenwriter, and a soundtrack which recycled much of Fred Katz’s jazzy Bucket score. The formula worked again.
The Olive disc has good sound and a clean, slightly soft image. It’s great to have this film available in a high quality release.
Many thanks to Olive Films for providing a copy of the film for review.
With an off-kilter jazzy score, hapless young anti-heroes and a slightly sensational edge, Stakeout on Dope Street (1958) is a classic Roger Corman production. The music and slick photography are the strongest elements of this teen crime and drug flick. Now available on DVD from Warner Archive, it is notable for being the first film directed by The Empire Strikes Back (1980) helmer Irvin Kershner and featuring for featuring the early work of cinematographer Haskell Wexler
A trio of teens come into possession of a two pound can of uncut heroin tossed aside during a police raid. They are essentially good kids, but impatient for the finer things in life, so they decide to sell the drugs. It should come as no surprise that things don't go well; the shocker here is a surprisingly frank extended sequence that tackles heroin addiction.
Of the leads Jonathon Haze, Yale Wexler and Morris Miller, Corman regular Haze is the most memorable, with his doofy manner, but incongruously dangerous-looking eyes. It isn't so much the way he handles a line, but his presence that distinguishes him. He's such an unusual performer, sometimes seeming to have simultaneously millions of faraway thoughts and absolutely nothing on his mind. However, he doesn't have much to do here and is essentially the third wheel to Wexler and Miller.
Neither Haze nor anyone else distinguishes themselves as a performer though. The acting here is generally awkward, and lends the production an oddly intriguing theatricality, as if you are watching a dramatic marionette show. No one seems to know how to speak a line like it hasn't been written or make a move without showing the thought behind it. As a sad sack heroin addict, Allen Kramer is especially wooden, which is unfortunate as he is featured in one of the film's major sequences.
There's a chatty, rambling narration that drones on over much of the action. I'm guessing there's so much of it because it was cheaper to film scenes silent and fill in explanations later, because in many sequences it would have been just as easy to have the characters speak for themselves. In one of the more extended narrative passages, the audience is given a lengthy list of the different names for heroin ("mooch" was a new one for me).
This fascinating clumsiness is at odds with the slick camerawork which lends the action an extra bit of momentum. Fast, sometimes unpredictable edits and eccentrically arranged close-ups add to the uneasy feeling that something is going to go very wrong. These jittery scenes are offset by quirky longshots, like a mesmerizing, if somewhat drawn-out scene of the three boys searching a dump when they have mistakenly discarded the can holding the drugs.
The frantic, but hip West Coast jazz soundtrack is a standout. Performed by The Hollywood Chamber Jazz Group, it's a frenzied compilation of snappy hi-hats and staccato horns.
These stylistic elements, and some interesting Los Angeles area location footage, are the highlights in what is essentially a routine film with little to distinguish it. While the heroin addiction sequence is remarkably frank for an age when even marijuana was barely mentioned on the screen, it is so different from the rest of the film that it barely seems a part of it. It is as if an educational short were dropped in the middle of a teenage delinquent drama.
It feels like the work of filmmakers who have something to offer, but haven't quite worked out what that is yet. Lacking in unique appeal and draggy in spots, the film is worth the watch for fans of Haskell and Kershner.
Many thanks to Warner Archive for providing a copy of the film for review. This is a Manufacture on Demand (MOD) DVD. To order, visit The Warner Archive Collection.
