A Bucket of Blood

There are two movies coming up in quick succession on TCM that are on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before, so one of them is going to get a post almost two days in advance. That's also in part because I'd like to space out the horror movies a bit more in October, and it looks as though I've got more coming up than I'd planned. So today I'm going to blog about a black comedy horror: A Bucket of Blood, which will be on TCM at 7:15 AM on October 6.

Roger Corman directed, and I had this one on the DVR from the Corman tribute back in July. The intro even included a bit from a sit-down with Ben Mankiewicz that Corman did I think in 2016; I wasn't paying as close attention to it as I might otherwise have since I think that bit was appended to the previous movie.

Frequent Corman bit player Dick Miller is the star here. He plays Walter Paisley, who is a busboy at The Yellow Door, a nightclub run by Leonard (Anthony Carbone), who is part of the local beatnik scene. (Anyone know just how common beatniks were? I've seen quite a few movies from the late 1950s that portray beatniks, but I don't know how many people actually followed the lifestyle.) Walter isn't respected by anybody, but he has dreams of being an artist and is taken by the bohemian beatnik artists that populate the club.

Walter goes back to his crappy apartment and tries to sculpt a bust of Carla, who is one of the habitues of the Yellow Door and for whom Walter has an unrequited love. But Walter has no talent. Worse, he hears the cries of his landlady's cat, who has more or less gone missing again, or at least the landlady is looking for the cat. Walter eventually deduces that the cat has got itself stuck in the wall, so fetches a knife to cut out the drywall to free the cat. Unfortunately, he accidentally stabs the cat to death.

Even though it was an accident, Walter most certainly is to blame. But this gives him an idea. In order not to have to tell the landlady what really happened, he'll cover the cat in clay and pass it off as a sculpture. And somehow, doing this actually makes a surprisingly lifelike sculpture. Not only that, but all of the beatniks where Walter works are taken with the sculpture because, well, they're wackos who could be taken with anything. Some of the suggest he sculpt a nude.

This, as you might guess, is where the plot of A Bucket of Blood goes around the bend. Walter is given some heroin by one of the patrons, and a cop (future game show host Bert Convy, credited as Burt) follows Walter back to the apartment because War on Drugs. Walter, thinking he's about to get shot, kills the cop in what he thinks is self-defense, and them turns the cup into a sculpture which amazingly preserves the death agony. More requests for sculptures, which means more killing, follow.

Objectively, A Bucket of Blood isn't a very good movie. Roger Corman had a very tiny budget, and the movie looks cheap. But the premise is so much fun, even if it isn't all that original -- Mystery of the Wax Museum was 25 years before this and had already been remade once. Corman's taking the idea and setting it against the beatnik subculture also turns the material from straight horror to some sort of ridiculous satire, which only heightens the fun.

There's no masterpiece in A Bucket of Blood, yet boy is it entertaining.