A Bucket of Blood

A Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959)

 

"I will talk to you of Art, for there is nothing else to talk about, for there is nothing else. Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of Art. Burn gas buggies, and whip your sour cream of circumstance and hope, and go ahead and sleep your bloody heads off. Creation is, all else is not. What is not creation, is graham crackers; let it all crumble to feed the creator. The Artist is, all others are not. A canvas is a canvas or a painting. A rock is a rock or a statue. A sound is a sound or is music. A preacher is a preacher, or an Artist. Where are John, Joe, Jake, Jim, jerk? Dead, dead, dead. They were not born before they were born, they were not born. Where are Leonardo, Rembrandt, Ludwig? Alive! Alive! Alive! They were born! Bring on the multitude, the multitude of fishes: feed them with the fishes for liver oil to nourish the Artist, stretch their skin upon an easel to give him canvas, crush their bones into a paste that he might mold them. Let them die, and by their miserable deaths become the clay within his hands that he might form an ashtray or an ark. For all that is comes through the eye of the Artist. The rest are blind fish, swimming in the cave of aloneness. Swim on you maudlin, muddling, maddened fools, and dream that one bright and sunny night, some Artist will bait a hook and let you bite upon it! Bite hard - and die! In his stomach you are very close to immortality."

Maxwell H. Brock

 

Feel free to snap your fingers at the crazy, words, man, and order another espresso. But, don't expect it anytime soon because the guy waiting tables, Walter, is a little bit distracted. Because he's surrounded by Art, baby, and internally roiling by his lack of it inside him. He aspires to be an artist...and to get a girlfriend...so don't harsh your mellow if the java's a little cold. You're in the Yellow Door cafe in Venice, California and the hipsters and beatniks are milling and mulling. Looking for the next "thing" to give life meaning and distract them. Because in this milieu if you aren't an artist, you're not anything. Dig?

Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) isn't an artist; he's a busboy. But, the words of all the hep cats extolling art makes him want to be an artist, too. Except he's not good at anything. Not even waiting tables. As the Yellow Door's resident genius (Julian Burton) states (and he doesn't doing anything less than "stating"):"Walter has a clear mind. Some day a thought will enter it, get lonely and leave again."

He gets a block of modeling clay, but although he has a picture of the prettiest girl at the Yellow Door (Barboura Morris), he can't make that clay into the form of what he loves. "Make a nose! Make a nose!" he pleads to the gunk in his hands, but it remains mere clay; something is needed to make the transition from raw material to completed artwork. Fortunately, Walter manages to find it when he accidentally kills the landlady's cat stuck in his stucco wall (unfortunately for the cat). The next day he presents a clay sculpture of a cat with a knife sticking through it (he's basically covered it in clay) and—what do ya know?—the hipsters think it's really good! They dig it (without having to dig anything)!

Oh, the owner of the club (Antony Carbone) gets wind of it—the "sculpture" breaks when it's knocked to the floor after-hours...and the cat's hair pokes through the crack. But, when a potential buyer looking to make an investment in "very important art" makes an offer for the sculpture far exceeding expectations, he's willing to look the other way. But, he sweats Walter's rise in stature...and statuary ("Keep up the good work...but don't RUSH things!"). Especially when Walter starts to bring in life-size...or past-life-size...figurines.

See, one of Walter's admirers, in appreciation, gave Walter a little vial. And when one of the undercover vice-cops (Ed Nelson and...Bert Convy..!!) casing the Yellow Door comes over to Walter's flea-bag apartment and tells him the vial contains "H! Horse! Heroin!" and tells the clueless Walter that he's going to drag him down to the pokey, Walter resists arrest by cracking him over the head with a skillet. But, how is he going to get rid of the body? 

 

He has to get creative.

Shot over five days and with a budget of a mere $50,000, A Bucket of Blood was a cheap horror film made by Corman on demand from the bosses at American International Pictures. The budget was a curse and a strength: with so little money, Corman and his writer Charles B. Griffith could not depend on monsters, effects, or even atmospherics; but with such a small budget, the film couldn't help but make money. So, they based their story on where they were holding their writer meetings—coffee-houses—and twisted the "Mystery of the Wax Museum"-based plot into a black comedy about the morose Beat culture, art pretensions and the skin-thin veneer of both, as well as the craving of status at any cost. That they all merge in as unironic a way as possible is a nice little "dig" at the values of hipsters, whichever coast they may find themselves on.

To maintain his admittedly minor status as an artist, Walter moves from obtaining raw material by accidental death to becoming a serial killer of whoever so much as gives him a stink-eye, and pretty soon, it becomes obvious where the schlubby sculptor gets his talent, and the film devolves into a noir-chase through the back-alleys of L.A. before the final shot of life imitating death.

It doesn't deserve to be as good as it is, but Griffith's script is clever with a lot of call-backs and ironic choices of words and some of the performances are actually better than they deserve to be. I've long been an admirer of Dick Miller, who stars as Walter Paisley* and there are times when his portrayal here has a whiff of Jerry Lewis to it—he'd be a lot more disciplined and funnier, underplaying as a flower-eating customer of Mushnik's Flowers in The Little Shop of Horrors the next year—but his physical acting at times is extraordinary, almost rodent-like initially, and then, when fame comes, flailing in ways both subtle and wild.

Everybody else is good, too, but they have the advantage of playing pretentious "types", so that florid over-acting is par for the personality and under-acting means that that character is merely holding their cards to their vest, dramatically. Also, much of the darker shading of the film is inherent in the beat milieu—the morbidity of folk-music with their subjects of murders down-by-the-river and death-row histrionics is not so out of place in a horror movie and the cynical poetry (which foreshadows events in the film) make the moral ambiguity a bit more reachable. But, a lot of what makes A Bucket of Blood so great happened by accident—there wasn't time for prep!—so, if one of the actors affected a limp or decided to wear sandals with their tuxedo it was just more detail in a project that didn't have the budget to be overstuffed with it.

And Corman makes the budget stretch as credibly as the incredulity allows. Miller groused about how the film would have been better with more budget so that they didn't have to depend on mannequins for the statues and such. True enough (although a bigger-budgeted remake isn't as good...or clever). But, budget can't replace the innovation needed to overcome its lack and it put Corman in the mind-set to make more of making-do, which would stand him in good stead for the rest of his career at AIP, and the many mentors to whom he passed on that ethic.

* He...or his collaborators...would use that name for quite a few Dick Miller characters throughout his career.

...where the title comes from.

 

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961) The year 1547. Francis Barnard (John Kerr) arrives at the Medina stronghold on the coast of Spain from England to inquire into his sister Elizabeth's recent demise. Not so recent to Barnard's shock—she has been dead for three months and he's only recently been informed. "Something in the blood" is the vague cause and that makes him even more suspicious. Perhaps if Catherine Medina (Luana Anders) wasn't so circumspect, and Elizabeth's husband Don Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) wasn't so...peculiarly and demonstrably aggrieved. No matter. Barnard vows not to leave the place until he "knows exactly what has happened here." Despite Medina's overwrought emotions, Barnard cannot be convinced that something suspicious hasn't happened to his sister.

A post-dinner visit by Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) reveals to Barnard that it wasn't some blood disease, but that Elizabeth "died of fright"—a shock to her heart. Nicholas Medina, you see, is the son of Don Sebastian Medina, "one of the Inquisition's most infamous, degraded..." torturers, it seems. And the Medina castle is just as he left it, with a basement torture chamber reeking of the evil "malignant atmosphere of the castle...the barbaric miasma that permeates these walls." Elizabeth was drawn to it, fascinated by it.

In blue-tinted flashbacks, Nicholas tells of the initial happy weeks of marriage between himself and Elizabeth (Barbara Steele), until her moods began to change and he would find her periodically wandering through the basement torture chamber, until one day she was found inside an "iron maiden", quite dead. But, Nicholas may not be entirely trusted, as he himself suffers from a wracked guilt, having witnessed the death of his uncle and mother at the hands of his father, accusing them of infidelity. Dr. Leon adds that although Nicholas' mother may have been tortured, there was speculation that she was entombed alive by his wicked father. That idea has become an obsession with Nicholas, only now it seems to repeat itself as everyone in the castle starts to hear nocturnal harpsichord playing—as Elizabeth once had—possessing the Don to think his late wife's spirit haunts the castle. And him.

Something, indeed, strange is going on, as everyone has heard the playing with Elizabeth's ruby ring found near the keys and Barnard's presence and truculent insistence to get to the truth only inspires more tragedy. He can't leave well enough alone, going so far as to insist that Elizabeth herself may have been prematurely buried—which seems to be born out when they break through her walled-in sarcophagus and find the moldering skeleton of Elizabeth seemingly trying to scratch through her coffin-lid. This drives Nicholas right over the babbling edge.

Although ostensibly the hero of the story, Barnard is, for the story's purposes, more of a useful idiot. It is only appropriate, then, that he should be the potential victim for the setting and device of the title. With Nicholas' mind snapped by Elizabeth's presence, he seems possessed of his torturer-father's mad spirit and straps his nosy antagonist to a slab in the deepest reaches of the castle and starts the elaborate process of lowering a razor-sharp pendulum ever lower to eviscerate his unwanted guest.

However convoluted the way is to get him down there, the sequence in the pit is a genuine nail-biter, with the heavy blade moving alarmingly fast in its swings looking to nearly slam into the camera as it passes near along with a vicious cross-cut editing employed that seems to build with every oscillation of the stroke until the thing threatens to shred Barnard's shirt as it relentlessly moves on its path to disembowel him. In fact, Barnard is such an unsympathetic character that one wouldn't be surprised if he actually does get sliced in two before the end credits.

The script is far more elaborate than the previous effort, House of Usher, had been with less psychic imaginings and more genuine evil informing its plot, with healthy doses of the previous film's curses and cracked psyches and obsession with premature burial. Yes, the cast is still limited...to six major players this time (up from Usher's four) with Price and "Britain's first lady of horror," Barbara Steele, at the start of her film career fresh from Mario Bava's Black Sunday, as the leads (even though Steele has barely six minutes of screen-time, her presence rather haunts the film). Price is allowed to go fully over the top of this one as he fairly jabbers his way into madness thinking himself the reincarnation of his dead father.

But, the movie has less to do with any supernatural evil than it does with the malignancies of evil perpetrated by real flesh-and-blood human beings who just happen to have a mean streak and no compunction to curtail it. In a way, people get the comeuppance they deserve not by spirits but by their own actions There's a genuine plot being perpetrated and those actions only unleash a monster rather than the planned consequences intended. And the final cruelty Matheson has devised is one even Poe might have blanched at—complete and utter uncaring apathy—with a surprise twist in the final shot.

Oh, it's entertaining, alright. And although Price may be going a bit overboard thespianing his way into lip-curling madness, he's fun to watch. But, the skill-level has gained a few notches with much more moody cinematography than the previous Poe film and a third act that's a corker including a line that has seared into my movie-memory forever: "Maximillian, we must break into the torture chamber! Quickly!"

 

You can say that again.

The Pit and the Pendulum was the first AIP Poe film to use 

(and re-use!) these groovy psychedelic graphics