Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) shows off his debut artistic creation, “Dead Cat,” at the Yellow Door in A BUCKET OF BLOOD

A BUCKET OF BLOOD (Roger Corman, 1959)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, August 29, 9:00, and Tuesday, September 1, 7:15
Series runs through September 3
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org

Writer Charles B. Griffith and producer and director Roger Corman skewer — and we do mean skewer — beatnik culture, the elitist art world, and their very own horror genre in the freaky-fun satire A Bucket of Blood. Inspired by Michael Curtiz’s 1933 The Mystery of the Wax Museum and André de Toth’s 1953 3D classic House of Wax and adding more than a dash of Macbeth, Griffith and Corman tell the lurid tale of one Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), a relatively simple-minded busboy at the Yellow Door, a smoky bohemian nightclub in San Francisco, where pre-Williamsburg hipster Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton) recites his poetry and hobnobs with his adoring fans. “I will talk to you of art, for there is nothing else to talk about, for there is nothing else,” Brock says over the opening credits, looking directly into the camera. “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!” Maxwell’s bloviating words impress Walter, who repeats them to himself as he is determined that he, too, will become an artist. Back at home, Walter is trying to make a clay bust of club hostess Carla (Barboura Morris, who later appeared in The Wasp Woman and The Trip), who he has a crush on, but he is interrupted by the meows of a cat trapped in the wall. In trying to free the cat, Walter accidentally stabs it to death, then decides to cover it in clay (leaving the knife in it) and show it off at the club so he can join the prestigious ranks of the art world. (No one quite gets the irony of his having killed a cat, hipster slang for a supposed cool person.) He is indeed celebrated by Maxwell, Carla, and most of the others, except for his boss, Leonard (Antony Carbone), who is suspicious of Walter’s sudden talent but doesn’t mind making a quick buck off his employee. Also keeping a close eye on things are undercover cops Art Lacroix (Peyton Place star Ed Nelson) and Lou Raby (game show host Bert Convy, billed as “Burt” Convy), who are looking to make some drug busts. Walter’s instant success goes straight to his addled little head, so soon he is creating disturbing statues of, well, let’s just say people start going missing in the neighborhood. Walter is determined to no longer be ignored, but it’s all liable to fall apart at any moment, like so much broken clay.

Shot in five days in black-and-white for $50,000 on existing sets (some of which would be used again for Griffith and Corman’s next comedy, the somewhat similarly themed Little Shop of Horrors), A Bucket of Blood suffers from the whirlwind production schedule and extremely low budget — Miller has since complained that there wasn’t enough time or money to prepare a proper finale, and he’s right — but it’s still a hoot, a playful stab at many of the genre conventions that Griffith (The Wild Angels, Eat My Dust!) and Corman (The Pit and the Pendulum, The Terror) established working for American International Pictures. This horror comedy is extremely creepy and very funny, with a superb lead performance by Miller, a distinctive, longtime character actor who would actually play men named Walter Paisley in several later films (including Joe Dante’s The Howling and Jim Wynorski’s Chopping Mall) as an homage to his triumph here. You can feel his every twisted emotion as he tries so hard to become an artist and capture Carla’s romantic attention and help them and others reach immortality. Photographed by Jacques R. Marquette and featuring a Twilight Zone–like score and pace (the Rod Serling series began the same year), A Bucket of Blood well deserves its cult status as a camp classic. A Bucket of Blood is screening August 29 and September 1 in Anthology Film Archives’ three-part tribute to American International Pictures, the first section of which continues through September 3 with such other cult faves as Ray Milland’s Panic in Year Zero!, Edward L. Cahn’s The She-Creature, and Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and The Tomb of Ligeia, with star Elizabeth Shepherd in person.