a bucket of blood [1959]

 

it's sweltering here!  we are having a heatwave.  an unseasonable trough of hot air parked itself over the west coast & man does it feel like summer.  today's high was in the high 80s F [31 C].  we even turned on the AC!  horrors!!!  so what does one do when it is hot hot hot?  open a couple of cold beers & watch movies of course.

this pic is a study of economy & scale.  shot in five days with a meager budget of about a buck & a quarter roger corman was tasked by American International Pictures to make a horor movie.  corman did, but he also created a brisk black comedy of manners, artistry, artists, & beatnik culture.  the great character actor dick miller plays walter paisley, a slow, goofy dude who works as a busboy at a beatnik coffeehouse called The Yellow Door.  paisley is enthralled by the bohemians that inhabit this place.  he wants to be part of their scene.  paisley is also crazyinsane over a fellow coworker at The Yellow Door, the lovely carla, played by barboura morris.  

but how to impress carla & these bohemians?  why, get a chunk of clay & make a sculpture.  but paisley doesn't know how to create a figure from clay.  after a dreadful night slopping coffee cups & emptying ashtrays paisley goes home to his flea-rotten SRO, takes out his slab of clay, & tries to make a face.  frustrated by his ineptitude paisley accidentally kills his landlady's cat, who found itself stuck between two walls.  hey now!  paisley comes up with the brilliant idea to hide the dead cat by covering it in clay.  but now, paisley has a sculpture he calls DEAD CAT.  with the knife he killed it with still stuck in it!

the beatniks, & carla, are gaga over DEAD CAT.  they surround paisley, call him a genius, & want more of his statues.  inspired paisley goes on a killing spree.  the artist as serial killer.  geez, what a trope!  at any rate, corman created one helluva morality tale peppered with moments of extreme black humor with a script by charles b. griffith.  corman wastes not a millimeter of film stock & gets maximum bang for his budget of a buck & a quarter.  the running time is a brisk 66 minutes.  morris is quite lovely & is excellent in this flick.  there's a bit more to the plot than this brief review notes.  such as a subtext of a demimonde drug world that is infiltrated by undercover cops.  or how art as a means of production is a mere commodity to by bought & sold.  or how fame will distort, pervert & make obscene the objects of adoration but also  the people upon who they adore.   clever for what was supposed to be a cheap drive-in horror movie.  

& then but still, the heatwave is still going.  tomorrow the high will be similar to today.  the first day of spring is tomorrow, friday, but man it seems, right now, we skipped spring on started on hard summer.  oh, i'm not complaining.  my walks have been extremely pleasurable.  i love it when i see people outside, at restaurants, walking their dogs, walking, jogging, skateboarding, the whole electric dynamism of living.  & summer, at least, should be hotter than the surface of the sun.  at least it is a dry heat!  

check out a bucket of blood!