Corman's a bucket of blood morbid whimsy
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Detritus auteur Roger Corman, infamous cobbler of zero-budget trash-classics, splashed a bucket of blood onto silver screens in 1959. By that action, he bridged the chasm between 1940s/'50s suspense and 1970s blood-sprays.
Tilted and unsettling, a bucket of blood surely stands alone amongst celluloid spectacles in imposing opportunities to hoot lustily at Beat-Generation pretensions, and suddenly bolt erect at atrocities sprung from the insecurities and pathetic aspirations obsessing an awkwardly bent bohemian brainpan.
"I will talk to you of art," a bearded Beat poet recites to coffee-house kookaburras, in a semi-comatose monotone. "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. Go ahead and sleep your bloody heads off...What is not creation is graham crackers."
A saxophonist noodles Jazz at the hirsute nut's side, as slouching patrons of the bad paintings-bedecked hipster hangout posture studiously.
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It is this mileau that dithery, pain-featured busboy Walter (actor Dick Miller) aches to be one of the 'in crowd.' As the tale advances, the sadsack kills and kills again -- initially inadvertently, and horrified by his unintended perpetration.
Frustrated to the point of emergent madness, though, by his utter lack of sculpting faculty, Walter hits on a scheme: plaster cadavers in modeling clay, and parade them as objets d'art.
His deceit temporarily accomplishes its mission. Much applause and celebration are lavished on the mousy plate-shlepper. He soon dons outlandish gear and puts on ten and twenty dogs.
(A word on coffee house The Yellow Door: Its garbagy furnishings may well have come from Montgomery Weird. The ambiance is one of calculated misfitism. And the two-legged curiosties sipping java and lauding Beardo's free-verse gobbledygook are to ridicule.)
The cafe's beret-wearing, walking-stick-wielding proprieter eventually catches on to Walter's unspeakable actuality. So do undercover cops who've camouflaged themselves as copycat scenesters. (One masked blue-boy, who Walter later refashions as arty attraction, is played by future game show ringleader Bert Convy.)
During an evening exhibition of Walter's works (there are by this time several dried-clay corpora delecti), the grisly charade becomes apparent, and the chase is on.
In a twinkling, beatniks who'd effectively hoisted him on shoulders only minutes previous, pursued the little cretin. Howls of just-add-water fury disturbed darkness.
The manner in which Walter forever escapes both the bohemian mob and justice will not be disclosed here. There is a lonely rope involved -- engage your imaginations.
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a bucket of blood was hardly the first Roger Corman / Dick Miller collaboration. The pair had joined shoulders a reported 14 times previously. Miller played a soldier in the director's It Conquered the World (1956), and turned up as a policeman in 1979 flick Rock 'n' Roll High School.
His one line, in his one Rock 'n' Roll High School scene: "These Ramones are ugly, ugly people!"
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