Because of their chintzy budgets and on-the-fly productions,
early Roger Corman efforts like Attack of
the Crab Monsters came off more like parodies than the director probably intended
them to be. With A Bucket of Blood,
Corman and screenwriter Charles B. Griffith embraced the goofiness and
transformed what could have been a serious low-budget horror about an artist
who incorporates corpses into his work into the first great Corman/Griffith
horror comedy. With the wonderfully sympathetic Dick Miller as Walter Paisley,
a nebbish who aspires to be as much of an “artist” as the pretentious beatniks who
frequent the coffee bar where he waits tables, A Bucket of Blood isn’t as outrageous as The Little Shop of Horrors, the film in which the Corman/Griffith
magic fully blossomed (a-hem), but it
is amusing and sometimes fairly horrifying. Its plot could have been ripped
right from the pages of The Vault of
Horror (in fact, it shares quite a few similarities to “Easel Kill Ya” from
The Vault), and its cartoonish approach
to dialogue, characterization, and design also has the feel of a live-action
E.C. comic without the color.
The Film Detective’s new blu-ray presents that comic
aesthetic quite well. Like so many of Corman’s early films, A Bucket of Blood is in the public
domain and has been subjected to a lot of lousy home video releases. The Film
Detective should be commended for going to the original 35mm source, especially
in light of all the ninth-generation crap out there. Appearances of tiny white
specks are fairly regular, but they aren’t especially intrusive and there are no
major scratches to speak of. No edge enhancement has been applied to sharpen
the naturally soft look. The film looks its best when there are strong blacks
on screen to contrast the more washed-out whites. The mono audio is clear,
which is especially complimentary to the cool jazz score, though there is a
constant buzzing undercurrent noticeable during the music-less passages. There
are no bonuses, but considering that A
Bucket of Blood probably wasn’t high on any other home video company’s
to-do lists, it’s groovy that it has received an HD release at all.
