“A Bucket of Blood” A Corman Classic

Don’t worry, there’s very little blood and no bucket, just a very funny movie that made fun of the Beatnik movement that was happening at the time.  Watch A Bucket of Blood –  HERE.

  • Film critics Wade Major and Mark Keizer talk about the 1969 Roger Corman classic, A Bucket of Blood
  • Hear the prank Mark and Wade tried to pull on the LA Critics Association.
  • Listen to Wade and Mark on the great movie podcast IGN Digigods.

A frustrated and talentless artist (Dick Miller) finds acclaim for a plaster covered dead cat that is mistaken as a skillful statuette. Soon the desire for more praise leads to an increasingly deadly series of works.

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Here’s a little background of “A Bucket of Blood:”

From WikiPedia:

A Bucket of Blood is a 1959 American comedy horror film directed by Roger Corman. It starred Dick Miller and was set in beatnik culture. The film, produced on a $50,000 budget, was shot in five days, and shares many of the low-budget filmmaking aesthetics commonly associated with Corman’s work  Written by Charles B. Griffith,A Bucket of Blood is a dark comic satire  about a socially awkward young busboy at a Bohemian café who is acclaimed as a brilliant sculptor when he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and covers its body in clay to hide the evidence. When he is pressured to create similar work, he becomes murderous.

A Bucket of Blood was the first of three collaborations between Corman and Griffith in the comedy genre, followed by The Little Shop of Horrors, which was shot on the same sets as A Bucket of Blood, and Creature from the Haunted Sea. Corman had made no previous attempt at the genre, although past and future Corman productions in other genres incorporated comedic elements.A Bucket of Blood is a satire not only of Corman’s own films, but also of the art world and teen films of the 1950s. The film is noted as well in many circles as an honest, undiscriminating portrayal of the many facets of Beatnik culture, including art, dance and style of living. The plot has similarities to Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). However, by setting the story in the Beat milieu of 1950s Southern California, Corman creates an entirely different mood from the earlier film.

A Bucket of Blood was remade in 1995 as a made-for-television film for the Showtime network. The character name of Walter Paisley has been adapted by actor Dick Miller as an in-joke in productions such as The Howling and Shake, Rattle and Rock!, which credit otherwise unrelated characters played by Miller under the character name.