A Bucket of Blood (1959) starring Dick Miller – a horror comedy about a busboy who wants to impress the beatnik artists – but has no talent …
A Bucket of Blood (1959) starring Dick Miller, Barboura Morris
Roger Corman uses A Bucket of Blood to poke fun at the beatnik scene, pretentious artists, and more … All wrapped up in a horror story. The story proper centers around Dick Miller’s Walter – a busboy, who idolizes the various “artists” who frequent the café he works at. Most of them, in return, treat him as lower than dirt — since he’s not an “artist”.
Walter’s not exactly brilliant — and Dick Miller portrays him brilliantly. The audience, initially, empathizes with the social outcast. The trouble begins when he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat. By covering the cat’s corpse in clay, he’s created a lifelike masterpiece — “Dead Cat”. And becomes the center of attention at the cafe. And he soon becomes addicted to the adulation, and one thing leads to another …
Product Description
Dick Miller is Walter Paisley, a nerdy waiter and busboy at a Bohemian cafe teeming with beatniks and colorful hustlers. Paisley is jealous of the swinging social lives of the creative types who hang out at the cafe and wishes he could be a part of their crowd. A twist of fate answers his wish after he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat, covers it in clay, and is heralded as a visionary genius. Paisley’s work of art (titled “Dead Cat”) is such an artistic triumph that he’s inundated with requests for more pieces. When a snoopy undercover cop tries to pin a drug-possession charge on Paisley, the cop finds himself on the wrong end of a cast-iron skillet and Paisley discovers a new way to manufacture his art.
Bucket of Blood, a wildly comedic horror film, is one of the most interesting and original films of Corman’s career and deserves to be regarded as a rediscovered gem. This black-comedy pre-figures another of screenwriter Charles Griffith/Roger Corman collaborations, the much acclaimed The Little Shop of Horrors.
Cast of characters
- Dick Miller (The Terror; The Undead) … Walter Paisley
- Barboura Morris (The Wasp Woman) … Carla
- Antony Carbone (The Pit and the Pendulum) … Leonard de Santis
- Julian Burton … Maxwell H. Brock
- Ed Nelson (Night of the Blood Beast) … Art Lacroix
- John Brinkley … Will
- John Herman Shaner … Oscar
- Judy Bamber … Alice
- Myrtle Vail … Mrs. Swickert (as Myrtle Damerel)
- Bert Convy (Hero At Large) … Lou Raby (as Burt Convy)
- Jhean Burton … Naolia
- Bruno VeSota (The Undead) … Art Collector
- Lynn Storey … Sylvia
