A Bucket of Blood
Directed by Roger Corman
Written by Charles B. Griffith
1959/USA
Alta Vista Productions
First viewing/Netflix rental
[box] Maxwell H. Brock: Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.[/box]
Roger Corman’s send-up of the beat generation has laughs and little blood.
Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is the squarest bus boy Leonard de Santis could have hired for his coffee house. The place is otherwise filled with artists, poets and folk singers, all of a fairly pretentious hyper-cool stripe. Other frequent visitors are undercover agents looking for drug deals. Walter is in love with an artist named Molly but is too shy to declare himself. His life seems to be one humiliation after another.
One day, Walter accidentally kills his landlady’s cat which had somehow wedged himself behind the dry wall. Walter was experimenting with (bad) sculpture at the time and uses the clay to cover his mistake. The resulting object is taken for a sculpture, which he dubs “Dead Cat” and all praise it or its detail and realism. Walter enjoys the only celebrity he has ever known and is desperate to keep it …
This is the first of Corman’s black comedies and as usual the schlockmeister’s films were superior when he directed himself. I didn’t laugh out loud exactly but it was amusing all the way through. He got the poetry, folk singing and pretension exactly right.
Speaking of folk singing, I can’t let another day go by without congratulating Bob Dylan on his Nobel Prize!
