Classic Horrors Club

Would you like to play a game? I’m going to share my notes about Blood Bath (1966) before I read anything about it. I thought it would be fun to see how my impressions match my subsequent research. For example, it’s an American International Pictures (AIP) production from 1966, written and directed, in part, by Jack Hill. Roger Corman’s name must be on it somewhere, right?

The other writer/director is Stephanie Rothman. Could that explain the schizophrenic nature of the movie? It opens with the beautifully dark and shadowy streets and alleys of Venice. A cloaked figure attacks a woman on the street, then drags her body into a nearby convertible as other people pass, pretending that they’re making out. And did I see fangs on the attacker when his face was revealed?

However, the next scene is static in what I’d call a beatnik cafe. Three artists stare at a ticking metronome with a fake eyeball on the tip of the arm. Max (Karl Schanzer) demonstrates his “quantum gun,” a device that splats paint on a portrait of Daisy Allen (Marissa Mathes). It makes the artists ooh and ahh but doesn’t please the subject of the painting, who storms away from her boyfriend, Max.

There’s then hope of connecting tissue when a woman enters the bar, which I guess is also a gallery, and asks about purchasing a “dead red nude” from a hot new artist, Antonio Sordi (William Campbell). His paintings, of which we’ll see more later in a shop window, feature naked women that have been killed in gruesome fashion, often with the weapons of their demise protruding from their bodies.

About this time, I was getting vibes of A Bucket of Blood (1959.) In that one, an amateur artist becomes a serial killer who covers his victims’ bodies in clay to sell them as sculptures. The vibes became stronger as we learn that Sordi is doing the same thing with his paintings: killing naked women who pose for him in a studio inside a clock tower. Interspersed are occasional angled shots of the giant bell tolling.

Let’s see how well I’m doing so far. Yes, Corman is the uncredited executive producer of Blood Bath. He also apparently played Sordi in a flashback, also uncredited. Yes, nine minutes of footage was taken from another film, Portrait in Terror (1968.) Hill shot all the new scenes that featured Campbell and most of the scenes with the beatniks. Rothman shot all the vampire footage.

Further contributing to the schizophrenia is that fact that Corman had produced a Yugoslavian spy thriller in 1963 called, Operation: Titian. Unreleasable on its own, footage from it was incorporated into Portrait in Terror. And while there’s no direct evidence of a connection to A Bucket of Blood, at one point in the saga, the script was about a sculptor, not a painter.

Idiosyncrasies identified and verified, there are a few interesting ideas here and there. Sordi is a descendant of a notorious painter with a similar modus operandi who was burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft. The spirit of the mistress who betrayed him haunts modern day Sordi through his paintings. Interest becomes confusion, though, because I don’t understand his need to summon her. How is she supposed to help him?

The climax features the discovery of all the bodies in the clock tower studio; however, why are they covered in plaster instead of… Ah, now I see where that comes from. Unless Sordi dabbles in sculpture, a hobby we never see him practice, it’s footage from some other variation of the story. Corman and company have combined bits and pieces of multiple movies before, but Blood Bath is not the most successful attempt at it.

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