A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Talent and good looks rarely go together. Dick Miller had the bad luck to combine a blue-collar face with a blue-collar voice, and suffered for it throughout his career. Such people are rarely successes in "leading" roles. Charles Bronson comes to mind, but he's barely a good actor. Miller is genuinely talented.His Walter Paisley (at one point the character wears a cravat with a paisley pattern) is played absolutely straight. He never winks at the camera or steps outside the character. He's a pathetic creature we sympathize with, even when doing horrible things. It is a finely nuanced, essentially perfect performance. That is not an exaggeration.Charles B Griffith's excellent script combines pointed satire, solid laughs, and genuine wit. Griffith did a lot of work for Roger Corman, and this is surely his best. The lesson to be learned is that you can't make a good movie from a bad script, but not even Roger Corman can ruin a good story.Griffith would go on to pen "The Little Shop of Horrors", which Dick Miller passed on, because he didn't want to do another film where he played a serial killer. This didn't help his career much, and today he's best-remembered as Mr Futterman in "Gremlins" and its sequel, as well as one of Lawrence Woolsey's cronies in "Matinee!". He is a beloved actor, and there aren't many actors, living or dead, who can claim that distinction.

This is a film I have forgotten about until I started watching it again. I remember this film. It's actually a cool art-house comedy-horror film. I find it to be more of a decent horror than comedy but there are a few funny moments in it.It all started with a dead cat - an accidental death of his landlady's cat. The cat was covered in plaster to cover up the evidence. It is considered "brilliant" art and highly praised... soon after people began to disappear and more "brilliant" works of art appear.This is a pretty good film to kick back and enjoy for a fun watch one boring afternoon. It's not a "must see" film - but it's an enjoyable film for those interested in black comedies and horror.7/10

his movie made by Roger Corman in 1959 starts off with a guy doing poetry in an old coffee shop. The main character is a busboy named Walter, played by Dick Miller. Also there's an undercover cop that hangs out out at the coffee shop, as a way to scope out criminals.Walter tries to do sculptures at but doesn't quite know what to do. Until he tries to get a cat out of his wall but ends up killing it. He decides to sculpt over the cat and tries to put it in the coffee shop. The people seem to like the sculpture even though it doesn't seem to stink. Also the cat would be heavy even with clay on it. Everyone at the coffee shop seems to like it but the undercover cop is suspicious about it.This woman at the coffee shop gives Walter a little tube of something and he takes it with him. A guy then follows him to his home and tells him he's an undercover cop. Also that he's under arrest for position of heroine since that's what was in the tube. Walter ends up killing him since he doesn't want to go so he kills him.The owner of the coffee shop finds out Walter's first sculpture was fake when it falls. He tries to call the cops but the buyer gives him a lot of money for it. Walter then shows the owner and this girl he likes his new sculpture. Which is the cop guy just sculpted over and the girl suggests a collection of his sculptures. Walter then is happy when he gets money for his sculptures and that he's an artist, even though he murdered someone.Walter then kills a woman at his home after a fight they had at the coffee shop then sculpts over her as well. All the coffee shop people like him and like more sculptures. So he ends up killing a random guy for another sculpture.Walter then one night asks the girl she likes to marry him but she refuses. He then asks to sculpt her after his collection exhibit show and she find out they're fake and people. After Walter chases the girl the people at the art show find out the sculptures are people as well. The undercover cop and some of the coffee shop people chase Walter and try to find him.At the end he hears the voices of the people he murders and at his home he still hears them. So he ends up hanging himself as his greatest work and to stop. This movie seems pretty good for a Roger Corman movie and it's mostly a black comedy.

Awkward and possibly mentally challenged, Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is desperate for love and respect. He works at a hipster cafe frequented by impossibly pretentious people and yearns to fit in. He is rejected as staid and hopelessly straight by its patrons and is largely viewed with pity. One day, he stumbles across a devilish way to make realistic sculptures, something he can't do ordinarily and his work is a big hit at the cafe. Walter's never had adulation and regard like this before and he realizes this is his ticket to popularity. How fully he realizes this becomes dreadfully clear as the film goes on. This is a pitch black satire of the cluelessness of hipsters. The cafe's owner Leonard de Santis (Anthony Carbone, who looks remarkably like Humphrey Bogart) realizes what a monster Walter is but doesn't intervene right away. Walter is a remarkable mix of slow and lonely and this makes him ripe for the the depredations to which he increasingly succumbs. In this day and age a decent attorney would claim that Walter was not fully responsible for his actions because of his low IQ, but I don't imagine that claim would have held up as well in 1959.In any case, Walter's fame grows as he continues to lose it. The hipsters don't smell a rat. Corman obviously takes great glee in mocking this. The clueless hipster is most perfectly embodied by Maxwell (an excellent, stentorian Julian Brock), a beard-wearing, abstract poet who is so enchanted by Walter's "work" that he holds a party in his honor and writes a poem for him!The beautifully ironic thing about this film is that the one character who most sees through Walter's inability as a sculptor is the most cold-eyed and callous character, Alice (Judy Bamber). She questions Walter's ability and by that time he is so well-regarded that his adoring fans savage HER for her lack of sophistication! That she and the relatively cool- headed cafe owner Leonard are the only ones who see through Walter is hilarious. Corman apparently shot this film in 5 days and for $50,000 and it's only 66 minutes long, but what a punch it packs! A scabrously funny script, some excellent acting, and no happy ending. If you like your comedy dark, this is one for you.