Review of A Bucket of Blood (1959) by Anna N — 31 Oct 2007

A slow-witted busboy at a beatnik café wants to become an artist to impress his unrequited love. Unfortunately, he has no talent. The solution? Killing people, covering their corpses in clay, and passing it off as sculpture. Pretty good performances, considering that the actors were making less than nothing, plus an intelligent (and funny) script which mocks the beatnik scene--the king of the beatniks is apparently a pretty accurate mockery of Allan Ginsberg.

According to Hollywood legend (okay, Wikipedia), Roger Corman hyped this movie by declaring on its posters "If you bring an actual bucket of blood to the ticket booth, you will receive free admission". Whether that was ever honoured, anywhere, at a grindhouse theatre is an unanswered question of American cinema.

Note that several of the actors, and at least one or two pieces of music, can be seen again in Corman's 1960 film "Little Shop of Horrors.".

Oh, and one final aside: I didn't find the movie overly scary, but my mother did-- and it frightened the living daylights out of my granny when I watched it with her.