User Reviews

Very funny B movie by Roger Corman about a hapless busboy who works in a fifties coffee shop and wants more than anything to be accepted by the beatnik in-crowd. He is prevented from doing so, however, by his complete lack of artistic talent (not that most of the regulars are particularly gifted either). After accidentally killing his landlady's cat (rigor mortis setting in immediately, apparently), he decides the best way to cover up his crime is to cover the critter with clay and pass it off as avant-garde art. His hep cat customers are blown away; Walter is delighted to be accepted at last; only to hold their interest he has to keep making sculptures…

The film is not particularly scary (and probably wasn't meant to be), but it works very well as a horror spoof and amusing, if occasionally heavy handed, satire on beatnik culture and the modern art scene (although considering that today rotten meat and crucifixes immersed in urine are taken seriously as art it's as though reality has caught up with and outdone satire). The bearded poet Maxwell who writes of cotton gongs and the sour cream of circumstance is, as others have commented, a dead-on parody of the type of writer who to this day can be found at café readings. (He is strangely likable, though, maybe because he is so genuinely enthusiastic about his pretentious poetry). And for some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I thought the final scene where Maxwell leads a bunch of other earnest beatniks in a chase after a now completely crazed Walter one of the funniest episodes I've ever seen in a movie.

If you've never seen a Corman film before, this is a good place to start.

Let's face it. If that darn cat hadn't gotten locked somehow behind a wall and immediately petrified when a knife entered its body, the slow-witted Walter (Dick Miller) wouldn't begin looking around finding other subjects for his art. All he wanted was to be accepted at the beatnik joint where he picked up plates and glasses and did dishes and got abused. For some reason, the purified cat becomes a hit and before long, he's bringing in other statues he's made, all quite life like and all quite frightening to look at, disturbing those who view them but fascinating them as well.

This early Roger Corman film is a terrific cult classic, maybe not a great movie but quite entertaining and very funny in a tongue-in-cheek way. Basically Walter is a sweet guy, and Dick Miller plays the innocence of his character perfectly. For the most part, the people surrounding him are pretty rotten, and the girl who poses sans clothes for him is actually quite nasty to him. She'll live on through the beauty of sculpture, maybe not in the way she'd like, but it's quite amusing to watch her statue being unveiled.

This film moves at a speedy pace, never stuffing it with nonsense footage, just giving us the grit and not the gristle. There's one particularly gruesome scene involving a wood shop but everything is insinuated so there really is no bucket of blood. In fact, I saw no bucket. For films like this, I can't really rate them as good films, but they are fun to watch, a product of a busy imagination that is perhaps a bit sick at times. This will grip you right up to the end as long as you don't end up in a mold of clay yourself.

(There are Spoilers) Roger Corman's 1959 movie about the 1950's Beatnik Generation and a guy who just didn't fit into that exclusive group of artists and intellectuals. Until he found a talent, that he didn't know that he had, that in no time at all made him world famous.

Being a busboy at this beatnik café, The Yellow Door, in Greenwich Village shy and nerdy Walter Paisley, Dick Miller, could only hope to become part of the gang of free living loving and thinking beatniks who patronizes that establishment. Watching and listening to all the great ideas poems and music by the many great minds who spend their time at the hip and swinging Yellow Door Café Walter can only hope that their brilliance would one day rub off on him.

Depressed at the thought that he just about reached his epitome in life as a busboy, and not being that good at it either, Walter finally hears his call one evening in hearing his landlady's cat stuck inside his wall. It's then that Walter in his confused state of mind tries to free the trapped cat with an icepick. The icepick eventually punchers and kills the cat, Frankie, but it also gives Walter, who's playing around with what looks like "Silly Puddy", an idea of hiding the animal's body. Covering it with clay Walter later tries to pawn off the dead and entombed, in clay, feline to his boss Leonard de Santis, Antony Carbone, as a sculpture that he created.

The sight of the cat sculpture, with an icepick stuck in it, just drove de Santis and everyone else at the café wild. This has to be one of the greatest works of art since the the construction of the Eiffel Tower! Everyone including the café poet laureate Maxwell H. Block,Julian Burton, who wouldn't give poor Walter the time of day is now so enamored by his work and talent that he hold Walter, who thinks the world of Maxwell, up as an example of being the ultimate achievement in the long and bumpy road to human creativity and perfection.

As one would expect Walter's blessing, as an artist, in the end turned out to be a curse in making him both swell headed as well as homicidal in creating future works of art. Being slipped an envelope of heroin by one of his now many admirers the goofy and incoherent Naolia, Jhean Burton, Walter is later confronted in his shabby apartment by the undercover cop who saw the transaction Officer Lou Raby, Bert Convy. About to arrest the totally innocent man, how the hell did he know what Naolia slipped him was dope, Raby is smashed over the head with a frying pan by an hysterical Walter killing him.

Walter now uses his new found talent to not only cover up his crime but cover up the dead Officer Raby, with clay, as well. Going on a murder spree in creating more works of art, clay coated human cadavers, Walter plans to kill all those who used to kick him around when he was just a lowly busboy. Walter's next victim is the arrogant and sarcastic Alice,Judy Bamber, who still thinks that he a no-talent fraud. That low opinion of himself by Alice in the end not only hurt Walter's very sensitive feeling but ended up hurting her as well; she became Walters next artistic masterpiece.

***SPOILER ALERT***The end for the by now maniacal, who was so sweet harmless and likable in the beginning, Walter Pailey came at his own hand. Even with all his talent and popularity Walter still couldn't get his fellow café worker the pretty waitress Carla, Barboura Morris,to both fall in love and marry him. It's not that Walter wasn't suffering from being rejected, as her husband and lover, by Carla it was that he felt that now being the big man that he is she rejected not only him but his work as an artist as well! That in effect demanded from him immediate and deadly payback.

It was that now that Walter finally made a name for himself as a world renowned artist and sculptor he was treated by his love from afar Carla as the simple-minded adolescent, Carla looked down at Walter as if he were her kid or baby brother, that he really is! That in the end finally drove the very unstable Walter over the edge together with his both promising and murderous future in the world of Art.

Before there was "The Little Shop of Horrors," there was "A Bucket of Blood" a year earlier. Dick Miller, the hungry flower-eater in the former film is the star of "A Bucket..." He plays Walter Paisley, an inept moronic busboy who works at a very hip beatnik coffee shop and dreams of becoming one of the artists who frequent the establishment. Through a quirk of fate, it doesn't take very long before Walter joins this select group of pretentious phonies. He accidentally kills his landlady's cat and then covers it with plaster to hide his boneheaded mistake. When this "masterpiece" somehow makes its way to the beatnik haunt, Walter is soon hailed as the next great sculptor of the 20th century. Carla (played by Barboura Morris) becomes his chief benefactor and enthusiastically encourages him to take up sculpture as a career. But for Walter to create more "great art," he needs more dead bodies. Future game-show host Bert Convy is unfortunately next on the list. The body count piles up until Walter is finally revealed for what he really is: not only a complete idiot, but a criminally insane one. "A Bucket of Blood" is played mostly for laughs by director Roger Corman, and with its shoestring budget, he really has no choice. Ed Nelson, later of "Peyton Place," shows up as a nosy cop investigating the demise of poor Mr. Convy. I don't think Ed ever wanted this one to pop up on his resume. Lead actor Dick Miller was assigned to mostly bit parts after this "classic" although he later appeared in the original "Terminator" as the fellow who sells firearms to the wrong guy. Ms. Morris, who had some potential as an actress, died relatively young. Of course, Corman went on to make a slew of biker movies and adapted a number of Edgar Allan Poe works that probably made that literary master roll over in his own grave. But longevity has a way of making one respectable. Corman is now hailed as a great innovator of the cinema and was recently featured on TCM. I guess if you can make a movie like "A Bucket of Blood" in less than a week and for $50,000, you deserve some notoriety. Yes, Corman was the king of the "B" movies in the 1960s. But he never made anything that came within a country mile of an "A" film. When all is said and done, Corman will probably be best remembered for being the first director to give Jack Nicholson a role.