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  USA. 1959. Director/Producer – Roger Corman, Screenplay – Charles B. Griffith, Photography (b&w) – Jacques Marquette, Music – Fred Hatz, Art Direction – Daniel Haller. Production Company – Alta Vista Cast: Dick Miller (Walter Paisley), Barboura Morris (Carla), Anthony Carborne (Leonard), Julian Barton (Brock), Ed Nelson (Art Lacroix), John Brinkley (Will), Myrtle Damerel (Mrs Surchart), Judy Bamber (Alice), Burt Convy (Lou Raby), Jhean Burton (Naolia)  

A Bucket of Blood was made on one of Roger Corman’s usual shoestring budgets and naturally shot in five days. The film has only a 65-minute running time. It was a precursor to Corman’s no-budget black comedic mini-gem The Little Shop of Horrors, which was also written by Charles B. Griffith and featured Dick Miller. Here Charles B. Griffith revamps and gives a satiric contemporary spin to the classic Grand Guignol horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), which featured Lionel Atwill as a mad wax museum curator encasing dead bodies in wax. Mystery of the Wax Museum had been remade a few years earlier in 3-D as the highly successful vehicle House of Wax (1953) with Vincent Price (who would become Roger Corman’s principal leading man the following year). There were several other efforts around the same period that borrowed the same notion of artists using real bodies in their work, including Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Color Me Blood Red (1965), Blood Bath (1966), Nightmare in Wax (1969), Sadisterotica (1969), Cauldron of Blood (1971) and Crucible of Terror (1971).

Corman and Charles B. Griffith’s interpretation of the idea is as a gleeful black comedy that happily jibes at the pretensions of the Beat Generation. The idea is amusing, although the script is told with a minimalist economy that brings a smile rather than a genuine laugh. As yet, Corman and Griffith have not taken the idea to the level of Little Shop of peopling the film with a cast of deadpan eccentric characters and most of the show is played straight. It tends to be more frenetic running around than it does laugh-out-loud gags. It is a cute idea, although essentially only a one-gag film – however, the brief running time means that the film never wears out its welcome. Dick Miller plays with likeably nebbish lunacy. He is like a little boy that you cannot help but dislike, even when he is killing people.

Dick Miller and the character he plays have become a running in-joke in the genre parodies of the 1980s, particularly the films of Joe Dante, with Miller usually always playing someone named Walter Paisley. Direct appearances of Miller as Walter Paisley include The Howling (1980), Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), Chopping Mall (1986), Night of the Creeps (1986) and Shake, Rattle and Rock (1994).

The film was later remade as A Bucket of Blood (1995), one of the cable tv movies presented under the umbrella title Roger Corman Presents, starring Anthony Michael Hall in the role of Walter Paisley. In the same way that The Little Shop of Horrors was successfully revived as a musical, this film was later revived in musical form as A Bucket of Blood (2009).

Roger Corman’s other genre films are:- Day the World Ended (1955), It Conquered the World (1956), Not Of This Earth (1956), War of the Satellites (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Journey to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957), The Undead (1957), Teenage Caveman (1958), The Wasp Woman (1959), The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Last Woman on Earth (1960), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), Tower of London (1962), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Raven (1963), The Terror (1963), X – The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), The Trip (1967), Gas; or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970) and Frankenstein Unbound (1990).