With the recent passing of Sid Haig, I
dived into his early career for this week's pick. Since I posted
about Spiderbaby – the obvious choice – back in 2010, I went with
1966's Blood Bath.
A string of disappearances in a seaside
town may have something to do with an eccentric artist named Sordi
(William Campbell) known for painting portraits of “dead red
nudes”.
At just over an hour long, Blood Bath
was an entertaining enough slice of cult Americana. It featured all
the hallmarks of Roger Corman & Jack Hill's sixties oeuvre, along with
sprinkles of House of Wax and H.G Lewis' Color Me Blood Red, the
latter of which was released a year previous. I also detected perhaps
the finale may have inspired Bill Lustig when it came to end his
seminal flick Maniac. Additionally, I was struck by the scenery and
locale that I later learned was Yugoslavia. This was one of the few
times that I have wished a black & white picture was filmed in
colour.
I found it funny that even in the
sixties, people were making fun of the art world's latent pretentiousness. It was amusing to watch and you can tell they were having fun
with it. However, I cannot fail to mention that a good chunk of the movie is
scantily clad women running around on the beach. Because, you know, it is a Corman/Hill production. Those swimsuits on Lori Saunders were
hanging on for dear life, but truth be told what made more excitable was watching her try to cut bread.
I was a little taken aback when the vampire
showed up, as it seemed to come out of
nowhere. Of course, I found out later that this picture was really
three movies in one. Originally, it was an unreleasable picture from
Yugoslavia called Portrait of Terror, for which Jack Hill then shot
new scenes (including the stuff with Sid Haig) and became Blood Bath.
Then, Corman employed a director named Stephanie Rothman to add in all the vampire stuff. This all resulted in it being a somewhat disjointed,
yet still watchable affair.
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Sig Haig (2nd from left) in Blood Bath. |
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