Thanks to Joe Bob Briggs and The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, I’ve finally experienced some film inspirado.  To celebrate seventy—yes, seventy (70)—years of filmmaking, Joe Bob and Darcy the Mail Girl hosted a special live edition of the show to honor Roger Corman.

For the uninitiated, Roger Corman is the king of the B movies.  He’s made anywhere from 500-700 films; one source of the disputed figure is that Corman himself doesn’t know how many films he’s made!  Casual fans most likely know Corman from 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors, which was filmed on the same sets as this week’s film, A Bucket of Blood (1959).  Tonally and narratively, the two films are very similar (as a fun aside, The Little Shop of Horrors was the first flick I watched on Shudder).

To get a sense for Corman’s influence on Hollywood and filmmaking in general, Here is a bit of the episode of The Last Drive-In in which actor Bruce Dern waxes poetic about Corman’s influence.  Corman never lost money on any film he made (with the exception of one arthouse film he made largely for himself, which eventually did become profitable almost twenty years after its release), primarily because he worked fast and cheap.  Corman would cut films to 77 minutes because he would only have to ship four film cannisters to drive-ins and theaters instead of five.  He’d reuse sets, make one person look like hundreds, etc.

As for the movie itself, A Bucket of Blood is just 65 minutes in length, but it feels like the appropriate length—and it feels like a complete movie, because it is.  Corman tells the story of busboy Walter Paisley efficiently and effectively.

And what a story!  Paisley is a put-upon busboy at a popular Beatnik café.  He wants to be an artist and to gain the attention of the Beatniks—and of a girl who frequents the coffeeshop.  One night while attempting to make a sculpture he accidentally stabs his landlord’s cat.  Rather than dispose of the body properly, he covers it in modeling clay.

The next day, he presents the clay-covered cat—with a knife still stuck into its side!—to his employer and the object of his affection.  The girl enthuses over its morbid brilliance, and soon Paisley is the talk of the scene.  What transpires is a comedy of errors that see Paisley turn to murder in order to create more sculptures, rising to the heights of artistic stardom before his dark secret is uncovered.

The film is played comedically, and it works well in this regard.  Paisley takes it for granted that people understand his method, and mistakes their encouragement as a license to commit more murders.

The film also serves as a brilliant satire of the Beat scene, and of the pretensions its practitioners maintained.  The film even opens with a Ginsburg-esque poetry reading while a saxophonist plays freeform jazz behind it (something yours portly has actually done—d’oh!).  The poet, Maxwell, is the biggest champion of Paisley’s work (although he does not know how it is made), and gives many flowery recitations that work their way into Paisley’s impressionable, eager-to-please mind.

The film is a dark comedy, but it’s on the lighter side—a grey comedy, perhaps?  It’s strengths are its portrayal of the 1950s Beat subculture and the played-straight comedy laced throughout the film.  As a regular participant (during the summer months, at least) at many open mics, the coffee shop culture, with its cast of eccentric characters, added to my personal enjoyment of the film.  The characters depicted are quite true-to-life, even in 2024.

I highly recommend this film as a fun look at Corman’s early work.  I think it’s even better than Little Shop of Horrors, but as they’re essentially the same story, pick your poison (or, in this case, murder weapon).