Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
A Bucket of Blood
A busboy at a beatnik café becomes the sculptor of the season. His materials are the problem.
Corman and Charles B. Griffith shot this in under a week on a coffeehouse set, and aimed it squarely at the people who might sneer at it: the poets, the collectors, the critics who praise what they do not look at. Dick Miller gives Walter Paisley a hunger for approval that is sad before it is funny, and the film never lets you off by making him a monster. It is a satire of the art world that is also a working horror picture. Watch the opening: a bearded poet reads to camera, and the whole film is in his first lines.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Roger Corman
- Photographed by
- Jacques R. Marquette
- With
- Ed Nelson · Dick Miller · Paul Horn · Bruno VeSota · Bert Convy
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
The same writer, the same director and the same joke, a year apart: an underdog who becomes a success by feeding the customers something terrible. Dick Miller is the busboy-sculptor in the first and the flower-eating customer in the second.