Recycling Corman and 1995's A BUCKET OF BLOOD

In the 1960s and 1970s, Roger Corman established himself as the king of drive-in cinema, producing a seemingly endless stream of genre flicks made for minimal budgets and jump-starting the careers of future luminaries like Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, and Ron Howard.  By the 1990s, however, the titan of tightwads was losing relevancy.  The theatrical market for genre films was fading, and the video market was emerging with countless new competitors that looked the same as a Corman production to the customer on a video store shelf.

Corman’s New Concorde pictures was certainly prolific in this era, churning out innumerable erotic thrillers, Philippines-lensed action pics, family comedies and quickie horror franchises for the direct-to-video market.  While none of them became genuine classics like DEATH RACE 2000 or BOXCAR BERTHA, there were points of interest that stood above the standard product if only due to Corman’s hands-off policies that stated that as long as a film contained the prerequisite violence and T&A, a director could basically do what they wanted.  

Corman also took a curious tactic during this time period – revisiting proven hits in an attempt to bring them to a new audience.  Theatrically, this took the form of sequels, with unwanted revisitings of well-received Corman offerings like ROCK’N’ROLL HIGH SCHOOL FOREVER, SATURDAY THE 14^TH STRIKES BACK and HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD II getting minimal theater playdates before being dumped to video and being ignored.  When Corman struck a deal with pay-TV channel Showtime to produce a series of “Roger Corman Presents” films, he took the opportunity again, this time making direct remakes of the marketable would-be franchises PIRANHA, HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, WASP WOMAN, NOT OF THIS EARTH (already remade by Corman a few years earlier) and A BUCKET OF BLOOD ostensibly for the television market but soon indistinguishable from any of the straight-to-video product of the time.

(This wasn’t the limit of Corman’s recycling.  Even ‘80s titles were fair game for the remake mill, under the idea that viewers wouldn’t notice the same script being used again.  Katt Shea’s 1990 film STREETS was remade as 1996’s RUMBLE IN THE STREETS, 1994’s ANGEL OF DESTRUCTION is a gender-swapped remake of 1992’s BLACKBELT, the script for 1989’s gothic romance DANCE OF THE DAMNED was back in 1994’s TO SLEEP WITH A VAMPIRE, and 1982’s FORBIDDEN WORLD became 1991’s DEAD SPACE.  I’d roughly estimate that at least half of Corman’s 90s films were created from screenplays that had already been made into films.)

The decision to remake A BUCKET OF BLOOD was an especially questionable one.  The original 1959 film, featuring Dick Miller as a dim-witted busboy in a beatnik bar who becomes an sensation of the hipster art world when he accidentally kills a cat and immerses it in plaster, is one of Corman’s cleverest films, but it’s one very rooted in the beatnik era.  While it’s highly entertaining as it pokes fun at artist clichés, it’s very reliant on the dialogue and the performance of Miller to make it work.

The remake, directed by future “Mad TV” regular Michael McDonald (and, at the time, a Corman film staple), changes the setting to the early ‘90s coffee house scene, but otherwise doesn’t tamper with the plot.  Some minor nudity is added, and there’s a bit more gore, but for the most part, the basic structure of the original classic is left intact.  Heck, even some of the dialogue is done verbatim, including an opening beat poem this time read by Shadoe Stevens, in fine form as one of the coffee house’s regular patrons.

Missing, however, is Miller’s entertaining Walter Paisley, whose affable loser persona is replaced by Anthony Michael Hall as a more grim, aloof Paisley, a character that’s not nearly engaging enough to carry the film.  It’s a strange decision, and one that keeps the 1995 A BUCKET OF BLOOD from being more than a pale shadow of the original.  While the original feels like a satire in which a likeable oaf finds himself in an increasingly hard-to-pull-off lie surrounded by over-the-top characters, the remake just feels like a bitter, angry, and rather dumb frustrated artist getting revenge on the clearly satirical characters around him.  It’s a role that’s meant to be played for comedy, or at least sympathy, and Hall plays Paisley as though he’s ten minutes from writing a manifesto against those who wronged him.

It’s even more puzzling as virtually everything else about the film seems to be on a satirical page.  From the Wurst Brothers’ jazzy score to goofy “avant-garde” performance art to the minor characters played by the likes of David Cross, Will Farrell, Jennifer Coolidge, Paul Bartel, Mink Stole, Alan Sues and Patrick Bristow (this aired the same month that SHOWGIRLS, featuring Bristow yelling at Elizabeth Hurley’s pelvis, was released) to co-star Justine Bateman’s ridiculous German-Italian accent, everyone involved seems to be aware that A BUCKET OF BLOOD is supposed to be a comedy.  Unfortunately, nobody let Hall in on the joke.

Box art courtesy IMDb.com

After airing on Showtime, the film was released to video by Corman’s own New Concorde films.  Curiously, the film was retitled THE DEATH ARTIST, with a cover eschewing any reference to the original film or the fact that the movie itself is a satire.  Bereft of any context for its existence and indistinguishable from countless erotic thrillers, the film, like most of Corman’s other remakes of the era, vanished into cultural oblivion, never even getting a DVD release.

It’s not even particularly memorable to the cast.  In a 2012 interview with David Cross, he mentions that he “never saw it” and dismisses it as “another kind of L.A. crowd all working with each other. I imagine there were other people that I know there.”  It’s a shame, as the 1995 A BUCKET OF BLOOD is on the verge of being a good film, but never quite gets its tone together to be more than a cult movie footnote.