Horror Challenge entry #2: Blood Bath (1966, Jack Hill & Stephanie Rothman)
Nothing I come up with is going to be as on-the-money as the film’s own critique of itself: “An interesting technique, but it needs something.” Given time and space to shape it, Blood Bath could have really worked, colliding modern-art phoniness with a particularly dark strain of classicism. The “dead red nudes” painted by the chief antagonist (a painter who believes his ancestor was a vampire, is haunted by a ghostly muse and might know that said vampirism runs in the family) are pretty striking, and some early shots, notably Daisy in the courtyard, display a Gothic framing and use of shadow that anticipates the burgeoning giallo genre. Yet, as expected of any project with as tortured a Frankenstein history as this one, it never quite hangs together - no tension is allowed to build because the cross-cutting of the two main plots robs them both of momentum, and scenes go on too long or serve no purpose other than padding. Roger Corman did what he could to rescue what he considered a hapless and unreleasable film, from what I understand, but forget A Bucket of Blood - this isn’t even on the level of Color Me Blood Red.
