Blood Bath (1966): 31 Days of Horror

Post author By jdp
Post date October 4, 2019
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#7. Blood Bath (1966)

Nature of Shame:
Long ago purchased the Arrow Films Blu-ray based on the impressive package of features and the potential for a deep study of the low-budget independent horror filmmaking of Roger Corman.

Hooptober Challenge Checklist:
Decade: 1960’s
Year Ends with “6”
Woman-directed

‘Blood Bath’ Elevator Pitch

Let’s paint a picture. Venice Beach, California. 1966. The beatniks are groovy and the birds are sexy, baby. A woman wanders the streets at night, lost in though, plagued by her argument with her boyfriend. She stops to admire a painting in a gallery window. It’s a Sordi. But Sordi is also admiring her as he’s stumbled into the night to admire his children in the window. He’s taken by her, asks her to pose nude for a new painting, a new Sordi. She happily obliges — to be the subject of a Sordi portrait! The girls will never believe it. Alas, the painter becomes possessed by the spirit of a long dead vampire ancestor and hacks her to pieces with a cleaver before dipping her body in wax. Day and night, the possessed Sordi stalks the streets of Venice Beach looking for his next victim.

Strange Cormans Are Afoot at the Circle K

Even if you didn’t know the history of the production, you’d notice that something feels off about Blood Bath by the end of the first reel. While on vacation in Europe, Roger Corman purchased the rights to distribute an unproduced Yugoslavian espionage thriller called Operation: Titian (1963). Corman added actors William Campbell and Patrick Magee to the cast in order to make it more palatable to American audiences. In the end, Corman discarded the film, deeming it unreleasable.

In 1964, Corman assigned Jack Hill to salvage the project. Hill had just directed sequences for Corman’s production The Terror (1963). Hill shifted the location to Venice, California to match the movie’s Yugoslavian footage and turned a story about espionage into a horror movie about a madmen who kills models and makes sculptures out of their dead bodies. Corman again decided against releasing the film, now titled Blood Bath, featuring Hill’s changes.

Two more years passed before Corman again returned to Operation: Titian / Blood Bath. He hired Stephanie Rothman, an associate producer who’d worked on American International Pictures’ simul-shot Queen of Blood (1965) and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965), to do whatever she wanted with the existing footage. Her influence changed the murderous artist to a vampire. The actor who played the murderer, William Campbell, refused to participate in yet another reshoot, so Rothman had to add a magical transformation element to the killer’s bag of tricks to explain why the “vampire” looked nothing like Campbell.

At long last, the project received Corman’s seal of approval, and AIP released the film under the title Blood Bath in 1966 with Hill and Rothman credited as directors. It played in a double feature with Queen of Blood.

It’s a Blood Bath

As Blood Bath unspools, it becomes even more incoherent and tonally muddied. Moments of dire seriousness back up against jokey comic relief, and the vampirism angle feels tacked on like Nic Cage’s fake teeth in Vampire’s Kiss. It also rips concepts and beats verbatim from other, better horror films. It’s Frankenstein’s monster in form and function. No amount of massaging Blood Bath could cloud the fact that this was cobbled together from multiple unrelated concepts.

As a historical curio in the filmography of Roger Corman rather than a fully-rendered film, Blood Bath offers more to enjoy. The Arrow Films edition features all completed versions of the film, making the package as a whole worth digging into. Corman’s process of obtaining and shepherding Operation: Titian into its many iterations gives the die-hard film geeks plenty of fodder upon which to chew. Vampire/chewing pun intended.

The average moviewatcher, however, won’t find much of interest here. It’s cheaply made and impossible to follow. Once Corman moved on from Hill’s version, narrative logic got tossed out the window. Continuity errors and unintelligible footage run rampant. If the viewer is to make anything out of their experience with Blood Bath it’ll come in appreciation for small moments of visual ingenuity and surrealist horror and humor. And Sid Haig. Sid Haig’s magic-grow facial hair should provide at least a few overt chuckles. (He had to do Blood Bath reshoots while filming another movie that required different grooming.)

Final ‘Blood Bath’ Thought

View the Arrow Films 4-movie package as a whole, Blood Bath as a curiosity of scrappy low-budget filmmaking technique, or embrace the small time moody absurdities. The best part about this film and the Blu-ray package is everything else that comes along with it.

blood bath arrow films Blood Bath is available on a limited edition Arrow Films Blu-ray box set featuring every iteration of the botched production.

2019 @CinemaShame / #Hooptober Progress

#1. Shocker (1989) // #2. Etoile (1989) // #3. The Phantom of the Opera (1989) // #4. Blacula (1972) // #5. Scream Blacula Scream (1973) // #6. Jaws: The Revenge (1987) // #7. Blood Bath (1966)

Tags blood bath, blood bath 1966, jack hill, operation titian, roger corman, stephanie rothman

31 Days of Horror Cinema

Jaws: The Revenge: 31 Days of Horror

Post author By jdp
Post date October 3, 2019
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#6. Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Nature of Shame:
Jaws 3D caused me to cut bait with the Jaws franchise. Let’s see how the infamous Jaws: The Revenge can further degrade the series.

Hooptober Challenge Checklist:
Decade: 1980’s
Lowest-rated 80’s film

The reputation of Joseph Sargent’s Jaws: The Revenge precedes it. I never had a desire to conclude the Jaws saga because the series just falls off the table in half-measures (at least). There’s not too much backstory here other than contentment that I’d never let The Revenge into my life. Jaws (1977) is one of the most beloved movies of its era — Jaws: The Revenge has a 0%. Jaws 3D does not. I don’t put much credibility in RT scores, but I wasn’t willing to troll for a movie worse than Jaws 3D.

‘Jaws: The Revenge’ Elevator Pitch

Sharks are drawn to the Brody family like their family tree leaks blood. One might imagine they’d move to Kansas to escape the carnage, but no, Ellen Brody and family will not run with her tail between her legs! So the shark comes for her younger son. Bloody carnage! She believes a shark appearance gave her beloved husband Martin a heart attack. Does she leave after deciding that the shark is carrying some personal vendetta? No! She decides to take a vacation. Canada, perhaps? No! The Bahamas! Those dastardly sharks would never find her on an island nation in the middle of the Caribbean! — where elder son Michael works as a marine biologist. No harm will come to any of them, I tell ya!

The Definition of Insharkity

It’s been said that the definition of insharkity is going back in the water, getting eaten and then doing the same thing over again. Never has this been more clear than in Jaws: The Revenge. Ellen keeps having PTSD shark flashbacks, and Jaws 4 draws on the slasher construct to create a kind of Laurie Strode (and fam) vs. the Shape on the high seas. Only unlike a slasher movie that presents its villain as a representation of pure, inescapable evil, Ellen could literally just leave. Amity never looked all that wonderful anyway. If the campers caught in their Friday the 13th nightmares could have just left camp to end their mortal peril, I’m quite certain they would have hopped on the first bus out of the woods.

On a related note this “How could this keep happening to the Brodies?” premise inspires plenty of unintentional humor. The aforementioned Ellen flashbacks of her entire family getting eaten by sharks or attacked my sharks. Sensing her elder son’s peril; in the middle of a dance with Michael Caine, no less; suggests something extra sensory, perhaps supernatural about this connection between Ellen and the fish. There’s no biological explanation for the narrative of Jaws: The Revenge. Jaws: The Revenge just is. As a viewer you can embrace the insharkity or you can, like schools of viewers before you, write the film off as Brody chum (instead of “bloody chum” — over-explaining mediocre puns is my favorite pastime).

The better — nay — best question about Jaws: The Revenge is how Ellen came to this realization that a Great White has a hit out on her family. Martin Brody killed the shark in Jaws and Jaws II. Unless the Lamnidae family of sharks has some kind of ancestral hive mind that pursues its aggressors across the oceans of the world, this is a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia. Except for the fact that the movie normalizes her fears. This shark wants to kill Brodies and that automatically makes JTR more interesting than your average cash grab sequel. I’m dying to know how that’s treated in the tie-in novelization because you know Hank Searls embraced shark telepathy in his prose.

‘Jaws: The Revenge’ Spawns… Something

There’s no reason for Mario Van Peebles to speak with an accent. Was Michael Caine’s agent drunk in the 1980s? During the mid-80’s, he was all over the bloody map with Blame It On Rio, Hannah and Her Sisters, Mona Lisa and Jaws: The Revenge. Luckily for all of us he showed up to collect his paycheck and still brings swagger and doe-eyed charisma to an underwritten (unwritten) role of swoon-worthy pilot. Caine even talks like he’s doing an impression of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon doing an impression of Michael Caine. Here’s the clip from The Trip (2010) for reference:

I’ve already assessed the clinically “inshark” (again, instead of “insane”) basis for this movie. Despite it all and despite its reputation, Jaws: The Revenge improves on Jaws 3D and I might even dare to argue that Joseph Sargent’s film is more entertaining than the objectively superior and more polished Jaws 2. I’ll share that confession with you, faithful readers and Hooptoberists, but I’m going to keep that to myself in mixed company unless plied with libations. The point I’m riding like a sunbather primed in the jaws of a Great white is that Jaws: The Revenge has reverted back to its B-movie roots. Steven Spielberg turned a B-movie premise into a global, industry-shifting blockbuster.

Between the rampant continuity errors and the comically mechanical shark, Jaws: The Revenge dispensed with any pretense that these sequels were ever able to attain a flavor cinematic excellence. With that guise of respectability finally swept out to sea, the fourth installment marries the slasher movie production mentality with the insharkity inherent to a series of movies about sharks repeatedly terrorizing a single family.

I’ll let Siskel and Ebert describe Jaws: The Revenge. They’re not wrong, but they’re discounting the entertainment value of inept filmmaking.

Final ‘Jaws: The Revenge’ Thoughts

Jaws: The Revenge had no business being released in theaters. It’s rushed, clumsy, incoherent, and the shark roars. Like a lion — that’s right. The final showdown between Ellen and the Great white suggests Sargent has taken cues from the Alien series. The badass woman going toe-to-toe (toe-to-fin?) with her nemesis in one final confrontation. The movie, however, can’t even maintain suspense for the ten minutes required to finish the fish. I’ll refrain from spoiling the method of ultimate demise, but I’ll state that it goes down among the most incoherent action finales I’ve ever seen.

When asked if he’d ever seen the finished film, Michael Caine said as only Michael Caine can: “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”

It’s all true — but I had some fun, and that’s ultimately why we watch.

Jaws: The Revenge is available on Universal Pictures Blu-ray.

2019 @CinemaShame / #Hooptober Progress

Shocker (1989) // 2. Etoile (1989) // 3. The Phantom of the Opera (1989) // #4. Blacula (1972) // #5. Scream Blacula Scream (1973) // #6. Jaws: The Revenge

Tags 31 days of horror, ellen brody, hooptober, insharkity, Jaws, jaws 4, jaws the revenge, shark telepathy

31 Days of Horror Cinema

Scream Blacula Scream (1973): 31 Days of Horror

Post author By jdp
Post date September 30, 2019
No Comments on Scream Blacula Scream (1973): 31 Days of Horror

#5. Scream Blacula Scream (1973)

Nature of Shame:
Since I watched Blacula, I had to watch the sequel, Scream Blacula Scream. Obviously.

Hooptober Challenge Checklist:
Decade: 1970’s
Black director or predominantly black cast

It’d be a more interesting story if I’d seen Scream Blacula Scream but not the original Blacula. Alas, I have no such story and predictably, prosaically, I’ve not seen the sequel. I do, however, as a copyeditor have license to question the title’s use of commas, or lack thereof. The vocative comma is necessary for direct address in the would-be title Scream, Blacula, Scream. That’s assuming, of course, that the title’s telling Blacula to scream — something I’m not sure we can assume since it shouldn’t be Blacula experiencing fear. He can’t even see himself in a mirror. How is he supposed to quake at the sight of his own visage. (The title actually comes to fruition by film’s end, but I’ll get back to that in a bit.)

If we’re to assume that his victims are doing the screaming, perhaps the title should have been Scream! It’s Blacula! (and then add that final Scream! if absolutely necessary. That scenario actually sounds more like the introduction of a late night talk show host a la “Heeeeeeeeere’s Johnnny.” I can’t deny that the title rolls off the tongue, but making heads or tails of its intentions is an entirely different matter.

I happened to glance at the MGM Soul Cinema DVD that I borrowed from the library and the title on that DVD features the vocative commas. (See cover art above left.) What ho?! Even though they’re not on any of the original poster art or in the movie’s title card, they appeared on the covers of the 2004 DVD and 2009 re-release.

Original poster art:

The title sequence from Art of the Title:

Scream Blacula Scream Elevator Pitch

A dying voodoo queen chooses Lisa (Pam Grier) as her successor, overstepping her son Willis (Richard Lawson) and legitimate heir. To get revenge he buys the bones of Blacula/Mamuwalde and resurrects the vampire to do his bidding. Fatal flaw in his plan, however — Mamuwalde comes back to life and bites his petulant ass, turning him into a subservient vampire. Just follow this next part to the best of your abilities because it’s about to get bumpy.

Justin, an ex-cop with a collection of African antiquities, investigates Mamuwalde’s murders. The two meet at a party, discuss his artifacts, and Mamuwalde spots pieces of jewelry worn by his late wife. At this same party (dude obviously knows how to party), he meets Justin’s girlfriend — the newly christened voodoo priestess with the afro that launched a thousand ships — and asks for her help in lifting the vampire curse placed upon him by Dracula. Mamuwalde has to evade Justin’s investigation and protect Lisa from his ever-increasing vampire army if he has any hope of resting peacefully.

Mamuwalde? I hardly knew ye!

In his review, Roger Ebert wrote that the film shows evidence of having been made in a hurry with limited funds. And the first one was what, exactly, if not a cheap production made fast and cheap to capitalize on fleeting cinematic trends? I don’t always agree with Roger, but he usually makes some kind of sense.

Scream Blacula Scream, if nothing else, has the added benefit of Pam Grier — who amplifies production quality just by appearing on screen. As Lisa, she’s an ideal counterpoint to William Marshall’s sympathetic villain — a confused voodoo priestess who’s just coming into control of her powers. The camera worships her just as William Marshall works the lens to magnify his powers of audience seduction, directing a version of male gaze inward and outward at the same time. It’s not a gaze of the leering variety. Through the movie’s perspective (and the perspective of most vampire films), this gaze craves control and places the viewer on the same wavelength as Mamuwalde.

Mamuwalde seeks control over his curse. He’s Dracula’s disciple, a monster created by a racist European, and must manage his thirst for blood in order to win the sympathies of Pam Grier’s voodoo priestess. The movie’s greatest bits of trickery? Withholding Pam Grier so that the audience also desperately craves her return and the fact that Scream Blacula Scream actually more resembles a story about addiction than a 1970’s cheapie horror film sequel.

So Scream Blacula Scream is actually Leaving Las Vegas?

I’m not going to tell you how to read the film — and I can’t even claim to know with any certainty that the filmmakers had this in mind when they made Scream Blacula Scream. Directed by Bob Kelljan (Count Yorga, Vampire — a movie with an appropriately placed comma) and written by Joan Torres, Raymond Koenig, and Maurice Jules, Scream Blacula Scream offers a much tighter production than its predecessor, but also a more ambling narrative. Without building predictable horror beats, Kelljan has made a character study about Mamuwalde overcoming bloodlust to save his soul.

We’ve seen dozens of stories about conflicted vampires. Scream Blacula Scream, by emulating and riffing predictable horror tropes without the ultimate gory payoff, transcends genre even as it cannot escape its considerable era-specific Blaxploitation style. The result? A dated sense of sameness consistently undermined by the movie’s stubborn resistance to convention. Mamuwalde struggles against his nature (rampant, random bloodsucking) in order to remove the shackles placed on him by his ersatz slave master. He must feed, but he also must struggle against his cravings to preserve his relationship with Lisa. Without Lisa he cannot be liberated. Without blood he goes mad. It does not end well.

Final ‘Scream Blacula Scream’ Thoughts

I don’t mean to spoil the outcome I teased with my comma argument earlier, but there is a moment at the end of the movie where Blacula does indeed scream. His fate left uncertain, his soul still without rest. I suppose it’s not-too-spoilery to state that the addiction wins in the end. Mamuwalde will continue to hunt the blood of the innocent, just as most addicts return to their drug of choice, alienating friends and family until no one is left on their side.

Where Blacula felt cheap and generally routine, the sequel waltzes around without a direct through-line from one scare to the next. This might sound like a backhanded compliment, but Scream Blacula Scream marginally and universally improves upon the original. It looks like a horror movie, but it doesn’t act like, well, much of anything in particular. If you like your horror-ish movies aimless but with a heap of swagger, you should check your resistance to movies without the appropriate vocative commas (but please try to control your thirst for Pam Grier) and give this Blacula double bill a viewing.

Scream Blacula Scream is available on a Scream Factory Blu-ray alongside Blacula.

2019 @CinemaShame / #Hooptober Progress

Shocker (1989) // 2. Etoile (1989) // 3. The Phantom of the Opera (1989) // #4. Blacula (1972) // #5. Scream Blacula Scream (1973)

Tags 31 days of horror, blacula, hooptober, hooptober 2019, pam grier, scream blacula scream 1973, william marshall, william marshall blacula