Day Twenty-Eight: A Bucket of Blood (1959)
I first noticed Dick Miller as a reoccurring supporting performer in the films of Joe Dante. Miller has one of the best scenes in Dante’s Gremlins as a man who seems to know more about the creatures than anyone else in town and subsequently pays for it with a bulldozer through his living room window. Miller is also terrific in a small part in The Howling, which we discussed earlier in our celebration, as one of the only people who respects the delicacy of werewolf execution. Dick Miller is always the guy in the know, the seasoned character kinda badass actor who’s never the star because he’s too competent. He’d kill the monster in fifteen minutes, and we’re conditioned to expect that it take our heroes at least ninety.
Dick Miller was called Walter Paisley in The Howling, and that name turns out to be another of the dozens of horror movie references to be found in that very endearing film. Paisley may be a small town bookstore owner looking to make a buck in The Howling, but he was once a very troubled young man who bussed tables at a pretentious cafe, where he hoped to one day make an impression with it’s self-absorbed, hypocritical patrons, particularly a sweeter girl in the group played by Barboura Morris. Paisley wants to be an artist like the others (who seem to talk of creating art more than actually creating it) but he’s painfully untalented. Then he discovers that sculpting is a breeze when you kill the subjects and just dump a little plaster on them. Quicker that way too.
Roger Corman directed A Bucket of Blood and my typically half assed research indicates that it’s the only film to feature Dick Miller front and center as the star. Miller was only twenty nine or thirty when he made A Bucket of Blood, and it’s a bit jarring to seem him devoid of some of the wrinkles that the years would eventually carve. That no-nonsense tough guy rasp is softer too, Miller sounds a little like Jerry Lewis in his nerd days, and, murder subtracted, it’s a similar kind of part.
A Bucket of Blood is charming and self-aware, not afraid to be a little (ok, a lot) goofy. The film’s idea of Bohemians is hilariously broad (very much in the “ok daddy yo” line of caricature) and it’s hard to separate the intentional from the unintentional. Corman keeps things zipping along, and, we find ourselves rooting for Miller’s serial killer to get the girl and rescue her from all of that blinding self-importance. The film has one very inspired line, a sorta poet approaches Miller and tells him that his work might net him twenty five grand. Miller looks at him, incredulous, and says that he thought money didn’t matter. The poet, startled, considers this and replies “of course money doesn’t matter, but this is twenty five thousand dollars!”
We’re in the middle of a remake craze now, mostly unnecessary, but I would like to suggest to Hollywoodland that A Bucket of Blood get the remake treatment. The film is a one joke movie, but it’s a funny joke, and one that could really be explored in a sharp satire of the various artistic putons that critics, artists, and viewers put themselves through on a daily basis. I only have two requests, an exec producer credit and Dick Miller again as the lead. Surely he can put the Gremlins and werewolves aside for a moment to stick it to the artistic elite again, old school style, with, of course, new school rules.
★★
