[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Blood Bath (1966)

A beatnik artist who thinks he's a vampire in Venice Beach, California, murders his muses by lowering them into a boiling vat of wax.

A film with a history that's far more entertaining than the film itself. Beginning life as an East European spy thriller produced by Roger Corman titled Operation: Titian but seen to be basically unreleasable to US audiences, Corman hired writer director Jack Hill to incorporate footage from Operation: Titian into a new production called Portrait of Terror. However Portrait of Terror was also deemed rubbish (I can verify this as i watched it alongside Blood Bath last night and it was pretty awful, seemingly more a half baked thriller based on German Krimi films than horror film). Corman then hired Stephanie Rothman to film additional sequences which were also added to the film whilst removing huge swathes of footage altogether bringing the run time down from 90 minutes to a mere 60 odd minutes.

So what you eventually see on screen is the product of three writer / directors in Corman, Hill and Rothman who all shot unrelated scenes that were thrown together by Corman to create Blood Bath.

The Beatnik artist scenes which feature a young Sid Haig who was a walking continuity error are ridiculous as is the fact the artist as originally played by actor William Campbell is now basically played by two people as Campbell wasn't re-hired for the vampire sequences. Meanwhile Operation Titian's lead actor Patrick Magee was cut altogether from Blood Bath.

Despite being a total mess Blood Bath does have scenes of interest, including a few dazzling murder set pieces, not to mention Lori Saunders who is equally dazzling in her numerous beach scenes. However with the film being so crudely assembled the narrative never flows and it's all so disjointed. For every sequence that works there are two that make you doubt your sanity as to why they are there. But what Corman, Hill and Rothman did achieve was putting something into US drive-ins that can only be described as the ultimate in exploitation - that exploitation being of the viewer themselves.