One of my all time favorites.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

" . . . it will leave crumbs all over the floor." A BUCKET OF BLOOD takes this one step further, with a story line which can be summarized as "If you give a Rat a kiss, he'll want to strangle you and pose your naked corpse for the whole wide world to titter at." When A BUCKET OF BLOOD is about half full, "Maxwell" the Beatnik Poet Laureate proclaims "One of my greatest innovations in Modern Verse is my elimination of Clarity." Certainly this constitutes a prophetic paraphrase of the Prime Directive under which America's first KGB-installed Game-Show-Host-in-Chief currently operates: "One of my greatest innovations in statesmanship is the elimination of Common Sense." Seen in this light, A BUCKET OF BLOOD portends that "Mad Vlad," Red Commie Czar of our beleaguered USA Homeland, is about to make a lewd display of 80 million or so traitorous Quisling fellow traveler "Core Supporters" stripped down to their birthday suits, and left twisting in the wind for the whole world to see. To parody a Real Life rhyme-smith who preceded the Beatniks by a century or two, "Ask not for whom A BUCKET A BLOOD DRIPS: it drips for YOU!!"

For some reason, Little Shop of Horrors keeps getting seen as the superior of Roger Corman's horror comedies. I always thought A Bucket of Blood was the superior movie in every way. Not only is it an interesting and clever premise for a horror film, it's probably one of the wickedest satires of so-called "hipster" culture ever made. Even though Beatniks existed more than a half a century ago, all the stuff A Bucket of Blood makes fun of about them could easily apply to today's hipsters, right down to their obsession with pretentious organic food. (You could easily swap the Beatniks' love of wheat germ for avocado toast and artisanal chocolate; that's how similar the two groups are).The movie also does a good job making fun of the modern art world, which to this day feels that if someone is willing to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a work, it's a masterpiece. Doesn't matter if it's a urinal, vomit on a canvas or whatever. If an art collector decides it's worth $10K, then it's art.Besides the movie containing brilliant satire, many of the characters are endearing or fun to watch. I just loved the two potheads, the weird, horny chick who propositions Walter, and the pompous poet, Maxwell. The owner of the Yellow Door is a hoot as well; his reaction when he sees Walter's second sculpture is hilarious, as well as later on in the movie when Walter keeps showing him new creations. He looks as though he's about to pass out at any moment.I also loved Walter's sculptures. I don't know who made them behind the scenes, but they were macabre as well as funny in a twisted kind of way. I would both gasp with shock and laugh at the same time. So yeah, A Bucket of Blood gets a solid 10/10 from me. It's films like this that really make me appreciate Roger Corman. No, he was no Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock but his movies were a lot more clever and interesting than people gave him credit for.

Talent and good looks rarely go together. Dick Miller had the bad luck to combine a blue-collar face with a blue-collar voice, and suffered for it throughout his career. Such people are rarely successes in "leading" roles. Charles Bronson comes to mind, but he's barely a good actor. Miller is genuinely talented.His Walter Paisley (at one point the character wears a cravat with a paisley pattern) is played absolutely straight. He never winks at the camera or steps outside the character. He's a pathetic creature we sympathize with, even when doing horrible things. It is a finely nuanced, essentially perfect performance. That is not an exaggeration.Charles B Griffith's excellent script combines pointed satire, solid laughs, and genuine wit. Griffith did a lot of work for Roger Corman, and this is surely his best. The lesson to be learned is that you can't make a good movie from a bad script, but not even Roger Corman can ruin a good story.Griffith would go on to pen "The Little Shop of Horrors", which Dick Miller passed on, because he didn't want to do another film where he played a serial killer. This didn't help his career much, and today he's best-remembered as Mr Futterman in "Gremlins" and its sequel, as well as one of Lawrence Woolsey's cronies in "Matinee!". He is a beloved actor, and there aren't many actors, living or dead, who can claim that distinction.

..this film. I was often a fan of Dick Miller and his ensemble of characters in American International films, many who also were in Wasp Woman, War of the Satellites, and Little Shop of Horrors. But this was a gross disappointment. Corman tries a tepid effort to build sympathy for Miller as the main character, a waiter in a beatnik coffee shop who feels teased and rejected by the "in crowd" giving him some bizarre motive to plaster over a cat he stabbed by mistake, leaving the knife in! Why wouldn't everyone get suspicious about his sculpture with a knife sticking out of it? He kills a detective (Burt Convy) and plasters him over. Where is the missing persons bureau and a citywide search to find out what happened to him? And using a pizza pan..lethal force for sure. It's no wonder most of Convy's career remained on Match Game and Hollywood Squares quiz shows. What an embarrassment to anyone's resume.