Blu-ray Release: A Bucket of Blood

Blu-ray Release Date: Sept. 24, 2015
Price: Blu-ray $27.99
Studio: Olive Films

The 1959 comedy-horror cult favorite A Bucket of Blood returns to Blu-ray as a part of Olive Films Signature Collection.

Dick Miller is one hip daddy-o in A Bucket of Blood.

Directed by undisputed schlockmeister Roger Corman (The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre) from a screenplay by Charles B. Griffith (The Little Shop of Horrors, Death Race), 1959’s A Bucket of Blood is a darkly comic satire that will delight fans of Corman, horror and classic, cult filmmaking.

Produced on a $50,000 budget and shot in five days (featuring many of the low-budget filmmaking aesthetics for which Corman’s work is known), the film concerns a dimwitted, impressionable young busboy (Dick Miller, Truck Turner) at a Bohemian café in southern California who is inspired by a beatnik artist’s performance to try his hand at sculpture. While working, he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and, in desperation, covers its body in clay to hide the evidence. When the suspiciously life-like figure earns him a reputation as a brilliant sculptor, he is pressured to create similar works … and his muse becomes murder!

A Bucket of Blood – noted in many circles as an honest, undiscriminating portrayal of the many facets of beatnik culture, including art, dance and style of living – is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and mono sound with optional English subtitles.

Here’s a round-up of what’s on the disc:

• Mastered from new 4K scan
• “Creation Is. All Else is Not” – Roger Corman on A Bucket of Blood
• “Call Me Paisley” – Dick and Lainie Miller on A Bucket of Blood
• Audio commentary by Elijah Drenner, director of That Guy Dick Miller
• Archival audio interview with screenwriter Charles B. Griffith
• “Bits of Bucket” – Visual essay comparing the original script to the finished film
• Essay by Caelum Vatnsdal, author of You Don’t Know Me, But You Love Me: The Lives of Dick Miller
• Rare prologue from German release
• Super 8 “digest” version
• Theatrical trailer
• German theatrical trailer
• Gallery of newly-discovered on-set photography