Blood Bath (1966)

A Masterpiece!

A lot of fun.

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This is one of those movies that's been made up of about four totally different productions. Blame Roger Corman. The initial movie, directed by exploitation king Jack Hill, involves a possessed painter whose "red dead nudes" have become critical masterpieces; of course, it transpires that he's under the influence of an evil spirit, and that he murders the women who pose as his subjects. This part of the movie is a bit like the gore flick COLOR ME BLOOD RED and would have benefited from being shot in colour so we could see all the red stuff. It's rather stodgy and dull, lacking in inspiration, aside from the genuinely chilling climax that sees the mutilated, wax-entombed victims of the tagline returning to stage their grubby revenge on the painter.Apparently, ANOTHER film – the unfinished Operation Titian – was being shot in Yugoslavia at the same time and Francis Ford Coppola participated in its production. Anyway, Corman didn't like the result so he hired a director, Stephanie Rothman, to shoot new scenes in which the painter becomes a vampire and chases nubile women around cities and beaches. To add to the confusion, some of the original cast members return, making it harder to spot where the different scenes have been spliced together. Finally, as if this wasn't enough, Corman needed a longer film to show on television, so he added another eleven minutes of random stuff – outtakes, a woman dancing on a beach for what seems like twenty minutes or so, etc. The resulting concoction is a confused mess that will try the patience of even the most hardened B-movie fanatic.This is nothing like DEMENTIA 13, the decent Corman/Coppola movie from a few years before. It's a mess, with many boring and pointless sequences, and even the action bits, the various chases, go on too long and are devoid of interest. This is a vampire who doesn't think twice about jumping in a swimming pool to catch a victim or chasing another into the ocean! A few cast members are familiar. William Campbell, the villain, returns from DEMENTIA 13. I thought I saw Patrick Magee pop up playing the vampire, although he's not credited. One of my favourite actors, Sid Haig, does appear in some of the film's best scenes – comedy filler moments involving a gang of Beatniks trying out a new method of 'quantum' art. These scenes seem to have been left over from A BUCKET OF BLOOD and it's a delight to see Haig on screen, even if only for a few moments. Popular US actress Lori Saunders is the nominal heroine and spends most of the film prancing around in a little bikini. Even half-naked women in the cast and Sid Haig (with HAIR!) can't save this mess of a production.

Blood Bath (1966) ** (out of 4)Artist Antonio Sordi (William Campbell) is a painter who specializes in nude but bloody prints. What people don't realize is that he's actually a vampire who is constantly luring young woman to their death.Producer Roger Corman hired Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman to take the unmarketable 1963 film OPERATION TICIJAN and turn it into something that could be shown at drive-ins. What they did was take footage from that movie and added some new footage of Campbell as a vampire and the end result was BLOOD BATH. However, things didn't stop here as this film only ran 62 minutes so when it came time to put it on television as TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE they had to film even more new scenes to pad out the time.If you go through the special edition Blu-ray you'll have Tim Lucas explaining the complicated history of this film, which included the original movie having its own television version under the title PORTRAIT OF TERROR. Having now seen all the versions, it's easy to say that none of them are good movies. If I had to view another one again I'd probably go with BLOOD BATH since it's the shortest of the lot and contains some nice supporting players including Sid Haig and Jonathan Haze.The entire vampire stuff isn't shot overly well and the film is quite choppy once you can tell and notice it's history but for the most part it's a quick 62 minutes and I'd argue that it's cheap entertainment. There's certainly nothing ground-breaking or "important" to be had with this film but it is certainly different to say the least.

Like many Roger Corman productions, the creation of Track of the Vampire, or Blood Bath, has a hell of a story behind it. Starting out life as an Americanised Yugoslavian espionage thriller called Operation: Titian starring William Campbell and Patrick Magee and with a script overlooked by Francis Ford Coppola, the film was quickly re-edited into Portrait in Terror. Corman was unhappy with both versions and hired Jack Hill to salvage the film. Hill shot extra footage and renamed it Blood Bath, turning it into a horror movie. Corman still deemed it unworthy of release and hired Stephanie Rothman to again film extra footage.The final products were a vampire movie based around a deranged artist retaining the title Blood Bath, which ran at just over an hour in length, and a longer feature-length version under the title Track of the Vampire. The resulting experience is confusing and clunkily- edited, yet bolstered by a goofy sense of humour during the scenes Jack Hill shot of a group of idiotic beatniks (including Sid Haig). Campbell plays Antonio Sordi, a painter of gory grotesques that sell at a high price who also happens to be a vampire capable of stalking people during the day. He is in love with Dorean (Lori Saunders), a ballerina who is a dead ringer for Sordi's former mistress, a witch named Melizza who denounced him centuries ago.Occasionally Track of the Vampire possesses that Ed Wood-esque charm of being so badly done you cannot help but laugh. Rothman added an eight-minute dance sequence on the beach in order to add bulk to the running time, and since Campbell refused to return for re-shoots, Sordi's vampire form is played by a different actor. Yet it's also occasionally terrific, namely whenever Hill is in charge. A haunted shot of the lovelorn Sordi standing on a deserted beach is just about as impressive as anything I've seen in low-budget cinema, and the aforementioned scenes involving the beatniks antics as they try to come up with a new style of art are witty and well-performed. This clash of qualities make for a strange 90 minutes, but it somehow works.

No wonder this lacks the cult following of Hill and Rothmann's other films--its myriad clashing elements suggest this movie's conception and shooting might have occurred at widely spaced times, whenever money or locations were available. Apparent female leads come and go. Sometimes the focus seems on satirizing pretentious "beatnik" art a la "Bucket of Blood." Then the film will stop dead for lengthy minutes of laughable "modern dance" by alleged dancers of highly varied ability. (Even the best seem in desperate need of an actual choreographer.) Beautiful young women are being killed by an alleged "vampire" painter allegedly descended from a line of vampires/artists stretching back to the 11th century. It's anyone's guess why most of the characters seem to be early 60s hipster-parody Los Angeleans, complete with wanderings on beach and in balmy surf. Meanwhile, we're told a particular castle and bell tower date back to (again) an ancestral 11th century? It's all supposed to be one city. Apparently "Vampire" aka "Blood Bath" was shot in both Venice, CA and Belgrade, Serbia-- ah, the mysteries of international funding! Trust me, the locations do not become seamless in the editing. This movie is bizarre and erratically well-crafted enough to hold interest, but it's still a disconnected mess that falls far short of the drive-in classics by Hill (Spider Baby, Switchblade Sisters) or Rothman (The Student Nurses, Terminal Island). It's a curiosity.