A Bucket of Blood

Walter Paisley is a bumbling busboy at a beatnik café called the Yellow Door, surrounded by poets, painters and sculptors whose talent he longs to share. He has none of his own, and his clumsy attempt to win over his co-worker Carla by sculpting her bust goes nowhere. Then he accidentally kills his landlady's cat and, in a panic, covers the body in plaster. The resulting piece is taken for a brilliant work of art, and Walter is hailed as a new genius by the café's crowd. To keep the acclaim coming, he keeps producing, and the process that made the first sculpture famous turns out to work with human subjects too.

Roger Corman directed this low-budget black comedy for American International Pictures, with a screenplay by Charles B. Griffith. It was the second of the nineteen films Corman directed, arriving between Swamp Women and The Wasp Woman, and he also produced it. Dick Miller leads as Walter, supported by Barboura Morris, Antony Carbone, Julian Burton, Ed Nelson and John Brinkley.

Running just over an hour, the film has held up as a compact satire of artistic pretension. On IMDb it holds a 6.7 rating from around 8,900 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.6 from a much smaller base of roughly 170 votes. A critics' score of 6.5 from 16 reviews places it close to both audience figures.