Alta Vista Productions, 1959
starring: Dick Miller, Barboura Morris, Antony Carbone and Julian Burton
directed by: Roger Corman

the plot: Walter Paisley (Miller) works as a busboy at the Yellow Door, a chic bohemian café frequented by beatniks, wannabes, stoners, loners, whackos and weirdoes. Walter daydreams about being an artist and hanging out with Maxwell Brock (Burton), the pompous poet who spends his nights in the café reading poems and chatting with his adoring fans. When Walter accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and uses some clay to turn the feline corpse into a sculpture, the regulars at the café hail the nebbish busboy as a true artist. Walter finally catches the eye of Clara (Morris), but the café’s owner, Mr. de Santis (Carbone) has some suspicions about Walter’s talent. Struggling to come up with a new masterpiece, Walter finds inspiration when an undercover cop shows up at his door and accuses him of being a heroin dealer. Without thinking, Walter murders the cop, slaps some clay on him and trots out his latest work, “Murdered Man.” The art world is all aflutter and Brock starts talking about organizing a show, and Walter finds his growing ego outweighs any guilt over the murders.

why it’s good: Any movie that opens with the line, “Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art,” sets a pretty high bar for awesomeness and, surprisingly enough, “A Bucket of Blood” delivers. The first in a series of collaborations between Roger Corman and writer Charles B. Griffith (a partnership that would later yield “Little Shop of Horrors”), “Bucket” is full of black humor and works fairly well as a spoof of the Beat aesthetic (which, by that time, had already been spoofed to death). There are plenty of killer lines and a great gag about how most of the café’s regulars are undercover cops. Shot in five days for about $50,000, “Bucket” is low-budget, but it doesn’t feel that way, thanks in part to Griffith’s tight script and some decent acting from Miller and the rest of the cast. Walter’s statues strike the perfect balance between grotesque and hilarious, especially the cat sculpture, which has a knife sticking out of its side and everything. Although there is a dead cat statue, there actually is no bucket of blood in “Bucket,” more likely due to budget concerns than anything else. But the lack of gore and light touches of horror keep the film’s humor sharp and pointed—and the sparse, no-nonsense story helps, too, proving that tragedy plus timing really does equal comedy.

why you should own it: “Bucket” is lots of fun, and if you can find it for cheap, pick it up. While the movie is in the public domain and knock-off copies can be easily found, opt for MGM’s release of the movie, which you can pick up as part of a recently released Corman boxed-set.