NEW Blood Bath (DVD)

I received this dvd-r on June 4th and went to watch it on June 5th. The dvd sleeve and the dvd itself clearly list this as being Blood Bath, but when the disc plays, the movie is actually Riot on Sunset Strip; this is also the movie shown on the discs' main menu. If you want Riot on Sunset Strip, that film is in 16x9 widescreen, but obviously you'll be pissed-off once you get ready to watch Blood Bath and that shows up on your screen instead. Hopefully MGM will correct this quickly, as I have read they made the same mistake with their dvd-r of Burn, Witch, Burn.

The remarkable low-budget horror film BLOOD BATH is an esoteric example of accidental art whose production history is as interesting as the film itself.

Uncredited Executive Producer Roger Corman hired co-director Stephanie Rothman (THE VELVET VAMPIRE) to complete an unfinished and shelved independent thriller directed by Jack Hill (SPIDER BABY), about a killer artist stalking the Beat art scene in Venice, California. Rothman's re-write transformed the villain into a vampire.

Corman embellished BLOOD BATH with ten minutes of rich atmospheric footage from a Yugoslavian film, OPERATION TITIAN, which in turn was revised by Corman protege Francis Ford Coppola as a very obscure feature released exclusively to television, PORTRAIT OF TERROR. This combined the dubbed and re-edited TITIAN with new scenes featuring actors William Campbell (STAR TREK) and Patrick Magee (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE), shot by second-unit director Hill during the filming in Ireland of Coppola's first commercial feature, DEMENTIA 13.

In BLOOD BATH, William Campbell's character retained the same occupation and name (artist "Antonio Sordi", or "Tony") from PORTRAIT. An early cut of the film contained even more footage from TITIAN which was trimmed for the finished theatrical edition released by American-International Productions.

For the television version of BLOOD BATH entitled TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE, Corman and Rothman expanded the 62-minute theatrical cut by eleven minutes, restoring some of the Yugoslavian footage and adding out-takes from the American version (including a three-minute interpretive ballet on the beach by Lori/Linda Saunders).

The most notable addition to TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE was a scene of Campbell and Magee from PORTRAIT OF TERROR, newly-dubbed to fit the existing story. The scene established a sub-plot which altered one of the supporting characters. (It also served as preparation for the nonsensical presence of Magee's "corpse" in the finale.)

These additions and restorations emphasized the patchwork nature of the film but also enhanced the unique sense of a bizarre collage.

The main debit is the jarring inclusion of awful improvisational black-comedy scenes, set in a Beat coffee-house, which look and play like out-takes from Corman's BUCKET OF BLOOD. These do, however, slyly satirize the very randomness of the film itself, enlightening us as to the "cosmic" effect of quantum physics on pretentious modern art. (The scenes were deleted from the TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE cut.)

The film's strongest assets are its beautiful black-and-white photography (by Alfred Taylor and Nenad Jovicic) and an eerie score by Ronald Stein. It benefits from a deeply creepy performance by Campbell, a striking one by Sandra Knight (of FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER and Corman's THE TERROR), and the bikinied presence of breathtaking Saunders.

In either of its variants, BLOOD BATH is a tremendously weird and compelling film that makes no sense at all on a story level but chances to succeed as low-budget surrealism worthy of Mario Bava. A dream scene effectively suggests the designs of Salvadore Dali; while a nightmarish sequence (shot with style by Rothman) of Knight tracking the vampire on shadowed streets approaches the haunting beauty of Herk Harvey's CARNIVAL OF SOULS.

The MGM Limited Edition made-to-order DVD-R is the original 62-min. theatrical version of BLOOD BATH, presented in its correct aspect ratio and rarely seen since its original release. This is a good print which looks and sounds dramatically better any any of the public-domain DVD's of the TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE version. Adjust monitor's sharpness control to minimum for intermittent excess grain.

RATING: 7/10 *** GOOD.

Judge Gordon Sullivan, DVD Verdict -- "With multiple directors it's somewhat difficult to determine who is responsible for what, but the overall atmosphere of Blood Bath is impressively creepy. Part of that is due to the actors giving some intense performances, but the lion's share of the credit goes to the nighttime black-and-white photography. It's not quite as stylized as typical noir or horror, but the darker scenes have an interesting edge to them, and even the scenes in daylight have an "off" quality. The idea of somehow capturing life or death on canvas is a good one. Sure Oscar Wilde did it with Dorian Gray, and it's been done in other pics as well, but the whole "Dead Red Nudes" concept is a solidly weird one. But the fact that the film throws in a bizarre vampire subplot to this already over-saturated tale just shows how off the rails an hour-long film can get."