Mikel3 It was another cold mostly dreary winter day so I decided to watch two Prime video movies. I'm really getting my money's worth out of my membership. Today I went with off-beat Vampire stories. Yes, I look for the unusual stories. The first was 'Blood Bath' from 1966. Watching it I thought for sure it was Italian made. Later I read up on it, turns out it was filmed in Serbia, of all places, and L.A. It starred William Campbell. I knew him best as Trelane in the original series Star Trek episode 'The Squire of Gothos' and as a Klingon in another episode. The story is about a Jekyll and Hyde like vampire. At times he seems like a gentle but rather morbid artist. Other times he is possessed by a vampire artist ancestor of his. The back story for his vampire ancestor was a bit confusing. Nowadays he finds female victims and boils their bodies for some reason. He boils them till they look like soap sculptures. He also makes morbid death paintings of female nudes. As in many films of this type there seems to be an endless supply of naive women victims for him to choose from. Sometimes they're standing under Gothic arches on dark streets late at night. Evidently they're waiting to become victims. No they aren't there because they're hookers or anything close to logical like that. Other times they're swimming alone in bikinis on isolated beaches or hanging out alone by swimming pools at night. One female, after meeting him on the street admiring his art work in a window, is lured to his studio. She then offers to do some modeling for him and strips without even being asked to. Yes, even though his studio looks like it's in the Tower of London only not as cheery, the women don't seem overly concerned about the decor. There are some attempts at surreal scenes in the movie where the director is trying to be artistic, the carousel scene for instance. A woman is being chased on this carousel by the vampire, she begs for help yet either nobody takes her pleas seriously or they just don't care. The best part about the film for me was the comments it contained on the nature of art and its value. To me much of what is now considered priceless art is simply garbage in disguise; some of Andy Warhol's works come to mind as examples of expensive junk. Is a painting of a Campbell's soup can really worth a fortune? This movie seems to agree with me that it's not. There are some beatnik-like characters in it that think all kinds of junk are art. One character even has what appears to be a prototype of our current paint guns and uses it to enhance his "art". There are some very unlikely heroes that turn up. The film does succeed to some extent by being different and ends with pretty good scares even if the makeup is poor.For those reasons and its offbeat quality I give it a 4 out of 10 rating. It was diverting.

ofumalow 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.

reptilicus This is complicated so pay attention. Roger Corman bought an unfinished film shot in Europe called OPERATION TITIAN concerning the hunt by both cops and crooks for a stolen Titian painting. Patrick Magee was the star. At the same time Jack Hill was shooting a movie in Venice, CA about an artist (biker film alumnus William Campbell) who kills his models and dips them in boiling wax (where have we heard THAT before?). By combining the footage, a trick he was to do many times in the 60's Corman created a film that essentially made no sense at all. Now that has never stopped our Roger so he brought in new director Stephanie Rothman who added an effect new to American movies, an oil dissolve, and shot even more footage to create a film about an artist who sometimes transforms into his remote ancestor who was falsely accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake only to return as a vengeance seeking vampire. Got all that? The stolen Titian painting was lost in the shuffle and Patrick Magee shows up only briefly as a jealous husband who gets dumped alive into the boiling wax.Meanwhile watch for Corman regulars Jonathan Haze, Sid Haig and Carl Schanzer turn up as Beatniks (leftover characters from BUCKET OF BLOOD perhaps?) who hang out in a coffee house, argue about art and use the word "quantum" a little too frequently. Also in the cast is Lori Saunders (billed here as "Linda") who went on the play the airhead, would-be journalist Bobbie Jo Bradley on "Petticoat Junction". This time she plays a dancer who is in love with Campbell never suspecting what he does with his models. She has a lengthy (8 minutes by my stopwatch!) scene where she does an interpretive dance on the beach and models 3 bikinis, each one smaller than the one before it, during the film.I do believe Joe Spinell saw this movie since the ending of his film MANIAC borrows liberally from the climax of BLOOD BATH.PS: This was not Lori Saunders only encounter with a mad killer. She would be chased by an axe wielding psychopath in a Tor Johnson mask (!) in SO SAD ABOUT GLORIA (1972).

Elliot-10 This film (which I saw years ago) seems to be two (or maybe more) different movies edited together-- a contemporary psychological horror film with "flashbacks" to a character's ancestor who was a witch. The "flashbacks" are, I suspect, part of another film entirely-- perhaps a Mexican horror film. Whatever budget reasons led to this unconventional method of film-making, the result can best be described as unintentional surrealism. A unique experience, to say the least.