The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 19-25
A Bucket of Blood (1959)
Directed by Roger Corman
Before he gallivanted into the world of Edgar Allan Poe, Corman made this hysterical, grim comedy highlighting his distaste for the art world and obsession with the macabre. The immortal Dick Miller stars as hapless Walter Paisley, the busboy who wants nothing more than to be accepted by the chichi bohemians at The Yellow Door Cafe. After the slaughter of his landlady’s cat, Paisley creates an avant-garde sculpture—the deceased, clay-slathered feline—and passes it off as his own creative vision. As his contemporaries go wild, they insist on more work from Paisley, and soon familiar faces begin disappearing just as more of his hideous sculptures materialize. Shooting on leftover sets in just five days for fifty thousand dollars, Corman’s subtle, unparalleled genius is in top form, mocking the beatniks of the 1950s, notably without any buckets of blood. Samantha Vacca (August 22, 7pm, at Anthology Film Archives’s tribute to Corman’s American International Pictures, with Corman in person)
