Where to start? At first thought, the idea of seeing A.I.P.’s Blood Bath in any form would have little appeal had it not been for the pioneering research and insights of Tim Lucas back in 1990. His article ‘The Trouble with Titian’ sold me on the whole concept of his then- new magazine Video Watchdog — a resource that would excite and exhaust my curiosity about fringe fantasy movies, not all of which I actually wanted to see. I had skipped Blood Bath in more than one of its versions on TV countless times; the one time I tuned into a screening of Portrait in Terror (version #2 of four), I lost interest almost immediately. But that misses the appeal of this disc set to film-minded viewers. The bizarre evolution of Blood Bath expresses everything that was amazing (and trashy) about Roger Corman’s anything-goes approach to filmmaking, back in the 1950s and ’60s when he was pioneering new commercial paths and literally ‘making it up as he went along.’ Corman engaged in wildcat filmmaking, bending the rules by traveling to places where the Hollywood Guilds couldn’t reach him. He engaged film students as assistants and elevated them to director status so as to protect his own status as a DGA signatory. He found every possible method of ‘running away’ from normal Hollywood production expenses. Tim Lucas’s 70-minute video-essay on this disc set lays out the strange sequence of events and even stranger moviemaking decisions that turned one lackluster Yugoslavian murder mystery into THREE MORE marketable films. Well, marginally marketable.
Having all these versions of Blood Bath in one spot, with Tim Lucas’s field guide to its unlikely, almost absurd series of alterations, is a major study in real nuts ‘n’ bolts filmmaking. Every version was filmed for a practical reason, with Corman ordering changes to squeeze out a new theatrical product, or another TV sale. After being nickel ‘n’ dimed, tricked and short-counted for years by Sam Arkoff, Roger must have relished the notion of selling American-International the same damn film three times over.
I’m not going to get into too much detail on this, mainly because it’s all so complicated. After my one viewing, I know I haven’t gotten the whole story straight. It was just too much fun to let the insanity wash over me. But here’s a possibly faulty description of the four separate movies contained in this disc set:
Operation Ticjian (Titian), like Dementia 13, came out of Corman’s European romp for the filming of his The Young Racers, a Formula One racing epic with a quarter of the thrills of Grand Prix but made for 1/200th of the cost. Corman bought into a Yugoslavian production by supplying two actors in exchange for distribution rights. William Campbell and Patrick Magee from Dementia 13 star as a crooked artist and his murderous partner. The title comes from a dispute over a painting said to be by the classic artiste Titian. Campbell’s character is a descendant of a famous painter by the name of Sordi.
When Corman saw what his foreign production partners made, he was aghast. It’s not a horror film but a murder mystery with a few creepy stalking scenes. Much of the film is taken up with a tepid romance with actors that mean nothing to American audiences. There’s also a thick serving of travelogue material promoting the Dubrovnic location. Campbell and Magee are good, but at 95 minutes the show is overlong. Far more exciting foreign productions could not attract an American distributor. Corman is stuck with a dog.
Portrait in Terror is for the most part a straight cut-down of Ticjian. Surely following Corman’s instructions, the new editor dropped the travelogue opening and scenes involving one detective’s domestic situation and the other’s participation in a ‘Dubrovnic fishing Festival.’ The editing is very smartly done. Portrait was given a new Ronald Stein soundtrack. New scenes filmed in Los Angeles bring the film up to length (81 min) for a TV release. Corman’s assistants find locations that match fairly well, but actors hired to replace characters in the Yugoslavian film don’t match at all. One stupid, overly literal additional scene ruins the original’s single clever suspense surprise.
But Corman doesn’t stop there. The theatrical release Blood Bath is Corman’s most extreme movie makeover. It was almost completely reshot, which begs the question, why stick with the original story in the first place? Still wanting to earn some theatrical money from Operation Ticjian, Roger hired (or perhaps simply assigned) his ace film fixer Jack Hill to tackle the problem. Hill uses the film’s interesting Dubrovnik architecture and nighttime stalking scenes, but rewrites the show to take place in Venice, Italy. Campbell’s artist character doesn’t commit a couple of murders to cover up an art crime — he’s now a madman, a full-on serial killer of beautiful women. Sordi paints morbid portraits of women stabbed and bleeding, and then murders the models for sexual satisfaction. As in a Corman-Poe movie, Sordi is haunted by a lost love, seen in a secret portrait kept behind a curtain. Aping Corman’s beatnik horror comedies, Jonathan Haze and Sid Haig appear as coffee shop intellectuals. For the big finish, Hill throws in the freaky idea of bodies being dipped into wax (not blood).
Jack Hill’s version doesn’t exist as he cut it. The show was put on hold while Roger was busy in Yugoslavia, filming The Secret Invasion, I believe. When he got back, Roger decided that Hill’s film wasn’t extreme enough. For whatever reason, his other assistant Stephanie Rothman inherited the project and imposed her own set of outrageous changes. The released version of Blood Bath is a crazy hodge-podge. On top of Hill’s carefully matched new scenes, Rothman adds more characters and more mismatched victims. William Campbell’s killer artist is now a vampire. When he transforms, a different, dull replacement actor with fangs takes over the role. Because this vampire wears a cape and broad brimmed hat, some of the vampire’s nighttime skulking about uses footage from the original Ticjian, of Patrick Magee creeping in the shadows. The finished Blood Bath is an incompetent travesty, but it delivers elements that Corman and A.I.P. could use to make easy sales: a vampire, more gorgeous women in states of undress. Just 62 minutes long, it received a theatrical release supporting Curtis Harrington’s color sci-fi mini-epic Queen of Blood.
The full insanity of this process becomes apparent when we’re told that the final theatrical release contains only four minutes from the original production. Jack Hill went to extraordinary means to seamlessly deepen Operation Ticjian, and Stepanie Rothman camped it up with a lot of wince-inducing nonsense. Monkeying with an existing feature bit by bit must have been much cheaper than negotiating a new show from scratch. One gets the idea that the Roger Corman was driven to make every single project finish in black ink, or die trying. Had Corman given Jack Hill the budget for the two reshoots up front, he might have come up with something more commercial than a dumb vampire. This is piecemeal moviemaking: “Apply a few more dollars. Not too many. Is it good enough yet? It only has to be good enough.”
Finally, the fourth film Track of the Vampire is a version of Blood Bath padded for TV. A full seventeen minutes of NOTHING is added to reach a more appropriate running time for A.I.P.’s TV syndication arm. One eight-minute chunk is simply an endless foot chase through what looks like the hills of Griffith Park. The pursuit passes through the same locations more than once; it’s an exercise in audience abuse. We readily believe that after this cut was finished, it went straight to unsuspecting movie stations without anybody really looking at it. The first to encounter Track of the Vampire were probably insomniacs that thought they were having a bad dream. The show became yet another early morning TV ordeal sandwiched between car ads.
What makes this incestuous tangle of filmic insanity so interesting? I think it’s because it shows Roger Corman at the apex of his wheeling and dealing, making the most of filmmaking opportunities that the rest of the industry couldn’t see, or had decided were beneath its collective dignity. He tried every avenue open to him. A.I.P. imported a few Italian sword & sandal movies, so Corman bought up Soviet sci-fi pictures — possibly from intermediates, not the original producers. He even made his own ersatz Italo muscleman movie. His runaway Puerto Rico and South Dakota productions encouraged him to make saleable movies on the cheap in Ireland; the Dubrovnik connection made on Operation Ticjian seems to have inspired his own Yugoslavian productions. Meanwhile, Corman also stretched his personal directing career through more normal industry channels. In addition to the ‘A’ pictures he directed for A.I.P. and other minor studios, he was courted by Columbia and Fox.
Everything Corman produced made money save for one noble foray that expressed his political views on the Civil Rights issue. The Intruder was a flop, but it had more social-comment integrity than anything made in the industry that year. Perhaps Corman’s only fumble was to not fully copyright and protect his first ten years of personal productions. His efforts to avoid the Guilds left behind many films that he produced, yet that don’t bear his name in the credits.
Roger Corman was something of a renegade but never a crook, which set him apart from most independent producers of exploitation product. His deals could be rough but they were also honest, up-front arrangements. He reportedly always paid what he said he would. Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman did not become big winners, as did some others from the Corman stable. Parts of Blood Bath look very much like student film work of the day — making literal the observation that Roger was running the real-world equivalent of a film school. It was an amazing, creative and prolific slice of filmmaking history.
