All Rise...

Judge Patrick Bromley prefers cold blood showers.

Editor's Note

Our reviews of Blood Bath (1966) (published July 1st, 2011) and Blood Bath (1976) (published August 17th, 2006) are also available.

The Charge

The shrieking of mutilated victims caged in a black pit of horror!

The Case

The 1966 horror movie Blood Bath is not a great movie, but Arrow Video's new Blu-ray is a great release both from a historical perspective and as a study in the life of a single film. The thing about Blood Bath is that it's not really a single film. It is four different films, all of which have been included on the Arrow Blu-ray, which serves as a kind of document of how on cheap exploitation import is reedited, retitled and repurposed into three other movies. Not one of them is particularly good taken on its own, but together provide a fascinating and unique glimpse into exploitation movie history.

Originally made in Yugoslavia in 1963 under the title Operation Titian, the rights to the movie were purchased by producer Roger Corman, who insisted on including some more "American" elements like co-stars William Campbell and Patrick Magee. Even with those changes, Corman wasn't happy with the results and tried to salvage the movie by dubbing some of the dialogue, making some cuts and dumping it straight to TV under the name Portrait in Terror (also included here on Arrow's Blu-ray). Still hoping to get the movie into theaters and make a profit on his investment, Corman hired the great Jack Hill to shoot new footage to be incorporated into the Yugoslavian version. Hill brought Sid Haig (The Devil's Rejects) and Jonathan Haze (The Little Shop of Horrors) to play beatniks and reworked the original film into something of a serial killer story with some of the same counterculture commentary Corman became known for in the late '50s and early 1960s.

But the story doesn't end there. Corman brought in yet another director, Stephanie Rothmans, who added a vampire subplot to Blood Bath, which would then be reedited yet again and shown on television as Track of the Vampire. Prior to Arrow's Blu-ray release, this was the most well-known version of the movie and the one that surfaces most often. In collecting all four versions together in the same package, Arrow has created the definitive version of Blood Bath…if there's a market for such a thing.

Summarizing the plot is a challenge, seeing as how it changes from film to film. The basics of Blood Bath are this: a female beatnik (Merissa Mathes) meets an artist named Antonio Sordi (Campbell), who brings her back to his studio, whereupon he becomes possessed by a kind of vampire spirit and kills her, disposing of the body in a vat of wax. He continues his killing spree, turning each of his victims into art before adding them to his wax vat. When he falls in love with a human he believes to be the reincarnated spirit of a witch (played by Linda Saunders of Petticoat Junction), he risks exposing his dark secret.

I find it difficult to comment on the quality of all the different versions of the movie, probably because watching the same thing four times in a row has them all running together and turned my brain into its own kind of blood bath. Blood Bath is the most watchable, again because Jack Hill is a great filmmaker and turns the movie into something sometimes funny, sometimes weird, sometimes twisted. Because it uses most of Hill's film as its base, Track of the Vampire goes down pretty easily, too, though it feels a bit like what it is—a movie that's been chopped up and repurposed. The original Yugoslavian cut, Operation Titian, is much more of a '60s art film but is mostly tedious. It's a drag to get through, best advised as a curiosity. In fact, I'd plan starting here if you plan to work through all four versions, if only so you can see how it gets turned into a better movie.

Presented on two discs, Blood Bath appears in four separate cuts, all in 1080p transfers in the original 1.66:1 widescreen aspect ratio. Because of the difficulty involved in giving all the different elements that make up all the different cuts HD transfers, there's a good deal of inconsistency across the four versions. Three of the four—Blood Bath, Track of the Vampire and Portrait in Terror, are generally comparable: the black and white image offers decent contrast and detail and appear mostly clean throughout. Operation Titian is the weakest of the set, often looking soft and hazy and with a number of shots that sport print damage. It's still watchable, but also the lowest in quality (and, thankfully, probably the version to which most audiences are least likely to revisit). All four versions of the movie have similar LCPM mono soundtracks that contain a fair amount of hiss and occasional distortion, but which still offer audible dialogue even if the whole thing is pretty thin.

All of the bonus features are contained on the second disc, including a nearly 90-minute video essay from author Tim Lucas in which he discusses the long and troubled production of Blood Bath over a collection of stills. It's a pretty incredible overview and just as watchable (if not more so) as any of the film's four cuts. Also included is a separate still gallery, a new (but brief) interview with co-star Sid Haig and an archival interview (in standard def) of director Jack Hill. This release is a little lighter on supplemental material than most Arrow releases, but I suspect that's because offering four different cuts of the movie speak for themselves and pick up the slack of any extras.

While I can't quite recommend Blood Bath for the quality of the movie itself (though the Jack Hill version certainly has a certain entertainment value), Arrow's release is a must for fans of classic cult movies, if for no other reason than to understand the history and development of how drive-in and exploitation movies were treated back in the '60s. Movie fans with an interest in editing may also want to have a look, seeing as how the changes from version to version really do turn Blood Bath into a different experience each time. Only some of those experiences bear repeating.

The Verdict

An incredible document of a less-than-incredible film.

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