Movies - Blood Bath

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	Movies - Blood Bath

:This article is about the 1966 horror film produced by Roger Corman. For the 1971 Italian horror directed by Mario Bava, see Twitch of the Death Nerve. For the death metal band, see Bloodbath.

Blood Bath is a vampire-themed horror thriller released in 1966, directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman, starring William Campbell. The film was produced by Roger Corman.
Plot
In Venice, California, Daisy (Marrisa Mathes) leaves a club alone after an argument with her beatnik boyfriend, Max (Carl Schanzer). While walking the streets, she stops to admire some gruesome paintings in a gallery window, all completed by the artist Antonio Sordi (Campbell), who coincidentally also comes by to look in on his "lost children." After a friendly conversation, Sordi convinces the young woman to pose nude for him that night. At his bell-tower studio, Sordi becomes insanely aroused by the sight of the woman's naked body. He suddenly transforms into a vampiric monster and hacks the screaming Daisy to death with a hatchet. Afterwards, he dumps her mutilated corpse into a vat of boiling wax.

Sordi, in his vampire form, stalks Venice in search of victims; he is able to do so freely at all hours. In the middle of the day, he chases a young woman into a swimming pool and drowns her. At night, he kills another victim in a car while numerous pedestrians walk by, who all assume the vampire and the woman are simply lovers.

Donna (Sandra Knight) investigates the disappearance of her sister, Daisy. She briefly visits Sordi's studio and talks to the artist on a stairwell, his face hidden in shadow. She then meets Max, and reads to him the legend of Sordi's 15th century ancestor, Erno Sordi, a vampire who had his reign of terror cut short when villagers chased him to his tower and forced him down to his death. Later, Donna is followed to a carnival by the vampire, who attacks and kills her on a carousel.

A third sister, Dorian (Linda Saunders), is a ballerina who Sordi falls in love with, believing she is the reincarnation of Erno Sordi’s long dead insane mistress, Melizza, who haunts him in his dreams. The modern Sordi eventually tries to kill Dorian, but before he can do so, Max and his beatnik friends have finally figured out who/what Sordi is, and, after freeing Dorian, chase the crazed vampire up to the roof of his bell-tower studio...
Production
Blood Bath had possibly the most convoluted production history of any horror movie ever made.

In 1963, while on vacation in Europe, Corman made a deal to distribute an unproduced Yugoslavian espionage thriller to be titled Operacija Ticijan/Operation: Titian. Corman bought the rights to the film for $20,000 and insisted on control over the production to ensure it could be adequately “Americanized”. To this end, Corman provided two cast members, William Campbell and Patrick Magee
, who had appeared together in Corman’s The Young Racers and Francis Ford Coppola’s Corman-produced Dementia 13. In addition, Coppola was installed as the production’s script supervisor. The completed film was deemed unreleasable by Corman, although a redubbed, slightly re-edited version was eventually released directly to television under the title Portrait in Terror.

In 1964, Corman asked director Jack Hill to salvage the film. Hill filmed additional sequences in Venice, California in order to match the original movie’s European look, and turned the former spy thriller into a horror movie about a crazed madman who killed his models and made sculptures out of their dead bodies. Campbell was available for the reshoots and insisted on a sizeable paycheck to do so, reportedly angering Corman who nonetheless agreed to the actor’s demands. Hill added all of the beatnik-related scenes, and was responsible for what many fans believe is the single most effective sequence in the film, the hatchet murder of Marrisa Mathes. Magee’s role was more or less retained intact in this version. However, Hill’s version of the film, entitled Blood Bath, has never been released, as Corman once again was unhappy with the results.

In 1966, Corman made another attempt to create a workable film. He hired another director, Stephanie Rothman, to change the story as she saw fit. While retaining much of Hill’s footage, she changed the plot from a story about a deranged, murderous artist to a story about a deranged, murderous artist who is also a vampire. Because Campbell refused to participate in yet another reshoot, Rothman was forced to use a completely different actor for the new murder scenes. This meant Rothman had to now provide the Campbell character with the ability to magically transform his physical shape whenever he turned into his vampiric-self, in order to explain why the vampire-killer looked nothing like Campbell. Almost all of the scenes Rothman added were among the weakest in the film. And this time around, Magee’s role was almost completely excised out, save for a brief glimpse of him as a wax encrusted corpse. For reasons known only to himself, it was this version of the film that most pleased Corman, and it was subsequently briefly released to theatres by American International Pictures, retaining Hill's Blood Bath title. Both Hill and Rothman were credited as co-directors.
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