By Tristan Bishop
Reshoots have been in the news recently, with a couple of forthcoming blockbusters apparently having footage reshoot to ‘lighten’ the dark tone (presumably in panicked response to the critical drubbing of Batman Vs Superman), but reshoots are nothing new, as this 2 disc package from Arrow Video attests.
Blood Bath is perhaps one of the lesser-seen films in legendary exploitation director Jack Hill’s oeuvre (we won’t count those Mexican Boris Karloff films that he apparently shot extra footage for), with a reputation as an incoherent cut & paste job. Is this a fair summation? Well, kind of. But, as this set makes clear, we never got Jack Hill’s ‘proper’ version of the film in the first place.
Let me take a deep breath and try to explain. We’ll start with the indefatigable (and always budget-conscious) producer Roger Corman, who, by the early sixties was already a dab hand at buying up Eastern European fantasy films (which often featured special effects way beyond the scope of the budgets Corman was working with), re-editing them, getting young directors to shoot new footage and passing the results off as American originals to unsuspecting audiences: see films such as Queen Of Blood, Magic Voyage Of Sinbad and Battle Beyond The Sun (the latter being especially worthy of merit, for not only being an early assignment for Francis Ford Coppola, but also for containing what can only be described as penis and vagina monsters, which one can only assume went over the heads of a US audience in 1962!)
During an Eastern European trip (presumably to try and source some more footage), Corman found himself chatting to some Yugoslav filmmakers who were interested in collaborating – They would take care of the production as long as Corman could throw some money in (reportedly around $20,000 dollars) and supply some actors for name value. In came William Campbell and Patrick Magee (the latter straight out of Francis Coppola’s underrated Dementia 13, also for Corman), and Operation Titian was born.
Long unavailable, Operation Titian is first up on this collection. Although Corman originally shelved it for being ‘unreleaseable’, it’s really not a bad little film. Coming off as an Eastern European twist on the German krimi, Operation Titian is a spy thriller of sorts; involving all sorts of characters out to get hold of a rare painting by, you guessed it, Titian. Despite some fairly awful line reading by some of the local actors speaking English, it’s a passable afternoon’s comfort viewing – extremely dated and occasionally flagging in pace, but saved by some lovely location work (Yugoslavia looks like a great place for a holiday), an arrestingly shot and heavily atmospheric intro sequence, and Magee as a badass Italian gangster, who steals the show, cutting off a stripper’s bra with his knife, and beating up some drunken sailors who attempt to retaliate. It’s unlikely to be anyone’s favourite film, but fans of early sixties romps will have a lot of fun with this one.
Having shelved the film for a couple of years, Corman had the film slightly re-edited and released to television in 1965 as Portrait In Terror, which is the second film in the collection. To be honest, there isn’t a massive amount of difference between the two films, save some cutting down of the more tourist-y footage from Project Titian (one of that film’s important scenes is based around a real fishing tournament, and this has been completely excised from the Portrait version) and a couple of moments where things have been slightly extended – with stand-ins! I can see how this may have played better at the time but, personally, I found a good deal of innocent charm in the travelogue footage, so Project Titian was a more satisfying experience for me.
So now we come to Blood Bath. As I mentioned at the start of this review, Jack Hill’s Blood Bath was never actually finished. Hill was bought in to ‘save’ the film, and started to use footage from Titian to make the tale of a crazed artist who murders his models – a massive nod to producer Corman’s classic Bucket Of Blood (1959). However, the project was abandoned after around 45 minutes of footage was shot by Hill, and he instead went on to direct the classic Spider Baby. The project was then picked up by Stephanie Rothman, who had been working on a variety of different projects for Corman in a variety of different roles, and ended up shooting another 30 minutes of footage for Blood Bath. However, tastes were changing by the mid-sixties, and instead of basing the footage around William Campbell’s mad artist, Blood Bath was now becoming a vampire film!
As it stands, Blood Bath actually contains very little footage from Project Titian. Notably the incredible opening sequence remains, which then segues into Rothman’s vampire footage. Most of Hill’s footage, I would guess, concerns the coffee shop antics of a group of beatnik artists (among them an extremely young, bare-chested Sid Haig), where the amusing dialogue about quantum theory remains the highlight of the film. Understandably, as a whole it’s a bit of a mess; personally I didn’t quite understand where the vampire stuff fitted in with the rest of the plot, I can only assume Campbell’s character is supposed to be able to become a vampire, who looks like a normal man with things, but, well, nothing like Campbell. There are more flashes of great material to be had including some fairly nasty murder sequences, and a cracking ending which must surely have been an influence on Bill Lustig’s Maniac (1980), so Blood Bath stands out as the best film in the collection despite the many flaws.
Track Of The Vampire, which rounds things out, is basically the TV version of Blood Bath; except, rather than a cut-down version as you might expect, presents us with an extended version instead. After all, Blood Bath runs barely over an hour, so 15 extra minutes have been added in to pad it out to acceptable broadcast length. Out of this 15 minutes, a whole 8 minutes is taken up by a scene where the vampire chases a random woman. 8 whole minutes of your life. Needless to say this version is inessential viewing, although fascinating as some of the footage seems to have been restored from Portrait in Terror.
The real charm on the disc, and what really pulls it all together, however, is Tim Lucas’ ‘Visual Essay’ on the bizarre history of the films and their productions. The feature runs longer than Blood Bath itself, and goes into fascinating detail about the various shoots and differences between the versions. Lucas has been obsessed by the films since realising as a child that Portrait In Terror and Track Of The Vampire shared footage, and his passion and research shine through – in fact, after watching the documentary, I realised much of the info on Wikipedia about the film is incorrect.
There are also on camera interviews with Sid Haig and Jack Hill, but these are fairly brief (less than ten minutes) and pale into insignificance alongside Lucas’s labour of love, and are mostly interesting for the fact that neither man seems to have much love for Rothman!
All in all, this is a wonderful example of a second rate film (or, more correctly, films), made essential viewing by the way Arrow has put this package together: a fascinating history lesson and insight into the heyday of exploitation film-making, with all the films restored into picture quality most likely not far off their original look (save the expected wear-and-tear on some of the elements). If you have any interest in Corman, Hill, or American horror films of the sixties, this is a treat you shouldn’t miss.
Blood Bath is out now on Blu-ray from Arrow Video.