Blood Bath
Blood Bath
NR | 02 March 1966 (USA)
Blood Bath Trailers

A painter of morbid art, who becomes a murderous vampire by night and kills young women, attempts a daytime relationship with a woman who resembles a former love and is also the sister of one of his victims.

Reviews
Harockerce What a beautiful movie!
CommentsXp Best movie ever!
MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant
Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
bugsmoran29 I must admit I enjoyed this movie when I recently saw it on Comet. The cobblestone roads, the medieval pillars and the clock tower all gave the film a creepy atmosphere.The Beatnik painters gave a touch of comic relief to the grim topic of a vampire artist. William Campbell did a great job as the prowling murderer. The attack on the female victims were very believable and exciting. Seeing the beautiful Sanders romp on the beach in a revealing bikini was also a bonus. I was surprised there were no police on the scene to question the painters or the artist. Not one cop in sight! I was also rather baffled that the vampire only went for the neck of one victim while the others were drowned, strangled or attacked with sharp instrument.
Mikel3 It was another cold mostly dreary winter day so I decided to watch two Prime video movies. I'm really getting my money's worth out of my membership. Today I went with off-beat Vampire stories. Yes, I look for the unusual stories. The first was 'Blood Bath' from 1966. Watching it I thought for sure it was Italian made. Later I read up on it, turns out it was filmed in Serbia, of all places, and L.A. It starred William Campbell. I knew him best as Trelane in the original series Star Trek episode 'The Squire of Gothos' and as a Klingon in another episode. The story is about a Jekyll and Hyde like vampire. At times he seems like a gentle but rather morbid artist. Other times he is possessed by a vampire artist ancestor of his. The back story for his vampire ancestor was a bit confusing. Nowadays he finds female victims and boils their bodies for some reason. He boils them till they look like soap sculptures. He also makes morbid death paintings of female nudes. As in many films of this type there seems to be an endless supply of naive women victims for him to choose from. Sometimes they're standing under Gothic arches on dark streets late at night. Evidently they're waiting to become victims. No they aren't there because they're hookers or anything close to logical like that. Other times they're swimming alone in bikinis on isolated beaches or hanging out alone by swimming pools at night. One female, after meeting him on the street admiring his art work in a window, is lured to his studio. She then offers to do some modeling for him and strips without even being asked to. Yes, even though his studio looks like it's in the Tower of London only not as cheery, the women don't seem overly concerned about the decor. There are some attempts at surreal scenes in the movie where the director is trying to be artistic, the carousel scene for instance. A woman is being chased on this carousel by the vampire, she begs for help yet either nobody takes her pleas seriously or they just don't care. The best part about the film for me was the comments it contained on the nature of art and its value. To me much of what is now considered priceless art is simply garbage in disguise; some of Andy Warhol's works come to mind as examples of expensive junk. Is a painting of a Campbell's soup can really worth a fortune? This movie seems to agree with me that it's not. There are some beatnik-like characters in it that think all kinds of junk are art. One character even has what appears to be a prototype of our current paint guns and uses it to enhance his "art". There are some very unlikely heroes that turn up. The film does succeed to some extent by being different and ends with pretty good scares even if the makeup is poor.For those reasons and its offbeat quality I give it a 4 out of 10 rating. It was diverting.
kevin olzak 1966's "Track of the Vampire" was first released theatrically at 62 minutes, under the title "Blood Bath," but this review will be of the full 78 minute version issued to television. William Campbell stars as Antonio Sordi, an artist lauded for his paintings of dead nudes, who believes himself to be the reincarnation of an artist ancestor burned at the stake for sorcery after being exposed by his latest model, Miliza, who believed her soul had been captured on canvas. Sordi keeps a portrait of Miliza in his studio, and cannot make love to his newest muse Dorean (Lori Saunders) because of her close resemblance to it. All the new scenes with Campbell were filmed by director Jack Hill, maintaining the name he used in "Portrait in Terror," but whenever the character becomes a blonde haired vampire sporting tiny fangs (!), a different actor was cast by new director Stephanie Rothman, resulting in sporadic chase sequences and a ballet lasting more than 3 minutes. Just over 9 (out of 81) minutes of footage from "Portrait in Terror" were used, recasting an unbilled Patrick Magee as a jealous husband (the exotic dancer now becoming his wife) who winds up covered in wax, like all of Sordi's female victims (the shared sequence between Campbell and Magee has completely new dialogue badly overdubbed). Apparently, he kills them first, paints their nude likenesses, then covers each corpse in wax. Campbell himself doesn't make his first appearance until 22 minutes in, the vampire having already worn out its welcome with a 6 1/2 minute pursuit of a young lass who ends up in the ocean minus most of her clothes, while a middleweight Tor Johnson lookalike acts as temporary lifeguard. The ending didn't make any sense, but probably made the film. Stephanie Rothman did all the vampire stuff, including the subplot featuring Sandra Knight, all of which is self contained (only a single dissolve fuses the artist and the vampire, pretty lame). Jack Hill did all the beatnik scenes, plus the bizarre climax, filming in Venice California. I'd say each director was split fairly even, sharing writing and directing credits, but never working in tandem (the uncredited Roger Corman replaced Hill with Rothman).
The_Void This film really is a complete mess so it came as no surprise to me that it's actually made up of about three different films that were spliced together over a period of a few years. It's a shame really because there's several interesting plot elements on show and they could definitely have resulted in a decent movie – as evidenced by Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood which is an excellent movie based on similar ideas. The central plot line revolves around an artist who happens to be the descendant of a man who was put to death for witchcraft centuries earlier. Both men were painters – the modern day one very successful. He paints pictures of beautiful women; before tossing them in a vat of acid when he's finished. He's apparently also a vampire. The film is shot in black and white and features some very interesting visuals, although it does look very cheap throughout. There are a few memorable faces; including those belonging to William Campbell and Sid Haig and the director's credit goes to Jack Hill, although Roger Corman had something to with it too apparently. It's a shame that the film couldn't have come together better because there are some good ideas here, but unfortunately it didn't and Blood Bath will be best be remembered as a bit of a mess. It's an interesting cult film...but I really wouldn't recommend going out of your way to find a copy!