Though clunky, Bloody Birthday is not a film you
will easily forget. Kudos to Severin for gift-wrapping it appropriately.
AARON VON LUPTON in Corman’s Kitchen Too Many Cooks
BLOOD BATH (1966) DVD Starring William Campbell, Marissa Mathes
and Sandra Knight Written and directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman MGM
A slab of cut-rate horror weirdness this odd could
only come from Roger Corman’s stable. Blood Bath is a mix of comedy and surrealism that plays like a funnier, more Gothic version of Carnival of Souls. And if it often feels as if there are several movies going on at once while watching the film, that’s no coinci- dence – a vampire movie, a psycho artist thriller and some kind of beatnik satire all violently collide during the sparse, 60-minute running time, and struggle to form a cohesive plot. Stuck with an unreleasable Yugoslavian spy movie
Looks Who’s Stalking
BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1981) DVD Starring Lori Lethin, Melinda Cordell and Julie Brown
Directed by Ed Hunt Written by Ed Hunt and Barry Pearson Severin
Bloody Birthday, a near-forgotten entry in the early
’80s slasher boom, is a great example of the power of the killer kid subgenre. Despite being an awkward descendent of similarly themed films such as The Bad Seed or Who Can Kill A Child?, the movie’s unsettling images of kids engaged in acts of violence are still disturbing. Three babies (two boys and a
girl) are born during a lunar eclipse caused by Saturn, the planet that allegedly regulates emotion. As a result, the three little buggers grow up to be murderous sociopaths who celebrate their tenth birthdays by offing a teenage couple making out in an open grave (hot!). Only local boy Timmy and his sister Joyce (Lori Lethin: Return to Horror High) suspect the brats, which makes them next on the hit list. Though it starts out as other slashers of the era do
– people getting murdered in the dark by unseen killers – Bloody Birthday quickly becomes a drawn- out game of cat-and-mouse in which the three kids
RM44 R E I S S U E S
try to kill Timmy and Joyce, while the duo attempts to convince the neighbourhood of the children’s evil intentions. Curiously, there’s very little structure to the story at all; the tykes randomly murder various people in elaborate but not particularly bloody se- quences. Even the titular birthday bash is barely a key plot point. Despite the sloppy writing, however, the movie
boasts plenty of fun exploitation moments, which are made infinitely more icky by involving children. In one of the film’s highlights, the little killer girl invites the two boys to peep on her older sister doing a striptease, before they off the buxom gal with an arrow through the eye! The picture quality on Sev-
erin Films’ DVD is solid despite the movie’s bargain-basement production values, and the sound is passable, though the dialogue is noticeably muffled in places. Features include an interview with Lethin, a lengthy audio interview with director Ed Hunt (The Brain), who details almost his entire career in B- movies, and a fun featurette ti- tled “A Brief History of Slasher Films,” which earns street cred
for spotlighting low-budget efforts such as Final Exam and The Dorm That Dripped Blood, even if it ultimately adds nothing to the existing stalk ’n’ slash lexicon.
he helped fund, Corman tried to give Blood Bath a jolt of box-office appeal by heaping on additional sto- rylines until the whole thing collapsed. In the film, William Campbell plays Sordi, a painter and sculptor who murders beautiful models and dips them in hot wax. Occasionally he’s also possessed by the ghost of an ancestor who makes him change into a com- pletely different-looking vampire who chases girls around the beach, at least until he’s exposed by Max (Karl Schanzer) and his ragtag beatnik pals (Jonathan Haze and Sid Haig). The story goes
that Corman, in an attempt to salvage the film, contracted Jack Hill to rehire Campbell and add the whole killer artist angle, as well as some light- hearted scenes of hepcat artists in a rundown coffee shop (that seem to be swiped from A Bucket of Blood’s cutting-room floor). But, still unhappy with the result, Corman then had director Stephanie Rothman work in the vampire story with an entirely new actor playing the trans- formed Sordi. In trying to paste together all of these disparate el-
ements, the film nevertheless coughs up some great atmospheric moments. Rothman gives an other- worldly flavour to scenes of the vampire stalking his prey, including a chase on a carousel, while Hill’s contribution – a ghostly visage laughing in a mirror inside Sordi’s gloomy castle lair – also gives the film some unexpected style. Even after the movie was completed, Corman still
couldn’t help tinkering with the shabby production, eventually adding even more new scenes for the TV broadcast and retitling the whole mess Track of the Vampire. That version is common on public domain
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