Jack Hill, Stephanie Rothman / 1966 / US / 80 min

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

It’s easy to love low-budget B-pictures. With all the wooden acting, overly emphatic music, bad overdubbing, glaring continuity errors, imperilled scream queens and piss-poor special effects they have a certain charm. Blood Bath has its genesis in 1963’s Operation: Titian – a thriller directed by Rados Novakovic and set in what was then Communist ‘Jugoslavia’. The action takes place in the enchanting, historic resort town of Dubrovnik in the Adriatic famed for its quaint streets and bell tower that look like an Escher drawing.

Novakovic tips his hat to The Third Man and Hitchcock; even Fellini. It’s an energetic and enjoyable, if forgettable enough B, that even seems to have the endorsement of the Dubrovnik tourist office. It was made in English with an attractive international cast. King of the B-pictures Roger Corman produced and invested in the film hoping it would be good drive-in fodder with a European twist (the story editor was Francis Ford Coppola although it probably doesn’t appear on his CV).

Operation Titian centres on a stolen painting by the Venetian master and a mad artist with impotency issues and ideas above his station. Although hardly intellectual the movie was re-edited to create Portrait in Terror (a more teen-friendly offering). There’s a promise of slasher gore and bare titties that are not delivered. Added to this is a subplot of hairy, pretentious beatniks (as risible as today’s sock-less humongo-bearded hipsters) for comic relief.

This was then restructured again; transforming it, incredibly, into a vampire movie called Blood Bath and a TV version Track of the Vampire using footage from the original and new scenes shot in the US, all imperfectly patched together to make an often unintentionally hilarious new result. Why does any of this matter? Corman was a fascinating maverick – he made 40 genre films in 17 years including Westerns, sci-fi and horror – with an eye for an easy buck. He is said to have made The Terror (1962) in a single weekend when bad weather kept him off the tennis court. His Little Shop of Horrors (1960) is an enduring cult and a remake is currently in development.

This limited edition box set of the four versions of Blood Bath (there’s very little blood but plenty of extras) treats the schlock meisterwork cycle as reverently as a newly-discovered director’s cut of Citizen Kane. A feature-length (and daftly reverential) visual essay by Video Watchdog’s Tim Lucas goes into interminable detail over the Blood Bath varietals. Aficionados will be creaming their jeans in late-night heaven.