Blood Bath

In 1963, while on vacation in Europe, Roger Corman made a deal to distribute an unproduced Yugoslavian espionage thriller titled Operacija Ticijan/Operation: Titian, shot in Yugoslavia.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4]

In 1964, Corman asked director Jack Hill to salvage the film. Hill wrote and 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 kills his models and makes sculptures out of their dead bodies. Campbell was available for the reshoots and insisted on a sizeable paycheck to appear in the film, reportedly angering Corman, who nonetheless agreed to the actor’s demands. Hill added all of the beatnik-related scenes shot with Sid Haig and Jonathan Haze, and was responsible for what many fans believe is the single most effective sequence in the film, the hatchet murder of Melissa Mathes. Magee’s role was more or less retained intact in this version. However, Hill’s version of the film, retitled Blood Bath, has never been released, as Corman once again was unhappy with the results.[5]

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.[6] 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 now had to provide the Campbell character with the ability to magically transform his physical shape whenever he turned into a vampire, in order to explain why the vampire-killer looked nothing like Campbell. Other complications including bringing Sid Haig back for re-shoots; at the time of shooting with Hill, he did not have a beard, but had grown one for the subsequent project he was working on. This explains the continuity errors concerning his facial hair in the film.[7]

In spite of the inconsistencies brought on by Rothman's additional shoots, this was this version of the film that most pleased Corman, and it was subsequently released to theatres by American International Pictures, retaining Hill's Blood Bath title. Both Hill and Rothman were credited as co-directors. Hill later claimed that Rothman's changes "totally ruined" the film.[8]

A fifth version of the film exists, entitled Track of the Vampire.[9] Because Rothman's Blood Bath ran 69 minutes, which was deemed too short for television showings, additional footage was added, including a six-minute sequence showing Linda Saunders dancing non-stop on the beach. This version of the film was shown often on late-night television.[10]

Commenting on the film's convoluted history, Hill stated:

Blood Bath was my script. It was my title. After I left, Roger decided that he didn't think that the Yugoslavian footage matched the footage that we had shot in Venice. You see, both Portrait of Terror and Blood Bath came out of this same footage. Roger got the idea that he could sell the original movie to television and have Stephanie Rothman pad out what I shot with further scenes to make another full-length movie—and wind up with two movies instead of one. This is the kind of nutso stuff that went through there. So Stephanie wrote new scenes and shot them, and turned it into a vampire movie.[11]

Michael Weldon, in his Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, called Blood Bath “a confusing but interesting horror film with an even more confusing history.[10] Phil Hardy’s The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror noted, “Cheap and crude, with echoes of a dozen movies ranging from Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) to A Bucket of Blood (1959), this film isn’t unenjoyable."[14] Cavett Binion of AllMovie wrote, "As one might imagine, this is pretty difficult to follow, but there are some good performances — particularly from William Campbell as the haunted shutterbug — and some fairly suspenseful scenes."[15]

In 1991, Video Watchdog magazine devoted lengthy articles in three separate issues fully detailing the production history of the film. These articles included interviews with Hill and Campbell, the latter of whom expressed shock when he was told that the film he had shot so long ago in Yugoslavia had been turned into five individual movies.[2]

Clayton Dillard of Slant Magazine awarded the film four out of five stars, writing: "Purely as a film, Blood Bath expectedly turns out to be a mash-up of styles and tones, with surrealist flourishes (a tracking shot focused on Sordi in the wide-open California desert) juxtaposing routine scenes of women being lured to the villain’s lair. Everything within it is odd, from rampant continuity errors, to unintelligible footage of shadowy figures from the preceding films interspersed throughout."[16]

The film was released on DVD in 2011 through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's "Limited Edition Collection," which are made-on-demand discs. In May 2016, the film was released on Blu-ray in a limited edition two-disc set by Arrow Films. It features all four versions of the film restored from the original negatives: the original Operation: Titian; Jack Hill's original Blood Bath; Blood Bath featuring Stephanie Rothman's re-shoots; and Track of the Vampire.[9]