Blood Bath (1975) User Reviews (8)

The bath is clogged with insipidness.

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 31 October 2020]

The creators and stars of a horror film gather together after completing filming and share their own horror stories, and what seems like would be an adult gathering ends up being juvenile in many ways. Lead by director and star Harve Presnell, the movie opens with a satanic wedding that is revealed to be the conclusion of the movie, and then we go onto hear the various stories that they have to tell. Most of them seem pointless or plotless, some building to have a possibly intense conclusion and letting the audience down.

There's a stranded man picked up by someone driving by (pointless), Napoleon in battle watching roasting rats (plotless) and the potentially amusing story of a foreclosure manager locked in a safe and visited by the ghost of a man whose foreclosure led to him being killed in a robbery. That one at least has a sense of irony in it, and the last minute presence of a young Doris Roberts as the foreclosure manager's wife. It's the best entry in the film, and that's not saying much.

The next segment involving a martial arts trainer is very dull, and I found myself tempted to fast-forward. The story involves a limbless samurai and is just too creepy and tasteless to care about watching unfold. The British horror filmmakers were better at creating engaging multi story anthology films that really built up in tension. This one just lays there with its premise just not working, playing out like a short story where nothing goes anywhere, causing the reader to gape at the last page, scratch their head, and say to themselves, "Huh?"

another work of genius by b-movie norse god joel reed

[priest.21 · 30 November 1999]

this nauseating tale of gore and torture wins my vote as the best b-movie horror for 1976. brilliant costume, intelligent plot, and terrific special effects make this a must see. not only that, but i threw up T W I C E while viewing this exceptional work of art; once when i saw blood and again when i witnessed a monstrous act of torture only the devil himself could conceptualize. this movie is wicked...if you like "blood sucking freaks" or the situational comedy series "the golden girls", you will love this obnoxious little piece!

Amateur night

[jameselliot-1 · 1/10 · 21 October 2019]

What was Harve Presnell doing in this piece of junk? It's hard to believe a stage and screen star with his talent and numerous credits agreed to appear in this rancid roundtable rubbish made in someone's apartment basement. This depresses me.

Boring bath

[trashgang · 2/10 · 20 November 2008]

What can I tell about this flick. It's from the director of Bloodsucking Freaks with the same kind of score. The movie itself is boring and bloodless. It contains four story's that are predictable and boring. The first one is maybe the best but you can see the plot coming from the beginning. Storyline two is a lot of bla bla and nothing really happens, you should be scared to see the ending, well you ain't. Storyline three about some coins, boring as hell and there's some gore in it, well , not scary at all. The last storyline is, as you can guess boring. And after the four story lines there's a plot to the whole movie, again predictable. The acting is beyond zero, Oh I can go on for ages, it's one you will see but forget immediately. This should have been a tales from the crypt but failed, a shame, Bloodsucking Freaks was better.

Worth a look, clever, darkly amusing

[HEFILM · 7/10 · 1 July 2006]

Well okay, there isn't really much blood in this movie, so get over it. This is a tame film, especially compared to Director Reeds deservedly notorious, and I think somewhat misunderstood, Bloodsucking Freaks. Blood Bath isn't a shock fest but knowing this and knowing the extremely limited resources they had to make the film it's pretty entertaining and has some good performances from actors who were/are in real movies.

It moves along well,each story features some good humor and good twists,and even all these years later it retains a spark of originality to it. The worst aspect is the low budget or no budget production design and photography, but it's all in focus and pretty much cuts together under Victor Kanefsky's editing--who went on to edit Bloodsucking Freaks for Reed as well. There are also some clever shots here and there when time allowed. There are however a few scenes that play against nothing but blackness--they couldn't even afford a wall. Main genre element I suppose deals with the sort of cruel irony/comedy of getting what you think you want, or thinking you got away with evil deeds and having them come back to trip you up.

Recent DVD release features a longish,not very creative, but still interesting, featurette that itself should have been better photographed but does dig up several of the performers and lets behind the scene people tell it like it was to make the film. This was not a hack work production, it was a quickly that they all did the best they could with and it's entertaining.

Those who hate low budget movies feel free to watch some large slick empty thing instead, but this is diverting stuff for those in the right frame of mind.

A Forgotten Masterpiece

[bond-76 · 10/10 · 27 July 2005]

I cannot believe that this gem of a horror has had such little publicity-totally original,clever with a bizarre twisted undertone,although a nightmare to find- any self respecting horror genre fan must hunt this beauty down-Forget Bloodsucking Freaks this is Joel Reeds finest moment!!!I first saw this movie over 20 years ago and and to be honest for years I had convinced myself I had been having flashbacks of some disturbing dream because the movie seemed to have totally be erased from existence even endless searches on the internet proved useless until eventually it turned up on ebay one day and naturally i snapped it up!What a relief it was I tell you confirming that I wasn't actually going insane!The art work alone for this film is just soooo classic in itself and in this case the video definitely should be judged by the cover!SEE IT!

Cheap but fun horror anthology.

[HumanoidOfFlesh · 7/10 · 13 September 2012]

Joel M.Reed's "Blood Bath" features four weird and darkly amusing horror stories:the first one is about luckless hit man,the second one is about one guy who wishes he was fighting in Napoleonic wars and his wish is granted by magical coin,the third one is about greedy businessman who is locked in his own safe and haunted by a ghost and finally the fourth and the weirdest one is about martial arts fighter."Blood Bath" is very weird horror anthology that doesn't make a lot of sense.The film is low on gore but high on weirdness.It's extremely tame in comparison to Joel M.Reed infamous exploitation classic "Bloodsucking Freaks".There's hardly any gore in "Blood Bath",but if you like strange and twisted horror comedies give this one a chance.7 candlelit dinners out of 10.

Wow! This is good!

[BandSAboutMovies · 6/10 · 11 August 2021]

Man, ever since I've obsessed over Night Train to Terror, I've been searching for a movie that has the same absurdist edge and amateurish energy that feels like a million monkeys had been working a million hours in a million room's worth of typewriters and this is the alien manuscript that they delivered to us.

What makes Blood Bath a movie that instantly went to the top of my list was who made it: Joel M. Reed, who may have made only six movies, but one of them was Bloodsucking Freaks*. This film has the same berserk zeal as that film, a movie I rented so many times as a teenager that I really should have been considered for counseling.

Yet unlike that film - which has pretty much full nudity for most of its running time and some of the most aberrant behavior I've ever seen - Blood Bath is, well, nearly bloodless. That doesn't make it any less strange.

Harve Presnell (Wade Gustafson from Fargo) plays Peter Brown, a man who is at once the most Satanic director of all time and also the husband of an actual demon and a New York City cop. The cast of his latest film wants to convince him that the supernatural is real, so they all gather to tell several stories to him that creates the heart of this portmanteau.

From a killer whose big hit goes wrong to a novelist who escapes the drudgery of marriage into a fantasy that doesn't live up to his dreams, a businessman locked in a vault with the ghost of a black man that he indirectly killed and a martial artist who steals the most important secret of a secret sect of mystics and sells it as part of his strip mall karate classes, none of the stories are going to set you ablaze (then again, the end of the martial arts story is absolute beyond insane, which is exactly what I want this entire movie to be), the stories all kind of pale to the real weirdness of seeing Raymond's mom Doris Roberts, Andy Milligan stock player Neil Flanagan, Jerry Lacy - who played Bogart to Woody Allen - and a brunette P. J. Soles tying to get with our director protagonist before his half-demon goat boy son goes off.

The art director of this movie, Ron Sullivan, is probably better known as Henri Pachard, the director of The Devil in Miss Jones Part II and Taboo American Style. One of the actors in this, Sonny Landham, may be better known as both Billy in Predator and a hardcore conservative political career, but he started things off in movies like this (and also doing adult).

This is the kind of movie that has a newspaper headline that shouts "Kung Fu Master Opens Supermarket!" and karate masters - one has no arms and legs - sitting down to eat egg rolls before they battle to the death.

This movie is not well made and that means that to me, it's beyond perfect. It's an absolute mess, shot on stages that feel barely put together with doors literally coming off their hinges. It has the kind of heart that today's endless streaming horror anthologies are missing. I demand more karate in my horror anthologies and films unafraid to be this incredibly odd.

*He also made the Jamie Gillis-starring Night of the Zombies.