BUCKET OF BLOOD–THE MUSICAL
Some Mo’ Productions at Factory Theater
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A Bucket of Blood, unlike Reefer Madness or even Night of the Living Dead, is a masterpiece of its genre. More black comedy than scary movie–ads promised, “You’ll be sick, sick, sick–from LAUGHING!”–A Bucket of Blood is well written and reasonably well acted, and has a tight structure, a fast-moving story, and surprisingly three-dimensional characters. The film was reportedly shot in only five days, yet it contains remarkably few of those awkward moments that make for great unintentional comedy (such as the attempts in Reefer Madness to show us “normal family life,” which succeed only in making the dope fiends more attractive).
More important, every element and character in A Bucket of Blood–the junkies, the art dealers, the undercover cops, the bearded poet who starts the movie by declaiming, “I will talk to you of art / for there is nothing else to talk about / for there is nothing else”–is essential to the story, which is basically a comic inversion of the Pygmalion legend: artist falls in love with woman and yearns to turn her into a statue.
Yet compared to Maestro Subgum’s abysmal How Could Such a Monster Come to Be?, Bucket of Blood is a comic masterpiece.
This mess was written by four of Chicago’s stronger and more imaginative writers–Jeff Dorchen, Bryn Magnus, Jenny Magnus, and Beau O’Reilly–which only reinforces my prejudice against committee-written projects. (A camel, my father used to say, is a horse designed by committee.) Everyone involved has done better work elsewhere.
