Blood Bath (1976)

Aping the style of horror anthologies from British production companies, this cheap and dull American compendium matches a forgettable framing device with equally uninteresting vignettes. In the framing sequences, a suave actor rumored to have made a deal with the devil for success in movies gathers several friends for dinner, and they swap spooky stories. Those stories comprise the vignettes. In the first story, a perfectionist murderer makes a deadly mistake while planting a time bomb. In the second story, a soul brother returns from the afterlife to haunt the usurious landlord who evicted him while the soul brother was a mortal. And in the third story, which feels as if it was airlifted in from an entirely different movie, a shifty martial-arts master exploits students by charging exorbitant fees for teaching a secret combat method. While there’s virtually nothing to recommend here, since Blood Bath is interminably boring for most of its running time, the sequence with the soul brother at least has some humor, as when the beleaguered ghost whines about all the paperwork he had to complete in Hell before receiving permission to haunt the landlord. The cast is strictly low-rent, though attentive viewers will spot a young Doris Roberts. As for nominal leading man Harve Presnell, who plays the movie star/dinner host, he enjoyed a respectable if unspectacular career on Broadway and in movies, often showcasing his rich singing voice. Arguably his best-known screen role was that of the aggrieved patriarch in Fargo (1996). One assumes that Presnell did not count among the highlights of his screen career the opening scene of this picture, during which his character marries a demon while the devil, portrayed by a dude wearing silly-looking horns on his forehead, stands nearby and cackles.

Blood Bath: LAME