No gorefest, but a black-tinged spoof of Greenwich Village pretension, a companion piece to the more well-known Roger Corman-Charles B. Griffith shoestring classic The Little Shop of Horrors, and a rather lovely contemplation of shabby artistry. Filmed on a similarly ridiculous schedule (something like four or five days), it's also the first movie to bring Corman's humorous morbidity to the fore, through Griffith's dry-wit screenplay -- the "sick" humor of an incoming decade, art literally as "still death." Dick Miller, long a stalwart for the director as miscellaneous cowboy or weirdo, grabs the spotlight as adenoidal busboy Walter Paisley, cleaning tables at The Yellow Door, a beatnik joint where hepcats and poseurs blab artistic and pay him no attention. One night Miller accidentally kills a cat trapped inside a wall (Poe already?), dips the body into clay and presents it as sculpture at the café, where the reigning beat poet (Julian Burton, sandals and glued-on beard) readily declares him "the silent voice of creation." Frenetically pondering the encore, he is visited by an undercover cop, popping in for an arrest only to meet the sharp end of a pancake pan and end up next in Miller's exposition: "Murdered Man." The plot is House of Wax, informally reworked with berets, saxophone-tooting and hilariously solemn beat poetry, with Miller's endearing necrophilic working his way up to the female form -- namely, his immortal beloved's (Barboura Morris). The trappings tease self-reflexivity, yet the film sidesteps the contempt of Herschell Gordon Lewis' Color Me Blood Red for a much livelier, less cynical essay on madman-as-craftsman (as opposed to madman-as-creator) and, one of Corman's oeuvre-long concerns, the role of death in the art of commerce. With Antony Carbone, Ed Nelson, and Bruno VeSota. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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