A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Roger Corman, Dick Miller, Barboura Morris, Antony Carbone · 1959 · 66 min

Five days, and the best film Corman ever made. Dick Miller's busboy wants to be an artist, kills a cat by accident, covers it in clay, and is immediately declared a genius. The escalation from there is obvious, awful, and very funny. It is a real satire of the beatnik art scene — of people who will praise anything that arrives with the correct vocabulary attached — and unlike most horror comedies of its decade, it earns its ending.

Chosen print (2026-08-17): Archive.org item ABucketofBlood, file Bucket_1959.mp4 — 1.71 GB, 720x544, 65.5 min.

279k downloads, 720x544. Replaces a scene-release-tagged Blu-ray rip rejected in the sweep — a commercial restoration transfer can carry rights distinct from the underlying PD film, and we do not launder those.

Selected from our vetted candidate queue after the automated reject rules and the owner eye-pass. Torrent generated from this exact file on 2026-08-17; that torrent is what the swarm carries.

Print upgraded (2026-08-22). Replaced ABucketofBlood (720x544 @ 3.5 Mbps) with Archive.org item a-bucket-of-blood-1959-by-roger-corman — 1920x1024 @ 2.2 Mbps, 1.09 GB, 65.5 min.

Found by the 2026-08-22 catalogue-wide print sweep, after the rule change that allows restoration transfers. Candidates were scored on resolution and bits per pixel, then compared frame-by-frame against the incumbent before this one was taken. Broadcast captures, AI upscales, colorised and frame-interpolated copies were rejected outright; where a candidate's frame was a different shape, cropdetect was used to tell a genuinely wider picture from a crop hiding in a wide container.

The superseded print stays in the catalogue as a superseded edition and keeps seeding — its torrent has its own info_hash and its own swarm, and anyone part-way through a download of it is unaffected.

Public domain by long-standing distribution consensus: published 1959, renewal required in the 28th year and by all accounts never filed. The renewal window (1986–87) falls in the Copyright Office's post-1977 online records rather than the scanned CCE volumes, so the online renewal search is the named remaining verification step before the torrent publishes.