Of all of the films that Roger Corman disembowelled in the 1960s to make entirely new movies for his Filmgroup company, Blood Bath has surely the most torturous history. While attending the Pula Film Festival in Yugoslavia in 1963, Corman was approached by a local production to buy the rights for a soon-to-be-produced thriller for a paltry $20,000. Corman agreed with certain provisos – that American actors be imported to take the leading roles for starters. The film, Operacija Ticijan/Operation Titian would eventually star William Campbell and be executive produced by the young Francis Ford Coppola (who was finishing work on the Corman produced Dementia 13 (1963) at the time that the producer struck his deal). Directed by Rados Novakovic, Operation Titian was an art heist thriller that also featured Patrick Magee.

But Corman was unhappy with the film and opted not to release it. Instead he turned the film over to director Jack Hill and told him to do something with it. Hill extracted the material he thought he could use, rewrote the script to turn it into a horror film and with Campbell recalled – though at a cost – he was paid a lot more than Corman would usually have paid because without his co-operation there would have been nothing to release – and turned in the new hybrid, Blood Bath. But even this didn’t please Corman and he once again shelved the film. Meanwhile, Operation Titian was reborn, now re-titled Portrait in Terror, and sold in a reasonably intact form (there were a few cuts) as 16mm prints to American television stations.

Cut to 1964 and enter Stephanie Rothman, a young aspiring director who had worked in various production roles on two of Corman’s other “cut and shut” ventures – Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) and Queen of Blood (1966), both partially culled from a trio of Russian science fictions film, Planeta Bur/Planet of Storms (1962), Nebo Zovyot/The Heavens Beckon (1959) and Mechte navstrechu/Encounter in Space (1961). In spring 1964, Hill’s Blood Bath was dusted down and handed over to Rothman who decided to turn the film into a vampire movie. There were no vampires in either Operation Titian or Hill’s Blood Bath and with Campbell refusing to return to the film yet again, Rothman was forced to add some nonsense about Campbell’s character changing appearance when he becomes a vampire.

The Rothman-ised film was eventually released to American cinemas in March 1966 on a double bill with the much better Queen of Blood but that still wasn’t the end of the story. When the time came to sell the film to television it was deemed to be too short at just 69 minutes and so a further 6 minutes of material was salvaged from Operation Titian (Patrick Magee, missing from both versions of Blood Bath, was now back) as well as unused material from Hill’s version and a new version, Track of the Vampire, was born.

The version under review here is the Hill and Rothman version of Blood Bath and it begins with young art student and model, Daisy (Marissa Mathes), storming out of a bar after an argument with her boyfriend and running into the artist Sordi (Campbell) who has come to check on his “lost children,” paintings of his displayed in an art gallery window. He invites her back to his studio to pose for him but he has visions of a long-dead ancestor taunting him and transforms into a vampire who hacks Daisy to death with a meat cleaver. Sordi’s undead alter ego continues to murder local women, preserving their bodies in wax as statues. Daisy’s sister, Donna, goes looking for Daisy and meets a sticky end, a trio of beatniks (Sid Haig, Jonathan Haze and Fred Thompson) occasionally drift in and out of the narrative and Sordi falls in love with dancer Dorian (Lori Saunders), Daisy’s former roommate and a dead ringer for his lost love Meliza.

In all honesty, the resulting film isn’t great. There’s a decent enough film skirting around the hodgepodge of different material (and that film might have been either Operation Titian or Hill’s original version of Blood Bath, still missing and presumed gone for good, though it’s impossible to tell at this stage) but none of what we see here hangs together terribly well. Hill and Rothman share director credits but they seem to have been pulling in different directions. The joins are often visible thanks to clumsy editing and as you’d expect, continuity errors abound and tonally the film lurches about like one of the drunken revellers that accost Donna. Campbell is very good, better than the role really deserves really but the actor playing him as a vampire (who has never been identified) looks nothing like him, making it next to impossible to take his transformation seriously and the film falls apart at the seams.

There are some nice flourishes here and there, especially a surreal flashback set in the desert, and the tormented artist trope provide an unexpected link to Corman’s earlier A Bucket of Blood (1959) (the early beatnik scenes, despite all their lofty talk of quantum guns, play like outtakes from that film) and Coppola’s Dementia 13. There are also some faint echoes of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) about its noir-ish night-time city scenes, and the sealing bodies in wax and passing them off as statues was straight out of the same year’s Carry on Screaming! But it’s a terrible mess that made no-one happy – Hill was horrified by what had become of his film, Rothman later disowned what was officially her directorial debut, and Corman was probably pleased to finally get rid of it and start making some of his money back. It doesn’t make a lick of sense (what are those Mardi Gras revellers doing in California – did they get lost?) and Rothman’s new footage since uneasily beside Hill’s – and quite which bits poor old Rados Novakovic contributed remains unclear.

Rothman’s subsequent The Velvet Vampire (1971) features several ideas and scenes (a woman reaching out to the leading man from within a picture frame, surreal moments set in the desert) that were filmed by Hill for Blood Bath. No doubt while going back and forth on the existing footage, trying to make her new material fit, something of Hill’s work had seeped into her subconscious.