That Guy Dick Miller -- What a Career!

"That Guy Dick Miller" is a straight-to-streaming documentary about the multi-decade movie career of "that guy, Dick Miller."

In 1959, one year before Psycho came out (and evidently released around the time that Psycho was going into production, so it couldn't have been a DIRECT influence), Dick Miller got one of his only leading roles in a movie called "A Bucket of Blood." Now there's a title that even beats Psycho for horror statements.

"A Bucket of Blood" was filmed in four days. This strikes me as incredible and yet I know that Corman shot movies like that all the time -- and in fewer days, too(like "The Terror" , whipped up for Boris Karloff when he had a few contracted days left after finishing the more upscale "The Raven" for Corman. And oh, a "Raven" co-star named Jack Nicholson was in that too.)

I watched "Bucket of Blood" some years ago with this thought in mind: reviews of Psycho in 1960 often said it had "arguably the most violent murder ever filmed"(the shower of course, though the staircase one is pretty slash-in-the-face brutal too.) Arguably? I've spent many years looking at pre-1960 movies to see if one had something more brutal than the shower murder. And I don't THINK I've found it yet.

And yet..."Bucket of Blood" comes close. For the plot has nerdy Beatnik bar employee Dick Miller making clay sculptures out of his own murder victims(shades of 1953's House of Wax), and those murders ARE pretty brutal(if filmed too quick and cheap to match the shower scene.) The first victim is inadvertent -- a cat trapped behind the wall; Dick pushes a knife into the wall to help drive the cat out, and ends up killing it. The cat ends up as a sculpture WITH THE KNIFE still in the cat.

A male victim gets his forehead split open with a frying pan -- HIS sculpture has a deep crevice in the head. A female victim gets strangled.

And near the end, Dick Miller elects to kill a total stranger -- a guy working a buzzsaw -- because he needs a new victim fast, and acquaintences are out of supply. Its a scene of horror because its so ARBITRARY...the victim has no idea why he is being killed (buzzsaw blade to head, offscreen.)

The murders are not bloody at all, just quick and brutal. But we are reminded that cheapjack movies WERE doing a Psycho-level shock around the time that Hitchcock noticed and took the whole thing up to 11.

The very next year, Dick Miller was offered the lead in a movie called(after a change) "Little Shop of Horrors." Yep, that very famous title(with the famous retro musical and 1986) came out in 1960, the same year as Psycho. Miller turned down the lead and recommended his friend Jonathan Haze(then a young Jerry Lewis type) and that movie was filmed in...TWO DAYS? But it got famous with that plant demanding "FEED ME." (Haze kills victims for the plant much as Dick Miller killed his victims for his "art.")

Also famously in "Little Shop of Horrors," Jack Nicholson comes in to play a hayseed goofball who submits to a dentist's worst drilling because he gets off on the pain(Bill Murray hilariously took this part in the 1986 film.)

So you could say that "A Bucket of Blood," and "The Little Shop of Horrors" are yet more pieces in the mosaic of the "50's/60's cusp horror movies" that gave us Psycho as "the big one." But the little ones have their own creepy charms.

Flash forward from the early sixties to the mid-80's. Dick Miller -- a rugged, tough guy handsome New Yorker who definitely has a character guy's memorable face -- is suddenly "in vogue" for short parts. Spielberg's protégé Joe Dante put Dick Miller into ALL of his 80's movies: Gremlins 1 and 2(the first a true blockbuster and Miller's most famous movie?) , Explorers, Innerspace, The Burbs -- and one glorious 1993 movie, "Matinee" (in which John Goodman plays 1962 William Castle under another name -- hating being compared to Hitchcock and in Key West to debut his new movie just as the Cuban Missile Crisis comes along.)

The documentary has one great outtake from The Burbs. A group of characters are standing in a group. They include Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern...Dick Miller...and Young Corey Feldman, who by his own admission on the doc, was high most of the time. These actors are trying to get the take and Feldman keeps jumping up and down and singing songs.

It falls to Dick Miller to set Feldman straight: "Shut the F up kid. We're trying to do some acting here!" When Dick Miller tells you that .. you shut the F up. We don't get to see how Hanks and Dern react.