Once you’ve electrocuted a woman through her nipples and sucked brains through a straw, what do you do for an encore? Blood Bath, the sophomore movie of Joel M. Reed, director of the rightly notorious Bloodsucking Freaks. As extreme as that phlegm film was, Blood Bath stands on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s even rated PG, which should give you a good idea at how successful it is as a horror anthology: not.

The great character actor Harve Presnell (Fargo) is unrecognizable as a fright-flick director who states on set his utter disbelief in the supernatural, black magic and fate. That night at dinner, his cast members share stories to convince him otherwise. Nary a single tale is worth the time; the third is notable only for its appearance by future sitcom star Doris Roberts (Everybody Loves Raymond).

The first follows a professional killer on his unbeknownst-to-him final hit; the second, a henpecked novelist who wishes to disappear into his own fiction to escape his shrew of a wife, who gets off Blood Bath‘s lone amusing line from their marital bed: “I am not one of those cheap, immoral swingers who work in accounts receivable!”

The aforementioned third segment centers on an unscrupulous businessman locked in a vault with an African-American ghost who looks like he leapt off the poster of The Harder They Come. Finally, a Wonder Bread-white master of kung fu infuriates his shaolin masters by opening a supermarket; Reed stages martial-arts sequences as well as a pre-K class could Pippin. The entire project is dull and incompetent — a tough sit that disproves that ol’ showbiz adage of, “Any movie that ends with a rampaging goat boy can’t be all bad.” —Rod Lott

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