Color Me Blood Red (1965)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Cast: Gordon Oas-Heim as Adam Sorg; Candi Conder as April Carter; Elyn Warner as Gigi; Pat Finn-Lee as Sydney (as Patricia Lee); Jerome Eden as Rolf; Scott H. Hall as Farnsworth; Jim Jaekel as Jack; Iris Marshall as Mrs. Carter; William Harris as Gregorovich; Cathy Collins as Mitzi

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #209

 

Pigments pal. Not haemoglobin!

When I first saw Color Me Blood Red a long time ago, I hated the film, not at a place to appreciate Herschell Gordon Lewis at all an era ago, getting into cult films in the late 2000s but a completely different person in my tastes. This was back when Tartan Films, with Something Weird Video, distributed Lewis' films on DVD in the United Kingdom under their Tartan Grindhouse sub label; that company no longer exists, which tells you how long ago that first viewing was. The different in time and where the final of his unofficial "Blood Trilogy" ends (with Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) is that he fully embraced his clear love for humour and winking to the audience. Whilst not a parody, which is for the better.

This is also not the first nor the last time a film has dealt with a mad artist who kills for their art - say hello A Bucket of Blood (1959) - but this particular one of Adam Sorg (Gordon Oas-Heim), a frustrated artist who finds his creative spark again in using human blood, still shows a huge jump into more deliberate comedy and whit among the luridness. There is even a joke about Adam hanging an abstract painting sideways in a gallery to see if any one notices, so that even if this does not feel like a film remotely interested in parodying the art world, they have the wherewithal to at least mock it time to time.

Before anyone asks, there have been artists who have used human blood in real life, one Vincent Castiglia eerily, to the point of clenching my arm in pain researching his work, turning this from a shock value concept to legitimate art with incredible preciseness, not merely drenching scenes from a surreal magazine or a cool horror novel cover as Adam does here in raspberry jam. Here, with Adam turning his pop art into blood baths, you see how arduous (and gruesome) it would be to try to use one's blood like a mad man, as he tries his own for a large canvas. Already on the edge, Gordon Oas-Heim the MVP with his unhinged manner, his relationship with his girlfriend turns sour, and his need to impress an art critic, one who criticised his work, pushes him over the edge.

Two Thousand Maniacs was good; it was a transition to more structured storytelling with a still-striking theme of the ghosts of the American South against the North. Here however is where my appreciation of Lewis will kick in onwards. His work is kitsch but the greater factor is his ability to wrung out entertainment to of a good sort, his eccentric filmography with films like this full of little touches of wryness and weirdness that improve vastly over Blood Feast. As much as I love that film's minimalist score, the jazz score here is exceptional, and whilst the delirium in his cinema would grow further from her, the humour thankfully makes itself welcome.

Such as with those water bikes that are abruptly in Adam's possession. Literally, bicycles custom made to float on the water and travel along when peddled. They were the only thing I remember from that first viewing, but it is apt as, whether something the production had access to or flung onto the creators, they are an example of the idiosyncrasies you find in Lewis' films which add life to them, which will grow in his productions from here on. They are even used for a murder scene, of someone on one against Adam in a speedboat, so Lewis thankfully took advantage of these ridiculous props, which is a good sign for the future. Then there are the heterosexual couple, friends of the female lead April (Candi Conder), who dress as each other, a lovably whimsical duo who are never traumatised (baring by accidentally finding a corpse in the beach sand) and are among the many strange figures that have appeared in Lewis' filmgraphy who stand out.

Color Me Blood Red does drag in the final half, mainly when it tries to be a conventional horror film, which clashes against Lewis' common trope of a very low budget and only a few locations to work with, emphasising dialogue scenes as a result which do not work when he is trying to be traditionally story driven. He is more interesting when, if there is a reliance on script, on skewered pulp tropes, zingers in the dialogue and eccentric characters, and thankfully, when this is in the right headspace Color Me Blood Red feels proudly camp, a kitsch production but with a sense of not being mockable, instead with its tongue firmly pressed in its cheek. And this is a time, soon after, when Herschell Gordon Lewis would become stranger. Making Jimmy, The Boy Wonder (1966), one of his two children's films, and Something Weird (1967), which lives up to that title tenfold. Lewis would return to gore films, and make them gorier, but naturally, they got stranger as he went along too. So, for me, Color Me Blood Red was a delight to return to, not bored as I was expecting a conventionally slick horror film as that first time, but a deliberately goofy film which improved tenfold. That, and with the added virtue that, as a stepping stone, this film's best virtues would appear magnified soon after as Something Weird was only two years after and so forth.