COLOR ME BLOOD RED

The final film in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ so-called Blood Trilogy, COLOR ME BLOOD RED tells the familiar tale of a down-on-his-luck artist whose fortunes are suddenly reversed when he begins melding artistic creation with cold blooded murder. Far less engaging than Roger Corman’s 1959 take on the tale, A BUCKET OF BLOOD, COLOR ME BLOOD RED struggles to maintain a pulse throughout its 79 minute run time. Following the lively and entertaining TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!, Lewis’ third foray into splatter feels positively uninspired.

Lewis was always able to turn the act of murder into an entertaining bit of low(est) brow art, but here in a film about that very thing, he stumbles completely. Adam Sorg, the downtrodden painter who discovers that human blood provides his art with just the right oomph to attract critical praise and commercial interest, could be seen as a stand-in Lewis, an ex-advertising man turned nudie-cutie director whose film career was going nowhere fast. Lewis came upon the idea of adding graphic, ludicrous gore to his films and just like that, he found himself a profitable commercial niche. 

But a niche can sometimes be a noose and you can definitely sense that Lewis was afraid of being trapped in the gore film forever. In that way, COLOR ME BLOOD RED can be seen as a kind of testimonial film, a movie all about an artist whose bloody work creates a kind of commercial and artistic whirlpool from which he cannot escape.

However, for as interesting as the film might be on a kind of autobiographical level, it just does not work well as a piece of entertainment. You can feel Lewis exercising a considerable amount of restraint throughout the film, especially in the area of on-screen violence. In terms of raw body count, COLOR ME BLOOD RED is by far the most anemic film in the entire Blood Trilogy. There is at least one great killing in the film, a riotous scene in which Sorg terrorizes two love birds riding water bikes in the ocean, but for the most part the killings are all strikingly tame. The only real bit of gore we get is a brief scene of Sorg wringing some blood out of an exposed wad of guts. The rest is rather unmemorable.

The characters are just plain awful. Sorg is every inch the annoying artiste, a bug eyed, whining brat of a man prone to screaming fits and grating histrionics. Oddly enough, when we first meet him, he’s quite likable, albeit a touch too sarcastic. His early scenes with his live-in lover Gigi are some of the best scenes the film has to offer. The two have an “if we ever get married…” in-joke that runs throughout all their scenes together, a kind of rib-poking light insult that gives the couple a genuine spark and chemistry. But then Gigi has to go and accidentally cut her finger on a broken frame, bleeding onto an empty canvas. The sight of the red blood awakens Sorg's creative energies and Gigi.. well, she ultimately ends up with a knife to the face as a result.

Her blood ends up smeared all over a rather terrible painting and that painting attracts the attention of Mrs. Carter, a well-off art appreciator with a lovely teenage daughter named April. April has a boring new boyfriend named Rolf and two beatnik friends, Jack and Sydney, who think it’s farrrr out to dress in identical costumes, right down to wearing the same wig. April and the gang will form the other half of the film’s focus, culminating in Sorg taking an unhealthy interest in April.

Unfortunately, April and her friends are every bit as annoying as our lead psychopath, especially the beatnik couple. They’re the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. So what we have here is a gore film that is light on gore filled with characters light on character. Though the jazz score is catchy and the film does contain some of the most striking compositions in all of Lewis’ oeuvre, the film really is an abysmal watch. The subtext of the film is the only thing worthy of consideration here, but even then the film makes it’s entire point shortly after Gigi’s murder. So had the film just been a 35 or so minute short, it would have been pretty damn good. But no, the film then spends 40 minutes lazily repeating itself until the underlying point of the film is drowned beneath all the lousy pacing and grating performances. It's a terrible miscalculation of a film and had it been, as it was planned to be, Lewis' farewell to the horror genre, it would have been a very bad way to go out.

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!

Just one year after inventing the modern gore film with his low budget shocker BLOOD FEAST, Herschell Gordon Lewis returned to the drive-ins with yet another genre innovation. Bolstered by an increase in budget, shooting time and confidence, Lewis created TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!, a dark horror comedy riff on Alan Jay Lerner’s Brigadoon. Six Yankees find themselves in a Southern hell, manipulated and murdered by the jubilant inhabitants of Pleasant Valley, a small redneck community celebrating their town centennial.

With it’s opening theme music enthusiastically proclaiming “oh, the South is gonna rise again!”, TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! births the Southern horror film. If you’ve ever seen a movie about a bunch of Northerners taking the wrong back road into dangerous hick country and enjoyed it, you can thank Lewis. Everything from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE to HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES has some of this film’s DNA floating around in it. If you’re in the market for an interesting and effective look at the cultural conflicts that live along the Mason-Dixon line, you would be better off sticking with Hooper’s classic or films like SOUTHERN COMFORT, but as a kind of culturally aware cartoon, Lewis’ film is every bit as enjoyable as the countless films it inspired.

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! is often referred to as one of the sickest films ever made and that’s a reputation the film actually kind of deserves. While the film isn’t as graphically violent as BLOOD FEAST, it is far more sadistic. The fact that it’s cast of killers are all sweet, jovial and pumped full of so-called “Southern charm” makes the violence they mete out that much more disturbing. A redneck Lothario forcibly cuts a woman’s thumb off and a live dismemberment by ax is carried out by giggling hicks. A gaggle of killers have the time of their lives watching a man being drawn and quartered. None of this is going to look at all convincing to you, by the way. The effects work largely consists of mannequin arms, raw hamburger and poster paint. It’s the gleeful sadism of it all that provides the punch.

If disembodied limbs are not candy enough for your eyes, there’s a bevy of beauties in the cast, including Connie Mason, Linda Cochran, Yvonne Gilbert and Shelby Livingston. Lewis had yet to mix his nudie-cutie proclivities with his newfound interest in gore so if you’re expecting nudity or sex, well… you’ll have to make due with Ms. Mason washing dirt off her legs in a river. But the female cast isn’t just scenery. No one in the cast of this film delivers a great performance per se, but they sure as hell deliver energetic performances. TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! was filmed in a small Florida town and everyone on camera, every single person, is clearly having the time of their life. This movie is not short on energy.

If you’re at all familiar with Brigadoon, I’m afraid I already spoiled the movie for you. For those who have no idea what Brigadoon is, the ending of TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! might come as quite the surprise. It’s a great ending for sure, a real Twilight Zone-style corker that manages to erase every plot hole you noticed throughout the film’s 83 minute running time. It also gives the film a bit of real world relevance. I can’t think of a better time for this film to be rediscovered than right now. It feels like a film uniquely suited to the current political climate of the United States.

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! was an important step forward in both Hicksploitation and Southern fried horror. I’ve heard that Lewis considered it to be his best film. I think I would agree with that. It’s a fun, funny, gross and nasty little exploitation movie with a few firing neurons and more than a little spilled blood. The perfect way to spend a lazy Autumn evening.