Color Me Blood Red

Just what does a teenage boy bursting with testosterone say, while with his bikini-clad girl, they discover a dead girl in the sand? "Wholly Bananas ! It's a girl's leg!" of course. That is just one example of the laughable dialogue contained in this thoroughly un-artistic look at a painter who uses blood to create his art. He starts by using his own, then moves to girl models for their hemoglobin, corpuscles, and plasma for his creative inspiration. Color Me Blood Red is the third film contained in what is typically known as the Blood trilogy directed by that world renowned director of gore...Herschell Gordon Lewis. Yep this film has all the Lewis trademarks. Poor direction...it has it! Cheap sets too! And that acting only Lewis seems to inspire...so bad it is funny. Many of the performers in here are so awful that one wonders how they were ever chosen, although the lead, Gordon Oas-Heim(Don Joseph) as Adam Sorg shows signs of mediocrity at times. For a Lewis film, Color Me Blood Red is a fun picture. It has some good honest to Gosh belly laughs(99% unintentional), and a story not too unlike Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood. And the lead actress...Candi Conder does more than AMPLE justice to a very nice swimsuit! I had fun watching it...never took any of it serious and, for a Lewis picture, it has minimal gore(only four deaths). It gives new meaning to the phrase that life is a canvas!

If you're a horror fan who loves gore and are looking for a gory movie, go check out High Tension. If you hate cheesy movies, go rent a new release from Blockbuster. This movie is for people who like quirkiness, b-grade film-making, c-grade acting, cheesy gore and.. FUN. I get the feeling that a few people who wrote reviews for this were obviously expecting something very different. This is NOT a horror movie, only in a very broad sense could it be considered one. It is a movie that is twice as unintentionally funny as any Ed Wood movie. There is no real comedy in Color Me Blood Red but the acting and direction will have you laughing throughout. This movie defines "grindhouse". Now that I've prepared you - Go buy it.

I rated this movie 8 out of 10. It was very good at doing what it tried to do. Giving this movie a 3/10 is a joke, of course it's bad but that is the whole point! A phrase I see a lot on the IMDb is "BAD meaning GOOD", not many movies are more deserving of that praise than Color Me Blood Red.

Director Herschell Gordon Lewis's concluding film in his "Blood Trilogy" (and final film with producer David F. Friedman) unfortunately just isn't as enjoyable as its predecessors. It's not as delightfully nutty as "Blood Feast" or as much fun as "Two Thousand Maniacs!". In fact, it's downright tedious at times. That's not to say that there aren't good moments - there just aren't enough of them.

Gordon Oas-Heim, definitely one of the better actors to be found in an HGL gore epic, plays the highly unlikable, mentally unstable painter Adam Sorg, who's impatient waiting for inspiration to strike. It finally comes when he realizes that human blood provides the perfect shade of crimson for his works of art. He realizes that using his own blood is a very wearying process, so he has to obtain blood from other unwilling donors.

Overall "Color Me Blood Red" is fairly amusing cheesy nonsense with the gleefully squishy splatter and inept acting that we come to expect from HGL's films. It has its delightful parts whenever Sorg is busy doing his thing. It doesn't help him that "hip", goofy young folk keep hanging around his beachfront property. It's also cool to see Scott H. Hall, the police captain from "Blood Feast", here playing Farnsworth the art gallery owner. The young gals are all nice looking even if their acting chops aren't up to snuff. The beautiful beach scenery is another plus. And the movie does end on a very funny note with its final line.

If you're new to the works of HGL and want to do the completist thing, then "Color Me Blood Red" is definitely worth seeing. Just don't expect the same level of entertainment if you've already seen and enjoyed "Blood Feast" and "Two Thousand Maniacs!".

Six out of 10.

Color Me Blood Red (1965)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

The third film in director Herschell Gordon Lewis' "blood trilogy," this one here centers on a crazed painter (Goron Oas-Heim) who finally reaches his breakthrough when he realizes that human blood is the perfect red for his paintings. This here is pretty much a re-working of the Roger Corman classic A BUCKET OF BLOOD with the biggest difference being that this here is in bright color, which perfectly shows off the various bloody scenes. Look, if you're wanting some sort of masterpiece or brilliant filmmaking then this here certainly isn't going to be for you. With that said, film history has all sorts of items that remain important and there's no doubt that Lewis' blood trilogy is one such thing. The movie contains some awful acting, a silly script, lame dialogue and there are countless other things that you could pick on but in the end the picture is at least fun. While I'm sure all the shots of blood were shocking back in 1965, when viewed today they're more campy fun than anything else. The movie managers to move at a very good pace, which is certainly important as there's nothing worse than one of these films that just drag along. Another important thing is that the lead actor at least keeps you entertained in everything. Yes, the performance isn't great or even good. It's over-the-top and rather campy but this here is actually very entertaining. The supporting players don't come off as well but I'm sure director Lewis wasn't too worried about performances. As for the red stuff, it's cleverly done and especially the "big" sequence early on when a woman is tied up and the painter has to use one of her organs to fill up his paint cup. COLOR ME BLOOD RED doesn't come close to the same level as BLOOD FEAST or TWO THOUSAND MANIACS but it's still a nice entry in the series.

"Color me Blood Red" completes the infamous Blood-trilogy by the even more infamous director Hershell Gordon Lewis and, although my least favorite film of the three, it's another silly entertaining and smutty gore classic. Don't look for many film-making qualities here, as the story is rather unoriginal (imitating Roger Corman's 1959 "Bucket of Blood"), the acting is unspeakable and – especially compared to "Two Thousand Maniacs" – it's clumsily edited together. Good old Lewis brings the art of finger painting to a whole new dimension here, when mentally unstable artist Adam Sorg discovers that the blood of his girlfriend's cut finger supplies him with the exact right shade of red he needs for his macabre paintings. He's going to need more, of course, and thus he kills her as well as various other models in order to complete his masterful art gallery exhibits. I spotted LESS gore than in the previous two Blood-trilogy films, still there are some effectively nauseating scenes, most notably the one where Sorg literally squeezes all the blood out of one his victims' intestines. Other than the gore, there are the hilariously inept dialogues and the complete lack of context to enjoy. If you're not into The Godfather of Gore's work, however, this will just seem like a mindless and sadistic trash-movie.