Classic Horrors Club

If we judge Herschell Gordon Lewis movies based on the amount of over-the-top gore, then Color Me Blood Red is the mildest one I’ve seen. With its story of a creatively stalled painter who can’t get his colors right until he discovers blood is the perfect shade of red, you’d think it would be more outrageous.

Instead, there’s only one cringeworthy scene. One of artist Adam Sorg’s (Gordon Oas-Heim) victims hangs in a room adjacent to his studio with her internal organs hanging outside her belly. He grabs one and squeezes, much like a cow’s teat, to produce more liquid to apply to his canvas.

I appreciate the entire concept, and am not really surprised that it’s not better executed. IMDb usually categorizes Lewis’s movies at least partially as comedies. This implies that the bad acting and horrible dialogue are used  purposely to make us laugh. I have to wonder, though, if that is a justification or an excuse.

I mean, the reason I laugh at the dialogue is not that it’s funny, just bad. For example, when our hero, Rolf (Jerome Eden) bursts into Sorg’s house to rescue “his girl,” April Carter (Candi Conder), Sorg accuses him of being rude. Rolf exclaims:

Listen, pal, you’d be rude, too, if you saw your girl tied up, and a man with an axe in one hand and a bloody mess in the other. And a corpse outside there on the beach.

Likewise, when the male half of another young couple, Jack (Jim Jaekel) and “his girl,” Sydney (Pat Finn-Lee), discover a previous victim’s body buried in the sand, he cries:

Holy bananas! It’s a girl’s leg.

Maybe that’s not so bad, but it raises problematic questions. Why in the world did Sorg bury his victim in the sand near a beach? He must have wanted her to be discovered. And if you discovered a girl buried in the sand, would you continue to excavate the rest of her? Well, it is Florida, I guess.

As backwater as it seems, this town has a surprisingly thriving art community. The fact that a gallery in what looks like a VFW hall would attract art critics and high-dollar buyers is ridiculous. Plus, the fact that a maniac like Sorg could become in high demand with his bloody paintings is preposterous. 

It’s also full of coincidences. I guess they’re common in most movies; you have to have them to tie plot threads together. For example, Candi’s mother, Mrs. Carter (Iris Marshall) happens to be one of the high-dollar buyers. The fact that Sorg’s bizarre behavior is discounted because he’s one of those eccentric artists is perhaps the most clever thing about this.

The more I think about it, Color Me Blood Red must be a comedy. Could it possibly by a satire about the world of collecting art? Maybe it’s an intelligent masterpiece instead of an amateur exploitation movie. Why, just the fact that I’m thinking this hard about indicates it’s… something.