The third film in Lewis’s Blood Trilogy, Color Me Blood Red employs much of the same tactics as the other two films that I’ve reviewed. Insert one eccentric and off-beat man character, give him some sort of deranged mental problem, coupled with healthy dosages of cheesball dialogue, and have him mutilate and maim young women. Its easy to see the correlation between his films as Lewis continues to transition from his early sexual exploitation films to horror (and eventually back again).
A commercially successful but critically derided artist, struggles to win the approval of an art critic. His main criticism being that he is never able to fully capture vibrant colors on his canvas. All the art hags and old women with loads of money to blow are in awe of his work. But the approval of his staunchest critic (played by a dude with a really silly French accent) eludes him.
One evening, in a fit of frustration, the obsessive painter cuts his finger open and brushes it mistakenly against the canvas he is working on. A light bulb goes off as he’s found the perfect shade of red to bring his work to life and give it the vibrancy that has been lacking.
Knowing that he can’t continue to use his own blood, he constructs ways to lure helpless women into his home, starting with his subservient girlfriend. Killing them and stringing up their bodies, he cuts them open, allowing the blood to drip into a collection pan which he uses as his new paint supply.
Not quite as gruesome or shocking as his other films but equally entertaining, Color Me Blood Red is another classic horror film from Herschell Gordon Lewis. Employing alot of the cheese and slapstick dialogue as his other films and continuing to introduce the most off the wall characters imaginable, this film brings the funny and totally off-beat. And the mad painter’s ‘paintings’ look like they were done by a 5th grader. Which, knowing Lewis’s work, is completely intentional.
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