Saturday, April 11, 2015

Color Me Blood Red


A painter goes to great lengths to improve his color palette in this early splatter film by Godfather of Gore Herschell Gordon Lewis. After scenes of riding a water bike, lots of boring movie, and a lengthy closeup of a broken canvas in lieu of a pasty love scene, the artist finally decides blood is the color he's been searching for in his artwork. Several fingers are unconvincingly cut and the blood is smeared across one of his unconvincing canvasses, then the artist collapses on his avocado-colored recliner in his wood-paneled studio in a swoon. Suddenly, he stabs his shrew of a wife in the face and smears her face across the canvas to a snappy jazz non-diegetic soundtrack. As a beret-wearing critic admires his latest creation, the artist fondles the painting in a creepy manner. Then he paints a painting of a fish wearing a shoe and eating a bird, and it's just as artistic as it sounds. After he uses his boat to impale some hooligans riding his water bikes, he milks their intestines into a bowl and uses the blood to paint. In a screaming huff, the artist decides not to sell his artwork of a bloody fish shoe, and the onlookers seem confused about his artistic temperament. Then someone uses a corncob bubblepipe in a convertible, and I'm not sure why. After someone is fooled into a little unconvincing light bondage, the movie mercifully ends a couple of times. If you'd like to experience some other Herschell Gordon Lewis films, check out Blood Feast, considered the first gore film and featuring locally sourced organ meats. It's awful, but entertainingly so.





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