Color Me Blood Red
Director Herschell Gordon Lewis cited Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood (1959) as the main inspiration for Color Me Blood Red.,After blood leaves the body and dries, it turns brown in color. Therefore the amazing red in the paintings would have in reality been brown.,Rolf: 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.,Featured in Terror on Tape (1985),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.,