Even though Herschell Gordon Lewis lived to be 90, he managed to pack about seven or eight more lives into his time on earth than should have been possible. Before making a single film, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism in Illinois, was a professor of communications in Mississippi, managed a radio station in Wisconsin, worked as a studio director at a television station in Oklahoma, taught advertising at a night school in Illinois, and worked as an adman in Chicago. That latter job eventually led to him directing TV commercials and promotional films and producing an indie film, and as the '50s turned into the '60s, Lewis decided to direct full-time in the world of cheap, quick, and profitable exploitation film with his new associate, producer David F. Friedman. After making a few movies in Chicago, the pair relocated to Florida, where Lewis settled for the remainder of his life.
Life story over, right? No. Lewis and Friedman made several exploitation movies throughout the '60s and early '70s, but once their audience started to wane, Lewis quit filmmaking to work in marketing and copywriting. He also became a successful author, writing twenty-plus books about advertising and direct marketing, and he eventually founded his own direct marketing company. Oh yeah, he also spent three years in prison in the late '70s for fraud. And he directed three more exploitation movies near the end of his life, one of which was a sequel to his most famous movie, Blood Feast. When did this guy sleep?
As his CV above may suggest, Lewis wasn't in film for the art. He wanted to make money without spending much money, and he figured directing sensationalistic low-budget schlock was a great way to do that. Despite his motives, he was an accidental auteur. His films have a unique look, feel, and rhythm that only belong to him (though you can see some of Lewis' style in John Waters' blend of influences), his color palette is bright and lurid, and his dialogue is funny, ridiculous, and weird. Even if profit was the goal, Lewis' films give you the sense that he enjoyed making them. And I enjoy watching them.
Lewis and Friedman started their film career with the short-lived nudie-cuties genre, which were softcore non-pornographic movies with copious female nudity. Nudie-cutie was the name given to this style of film to differentiate it from nudist camp movies, sensationalist documentaries and pseudo-documentaries about nudist colonies that were popular on the exploitation circuit and filled a gap for people who wanted to gawk at naked women without the stigma of porn.
When the nudie-cutie market declined in 1963, Lewis and Friedman decided to push the gore envelope as the next frontier in you-gotta-see-this sensationalism. The first and best known of these was the aforementioned Blood Feast, a film credited with inventing the splatter subgenre of horror. For the next decade, gore films led the pack in the Lewis and Friedman filmography (Two Thousand Maniacs!, A Taste of Blood, The Gruesome Twosome, The Wizard of Gore, The Gore Gore Girls, the movie I'm about to review), but they also visited nearly every corner of exploitation genre, including the redneck moonshine movie (Moonshine Mountain, This Stuff'll Kill Ya!), juvenile delinquents run amok (Scum of the Earth, Just for the Hell of It), cheapo children's movies (Jimmy, the Boy Wonder, The Magic Land of Mother Goose), musicsploitation (Blast-Off Girls, about a female rock group exploited by a sleazy manager, The Year of the Yahoo!, about a country singer running for Senate), the biker gang movie (She-Devils on Wheels), the western (Linda and Abilene), sexploitation (The Girl the Body and the Pill, The Alley Tramp, Suburban Roulette, The Ecstasies of Women), a straight-up porn (Black Love, which he denied making), and general weirdness (nerdy-professor-builds-sex-robots movie How to Make a Doll, the indescribable Something Weird).
Background preamble over, it's time to dive into Lewis' third gore magnum opus, Color Me Blood Red, a classic tale of the eternal struggle between art and commerce and between the artist and himself. Unlike Lewis, protagonist Adam Sorg has no financial motive. He's an artist, damn it, and he's constantly bedeviled by the deadlines and requests of gallery owner Farnsworth, the stinging criticism of art critic Gregorovich, the expectations of buyers, the interruptions of his girlfriend, and the elusive muse itself. Sorg is an obsessive, eccentric, and unpleasant man, but he's the hottest painter going in the beach area of suburban mid-'60s Sarasota, Florida, and that's got to mean something. Farnsworth believes in his potential, but the beret-wearing, cigarette-holder-brandishing Gregorovich doesn't think Sorg's color palette is fully developed yet. This is driving Sorg crazy, until his girlfriend Gigi cuts her hand on a broken frame and her blood drips on the canvas. Eureka! That's exactly the color Sorg's paintings have been missing.
Sorg stays up all night covering an existing painting with the blood from Gigi's cut and self-administered lacerations on his own body, and he discovers that repeatedly cutting oneself and painting with the blood is pretty draining, pun intended. The solution: murder! You get all the blood you need that way, with no negative consequences. And since it's for art, Sorg is morally justified. Why live as a nobody when you can die for artistic immortality?
These blood paintings are a huge hit with Farnsworth and Gregorovich, who seem to think they will end up in the Louvre or MOMA or someplace like that and also in every art textbook in the world even though they don't look so hot to me, but Sorg won't sell them to what the film suggests is the area's only art buyer, the stylish Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Carter becomes obsessed with snagging one of Sorg's paintings when she is not busy soaking up the sun with her daughter April while April waits for her dorky boyfriend Rolf and their beatnik pals Sydney and Jack to pick her up and take her on one of their frequent beach excursions to the deserted part of the beach next to Sorg's beach house, possibly leading to a blood painting beach disaster.
Lewis gives us lots of bright-red blood that never turns brown as it dries, ridiculous paintings, artistic meltdowns, attractive women in bathing suits, leotards, and mid-'60s torpedo-shaped brassieres, murder, beach tomfoolery, a weenie roast, and dialogue like "holy bananas!" and "dig that crazy driftwood" and "she's not squaresville after all" and "I guess she digs the scene even if she doesn't make it." I think you already know if you're the kind of person who needs Color Me Blood Red in your life.
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