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Plot Outline: Adam Sorg is a artist starving for critical attention. His paintings tend to sell very well, but there’s one particular critic who always gives him awful reviews and Adam doesn’t feel like he can take it anymore. After this one critic tells Adam that his use of color is terrible while at the Farnsworth galleries (I’m sorry, everytime I hear the name Farnsworth I instantly think of the old man on Futurama), Sorg blows up and heads home to construct a masterpiece that everyone will love. The only problem is that when he gets home he discovers he doesn’t have a shade of red that will fit the said masterpiece. Once again, like a child he throws a temper tantrum (he throws about nine in the course of the film). During the night though, something magical happens. While Adam’s girlfriend is walking through the living room she cuts herself on a nail and bleeds a little bit on to a canvass. Come the morning Adam sees the blood and thus begins the work on his masterpiece. He at first begins draining his own blood but finds himself lightheaded, but then he puts together the idea that if he uses other people’s blood he won’t have to worry about passing out! He starts of by killing his girlfriend and dumping her blood on a lousy painting. He is then a critical success, but the cynical critic asks whether this one painting is his only stroke of genius. Adam sets off to prove him wrong, and I guess you can see where this is going. |



The film actually opens with a great deal of promise when we watch a man carry a painting out of the
Farnsworth galleries into the back yard where he begins burning it. All is done in complete silence
except for a drum beat that plays repeatedly over the soundtrack, and leads into a much larger (and
very b-movie’ish) anthemic horror score. I thought it was fairly daring for this type of film to open
with such a relaxed and subtle introduction, and it actually works to a degree. The only real negative
is that by the time the guy sets the painting down to burn it, you’re being drove mad by the
percussion. The credits roll over the image of the flaming painting which then proceeds to pour blood
and so the film begins. This is about as good as it gets really, the same trick is played twice where
we are introduced to a montage of scenes played with nothing but music on the soundtrack. I thought
each one was actually pulled off pretty well, but the way that it fit into the film didn’t feel very
natural. I suspect perhaps something was wrong in the film, perhaps a dead mic or something along
those lines and Lewis had to cut the scenes together fairly quick. It doesn’t really matter though
because in the end it actually helps the film out a good bit, giving he audience a break from the
monotonous dialogue laden sequences. I kind of feel bad disrespecting the film, because it’s just too
easy to do it, but I have to comment on the camerawork. To paraphrase Space Ghost, it ‘wadn’t very
good’ (murmured by SG in the episode ‘Curling Flower Space’, misspelling intentional). It fluctuates in
the film really. It tends to ranges from being darn right disrespectful to the trade, to a few actually
well put together shots. What Lewis tends to do that easily can grate a viewers nerves is that he
lingers far too long on inconsequential things. This is an editing complaint more than a cinematography
one, but the two are easily connected when you watch the sloppier moments put together I’m thinking of.
I remember being irritated to no end during one particular scene where the camera stayed in the same
position watching a girl calling out for a guy to come to shore, and then watching her get in a
bike/boat thing and travel out to the middle of the water just to reach him and begin a short
conversation. There are perhaps three cuts in the scene, but it could have been edited down in so many
better and more interesting ways that you begin to grow infuriated by how boring it is. I can imagine
that there wasn’t enough time or money for Lewis to take time and shoot scenes from different angles,
but when looking through the film for profile shots of the actors I sat through like three
conversations in the film where all we do is sit and watch them talk from about six feet away.
The really big problem I had with the cinematography though was how much the camera just seemed to
wander around. There were moments that I swear the cameraman was drunk while he filmed the scenes. The
movement was jerky and seemed to float a good bit during the scenes in Adam’s house in particular. A
lot of the different panning shots in the film are actually fairly interesting, but a lot of them are
just bumpy and take you out of the film, especially since everything looks more akin to a theatrical
play than a film. The film does have it’s own distinct visual style about it, I guess you can at least
give it that. The actors in the film, do I really have to even comment? Well, I might as well anyway.
The only person who delivers a fairly decent performance is Gordon Oas-Heim (credited with the
pseudonym Don Joesph) as Adam, but he is of most interest only because he plays the part so over the
top that his performance rivals the lead in Gore, Gore Girls. Maybe I draw the comparison because of
how similar the two characters are. Both are played very over the top and are quite hilarious, both are
extremely obnoxious and both seem to really hate women. He’s part of what makes the film actually work,
sure he could have played it subdued and the director could have brought us into his world as it falls
apart within his mind but instead we take the more fun route and have a brash, ego-centric idiot artist
who basis his whole existence on pleasing some moronic critic who appears to have his own chair that
never leaves the stage at the local art gallery. The rest of the cast other than Oas-Heim aren’t all
that interesting except for those who make you shudder when they talk. The snobbish critic comes to
mind, and so does the girl’s mother who continually tries to buy Adam’s “art”. Please do note the
quotation marks, it’s called sarcasm. This brings me to the one thing in the film I really didn’t get,
how am I supposed to believe the paintings were created the way they were shown? Adam is shown pouring
blood on an empty canvas with nothing but a penciled in outline, yet in the next shot he’s pouring
blood over a halfway painted canvass. Even though he poured blood on the empty one, somehow he was able
to paint UNDERNEATH the blood he had already spilled on the outline. If there’s something I missed, I
don’t know what it is. While I’m at it I could probably also point out that I’ve never seen blood
remain red after it stays on paper for too long, it seems to turn maroonish brown after a day or so. To
top the whole painting sequence off though, I’ll also note that the amount of blood on the canvas never
really changed that much after Adam stopped trying to milk blood from his finger and started killing
people for blood.
Before I draw this review to a close I guess I’ll bring up one last thing, for some reason in the film
(maybe some kind of production code back in the day?) something prevents the use of harsher
expletives. Several times in the film Adam toys with a few curse words but never actually says the
words aloud. I just don’t get it, the ‘F’ word wasn’t suitable back then but showing a man using his
wife’s dead corpse for a paint brush was perfectly suitable for mass enjoyment? It’s either a choice
made by Lewis or the producers or the censors, either way it’s incredibly silly. So here I am, I’ve
basically did nothing but rag on the film in all of it’s ineptitude, but I continue to give it a three!
What’s the unknown reason you ask? Well, it’s entertaining! Unlike Blood Feast or Wizard of Gore, I
found Blood Red to actually deliver a film that I might could watch once or twice more in my lifespan.
The dialogue is atrocious, but a hoot to laugh at when feeling particularly witty and the blood that
looks like red paint always entertains me. I do not recommend it for all audiences though, this may
be a bit too harsh of b-movie trauma for most horror fans to take. Over the years I’ve developed a
decent threshold for drive in cinema, but I’m still a softie by some standards. For those of you who
have seen one or two Lewis films that you liked, this one might be of interest. So now Lewis is two
for two with me, he’s a bad director but somewhat alluring. What can I say, I’ve seen
worse.
