How to Succeed in Painting

Title:  Blood Feast / Color Me Blood Red

Actors/Director/Anything Worth Mentioning Right Away:   These are two out of three movies in the Hershel Gordon Lewis Blood Trilogy.   They have enough similarities that I decided to do one review for them as sort of a double feature.

Introduction:  I purchased the HG Lewis Blood Trilogy DVD set on eBay for an undisclosed sum.

Location:  Both of these movies take place in towns, which people end up in other locations as well such as the beach.   They move around quite a bit, so they had some sort of budget for that I suppose.

Plot:  In Color Me Blood Red, a struggling painter accidentally uses some blood on his canvas.  In order to get more, he begins killing women and draining them of their blood.   He becomes a rather big success in the art community up until the end when he’s caught.   In a classic moment in cinema, one of his paintings is burned at the end of the movie to save the soul of the person whose blood is used in it.   One of the two men remarks, “Well you could have at least saved the frame”.    Blood Feast is not that much different except for the fact that the killer in this movie is collecting body parts for some sort of Egyptian Blood Feast that only happens so many thousand years.   The odd part about both of these movies is that their main villains (murderers) share a similar demise.   In Color Me Blood Red, as he is about to drain the blood from his last victim with an ax, a guy walks in asking to use the phone and has that kind of “What’s going on here” speech.  The guy grabs a gun from above the fire place and eventually shoots the painter’s face off.   In a similar ending, the serial killer in Blood Feast has a woman lying down with her eyes closed and he’s about to hack her up with a machete when some people walk in and catch him in the act.   However, he runs and eventually gets compacted in a garbage truck.

Acting:  The acting is actually not that bad, which surprised me.

Production:  It looks okay, but in Blood Feast a couple of the older characters had hair that looked blue.

Sex/Nudity:  No.   These movies love the underwear, but not nudity.

Special Effects:  Most of the special effects are severed limbs and, well, blood.   It’s somewhat of a slasher movie, especially for Color Me Blood Red.   But for the 1960’s, they look about what you would expect them to look like with the blood content and all.   They are rather well done.

Overall Verdict:  I think these two movies need to go together because of their overlapping qualities.   They are, also, part of the Blood Trilogy (along with Two Thousand Maniacs, which will be reviewed another time) so that kind of ties them together in some way.   None the less, I definitely recommend watching them because they aren’t necessarily scary or a mystery but the effects are done well enough and there is a slight hint of unintentional comedy.