CRIMSON, THE COLOR OF BLOOD

Directed by Juan Fortuny. 1976. Spain, France, Belgium.

"If I'm going to save this man's life, I'm going to have to perform a cerebral transplant, and to do that, I'll need a human brain with the same characteristics and blood groups as this man's. Are either of you willing to give up his life? I need the head of a man who has recently died. Have I made myself clear?" - Prof. Teets.

I’m afraid not, Professor. I am more than a little confused.

You see, this movie began as a heist movie, with a quartet of crooks breaking into a jewelry store vault. One of the gang decides to nick a string of pearls from a display stand, setting off an alarm. After a poorly edited shootout with the cops, the gang returns to their hideout. They might not have managed to steal a load of jewels, but the leader of the gang, Jack Surnett, didn’t come away empty-handed. He’s currently got a nice, hot load of lead stuck inside his cranium courtesy of the cops. With Surnett’s clock quickly ticking down, Henry, the most loyal second-in-command petty crook ever, decides to take his boss to see the drunken Doctor Ritter.

Aware that prying a bullet out of a man’s head is beyond his pay grade, but desperate not to be murdered by Henry, Ritter takes the gang to the country home of the unfortunately named Professor Teets, a neurosurgeon who has spent the past several years doing potentially unethical experiments on animal brains with his wife, Ana. The good Professor and his wife are hesitant to help Surnett survive, but five minutes and one kidnapped daughter later, they have a change of heart. They will perform the life-saving cerebral transplant surgery. There’s just one catch. They need a brain, or more specifically, they need a whole damn head.

And this is where I thought the film was going to settle in on a tone and a storyline. You see, this is a cheap piece of Spanish Eurotrash, one produced with no great care and certainly no great skill. The dubbing (yes, unfortunately, I chose the English language version, so I got bad dubbing instead of more nudity) is so drab and emotionless that it lends an almost comical air to the whole thing. It’s very campy yet overly sincere, making it the perfect vehicle for comedy. Sure, it may be the unintentional kind, but beggars can’t be choosers.

I was actually quite pleased when the boys decided to bump off the leader of the rival gang, a man everyone calls “The Sadist”, and use his brain for the surgery. They use Surnett’s current squeeze, Ingrid (played by the lovely Gilda Arancio), to lure The Sadist into a trap. A couple of bullets later, the other two members of Surnett’s gang, Paul and Karl, are hauling The Sadist’s body around town, trying their best to separate the dead perp from his noggin.

I was having a blast at this point, watching these two bumbling idiots try and fail to decapitate a corpse. I thought this was going to be the rest of the movie, a complete farce about trying to save their boss's life. I expected something to happen to the corpse. Maybe they leave it in the back of the car, only to have yet another crook steal their ride. I was ready for this ridiculously stupid movie to become a ridiculously stupid fun movie.

Then they just put the corpse on train tracks and that’s that. The head is procured. Moving on.

The Professor and Ana use a kaleidoscope and a scalpel to perform the surgery, and everything appears to go well. Well, except that The Sadist’s gang has figured out why their boss is missing and who’s responsible. That’s not gonna be good. Oh, and Surnett is now awake, which would be great if he weren’t feeling a little rapey all of a sudden. Ah yes, the dreaded “psychic transference” the Professor was worried about is happening. Egads! Who would have thought putting a chunk of brain from a man named The Sadist into the head of Paul Naschy would go so wrong?

The rest of the movie is just barely comprehensible. The Sadist’s gang shows up. Paul Naschy rapes every female character he comes across. Karl and Henry find Paul’s obviously murdered body hanging from a tree, and instead of going on instant lockdown, they just bury it like nothing happened. I don’t know. At a certain point, I stopped experiencing time as a linear construct. I swear things started happening for no good reason. Ingrid has a half dozen cigarettes put out on her breasts. Henry molests a woman in front of her pre-teen daughter. There are two burlesque performances for some reason. Henry and Karl hold each other at gunpoint once? Twice? Maybe three times? I can’t remember. It’s all a big, stupid blur.

Look, I prefer Paul Naschy lying in bed, pretending to be comatose, than up and moving around and “acting”. So, for me, the first half of the movie, with all its wild mood swings and lunacy, was the strongest part of the movie. I was kind of enjoying it. It was all over the place, veering between crime thriller, drama, black comedy, sexploitation, and satire, all with as straight a face as it could muster. I wish it had never gone the mad scientist route because that shit is just kinda gross. Nothing is frightening about a shirtless, barrel-chested Paul Naschy groping a squirming woman. It’s just demeaning and off-putting.

And that’s all Naschy does in the final third. There’s no big scene of him coming to terms with having half the brain of his rival or suffering anything close to an existential crisis over his conflicting identities. He just grabs breasts and grunts. I was far more invested in the budding battle between Karl, the thief who caused this entire mess, and the ever-loyal Henry. It’s a shame that ends as quickly as it begins. By the time the credits rolled and the movie had stumbled to its dumb, clumsy finish, I was thoroughly ready to bid adieu to this entire clusterfuck.

CRIMSON, THE COLOR OF BLOOD is not a Eurotrash classic. It’s just a mess of half-thought-through ideas, some good, some bad, some funny, some deeply regrettable. At no point did I feel my tongue begin to slide down the back of my throat, but I did notice my knee starting to uncontrollably bounce more and more as the running time wore on. I was mostly just bored by it, especially in the back half. It’s a shame. Had they leaned into the absurdity of the premise, they could have come away with something decent. As it stands, I won’t remember it in a week.