Crimson: The Colour of Blood (1976)

Just as there are certain actors, directors and producers whose names on a film's credits are an indication that you are about to see a certain type of production, the same is true of certain production companies and distributors, who are instantly recognisable for dealing in certain genres.  Hammer is an obvious example - despite producing films in a wide range of genres, they will always be associated with Gothic horror, just as Republic are with serials, Monogram with cheap B-movies and Universal with monsters.  Likewise, whenever I see Eurocine credited as a producer or co-producer of a movie, I know that I'm set to experience some bizarre continental concoction of schlock genres.  In this respect, Crimson: The Colour of Blood (1976) doesn't disappoint.  A French-Spanish co-production, it crosses a number of genres and stars Paul Naschy (billed as 'Paul Nash' on the English language credits tacked onto the English sub-titled French language version I recently saw).  Despite feeling somewhat like a Jesus Franco movie, it is in fact directed by his fellow Spaniard Juan Fortuny, who had his own catalogue of schlocky B-movies.  Crimson opens as if it is going to be a gritty Euro crime thriller, with Naschy attempting to crack a safe in a jeweler's shop, only for the alarm to go off as a result of a fellow gang member triggering an alarm by snatching a necklace from a display case.  In the resulting getaway from the police, involving car chases and shoot outs, Naschy suffers a bullet wound to the head.  The gang's doctor tells them that Naschy needs to go to hospital, but the gang's leader, Henry, is naturally reluctant to go down this route.  The doctor then remembers an old colleague, a brilliant professor who fell out with the medical establishment due t his unusual experiments.  So the gang and the doctor decamp to the professor's remote mansion.

At which point the film takes a turn into science fiction territory, with the professor declaring that Naschy needs a brain transplant (in the English sub-titles, at least) and that the gang need to find him a freshly severed head.  He warns that such a procedure might have side effects and that Naschy might not quite be himself afterward - well, obviously, if he has someone else's brain then, in effect, he'll be someone else.  Of course, there are complications, the professor's hands have been badly scarred in an accident, leaving him unable to do the surgery himself, but luckily he has trained his wife in surgery.  The gang decide to obtain the donor brain from their arch-enemy, 'The Sadist', who happens to have the right blood group.  Just to make out sure the Prof and his wife actually do carry out the surgery, the gang hold their young daughter hostage.  The film then takes a turn into black comedy, as Henry's two sidekicks succeed in killing 'The Sadist', but neither can bring themselves to decapitate him, instead deciding to put his body on a railway lime and wait for a passing train to sever the head.  As it turns out, what the Professor is proposing isn't a full brain transplant, but rather using a part of the new brain to replace the damaged part of Naschy's (which makes slightly more sense).  With the operation done and Nascy recovering, Henry can't resist taunting his rival's former gang by sending them their deceased leader's head, sparking a gang war between the two groups.  While the rival gang search for Naschy and co's whereabouts, torturing the doctor and Naschy's girlfriend along the way, Naschy begins to recover, but finds himself subject to alien thoughts and urges.  In particular, he starts becoming violent toward women, ('The Sadist' having earned his name from his predilection for getting rough with girls).  

Inevitably, Naschy attacks and tries to rape the Professor's wife as the gangs shoot it out in the grounds of the house.  Eventually, the police turn up and gun down Naschy as he staggers outside.  Overall, Crimson is a curious film, never quite making up its mind as to whether it is a science fiction, horror or gangster film, with the latter elements pretty much dominating the film, or, indeed, settling on a tone, with its jarring excursions into black comedy amidst the torture and violence.  That the thriller elements eventually prevail is no surprise, as much of director Fortuny's previous experience had been in this genre and this was the material he was clearly most comfortable with.  The science fiction elements seem somewhat arbitrarily tacked on, with the whole business of Naschy's identity crisis feeling rather perfunctory and never really explored.  The film is, in effect, a variation on Universal's 1940 film Black Friday, in which mild mannered academic receives part of gangster Bela Lugosi#s brain in a transplant and gradually becomes a gangster himself.  The problem that this version has is that its protagonist was already part of a gang of violent criminals (who think nothing of kidnapping little girls in order to coerce people into doing their bidding), making it hard for the viewer to see how having part of a sadist's brain and consequently his sadistic urges, actually makes him any worse, with his subsequent actions hardly seeming surprising, brain transplant or not.  Indeed, the film's complete lack of sympathetic characters - Naschy, his gang and their rivals are violent criminals, the doctor's a broken down, weak willed drunk while the Professor is blinded with regard to the morality of his actions by his fanatical devotion to his research - makes it difficult for the viewer to ultimately care what happens to any of them.  

Obviously made on a limited budget, Crimson looks very much like a typical Gallic policier, all moody autumnal colours, drab interiors and muted lighting, while the Professor's basement lab comes over as something out of a Monogram mad scientist B-movie. Fortuny moves it along at a reasonable clip, with enough action in the form of gunfights and car chases to stop it ever becoming tedious, but never really making enough out of its more bizarre aspects.  Most criminally, though, it doesn't give star Naschy enough to do, keeping him comatose for a large part of the film and affording him only the most modest of evil rampages at the climax.  Crimson, nonetheless, is an enjoyably eccentric slice of Euro exploitation, albeit never really doing full justice to its horror elements and thereby never quite fulfilling its potential for mind-boggling weirdness.