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Crimson AKA Las Ratas no duermen de noche AKA Crimson, The Colour of Blood AKA The Man with the Seve
R0 - United Kingdom - Arrow Films Review written by and copyright: Jon Meakin (26th September 2011). |
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The Film
 With a title like that, you just know you’re in for a treat! And before the film starts there’s a wonderful trailer by Arrow Films to showcase some of the stuff they’re releasing and it really sets you up for the main feature. A good old fashioned slice of nasty grindhouse exploitation, with gore and nudity! Well, that’s what I hoped for. That’s what the title insinuated and the picture on the DVD sleeve is suitably garish. And it stars Paul Naschy who had a notorious career in grotty fun like the Re-Animator sequel or enthusiastic Spanish werewolf flicks. Grindhouse cinema has a proud history of embracing the “video nasty” stereotype and courting controversy and threats of being banned. The only reason this film should be banned is because it’s astonishingly dull. It’s not a bad premise and the story isn’t awful, but it plays out without anything worthy of note. It’s a non-event. Naschy plays a mobster who is shot in the head during a botched robbery. His doctor understands that hospital is not an option and so takes him to a professor who has been experimenting with brain transplants in animals. The Professor claims, with his family under threat, that he will be able to save the gang’s boss. He just needs a suitable brain and so the henchmen track down their arch-enemy (promisingly called The Sadist) and bring back his head. The operation is a success! Or is it? Right now, if you like this sort of film, I can virtually guarantee that the film you’re imagining in your head is considerably more fun than what you’ll actually see. Mad professors swapping brains, mobsters called “The Sadist”, medical experiments going nuts! That has to be a winner, eh? But it isn’t. What you actually get is a very run of the mill gangster plot that maybe The Sopranos could have built on, with no sense of the fantastic or the macabre. The Sadist is the least convincing gangster I have ever seen while the injured Naschy simply needs fixing up without regular doctors asking awkward questions. He recovers in the Prof’s house and post-op, the patient gets a headache and doesn’t “feel himself”. That’s it, really. It’s a very poorly made film, but you kind of want that for the experience. The bad acting (including Naschy, despite his reputation), the awful script, the incompetence of the director … all of this is par for the course and complaining about it would be idiotic. But what I can’t understand is how serious it’s being taken! There’s no irony whatsoever and even less enthusiasm. No blood, no gore (except for an inventive way of decapitating a corpse), a small amount of nudity. The opening sequence with the robbery isn’t bad and overall the story is good enough to keep you watching in the vain hope they’re saving everything for a final reel blow-out. They don’t. When Naschy finally goes on his nutty rampage, it’s more of a confused walk. I gave up when a girl on a moped is surprised by him. She gets off it to run away. That’s right; she drops the perfectly functional and rather nippy escape vehicle so she can run into the woods o n foot. When the victims have to stop and wait for the villain to catch up, you know all hope is lost.
Video
Quality is great for this full frame 16:9 release. Colours are distinct and it’s a very clean transfer. This cheap film has surely never looked so expensive! It is very dated: it makes the 1970s look like the 1960s. And I wish I could tell you how good the effects looked, but I can’t, because there wasn’t any.
Audio
There is a choice of English or French 2 channel mono audio. I think both are dubs and while the English track seems to be centred better with more effective bass, the dubbing is horrendous. The French track is much better and the lone English subtitles are selectable.
Extras
A nice 23 minute retrospective of the late Paul Naschy’s career shows you clips from several of his clearly more interesting films, including the Spanish werewolf stuff, which looks like fantastic fun. There is also a trailer and six minutes of deleted “Erotic scenes”.
Overall
Arrow Films are to be commended for such a well presented effort in restoring an example of the much maligned exploitation genre, but it’s all for nothing. It’s a dull experience watching the film and then you see those deleted scenes… It is at this point the game is up and you slap yourself on the forehead as the mystery of why the film was so weak is revealed. The six minutes of sex scenes are clumsy, but so gratuitously filmed and overlong, it is blindingly obvious the whole intention behind The Man With The Severed Head was to produce a soft-core porn film. It is fair to say the opening scenes aren’t bad, so maybe someone thought there was enough straight material to pull off a half-decent crime movie after rescuing it from such a laughably inept nudie flick. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way it doesn’t matter. There is value in the cheap and nasty riotous fun of the exploitation genre, but none of it can be found here. It’s a porn film with the sex cut out and it doesn’t get much more pointless than that!
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