Gordon Oas-Heim | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week, the fifth season begins.

Episode 5.1 “Suicide Stunt”

(Dir by Michael Caffey, originally aired on October 4th, 1981)

The fifth season opens with the Highway Patrol pursuing a gang of thieves and also keeping an eye on Janos Szabo (Les Lannom), a motorcycle daredevil from Hungary who has come to Los Angeles to take part in charity show for “Highway Patrol Widows and Orphans.”

Since Hungary was controlled by the evil communists (hisssss!) when this episode originally aired, I assumed the episode would be about Janos trying to defect so that he could start a new life in the greatest country on Earth, the USA (yay!). Instead, it turned out that Janos was more concerned with spending time with an ex-girlfriend named Maria (Anita Jodelsohn) who had defected (Good for you, Maria!) and was now working for the Highway Patrol. The entire episode was pretty much scene after scene of Janos sneaking away from his handlers, stealing a vehicle, and then trying to kidnap Maria. Maria found it to be amusing. The members of the Highway Patrol were amused. Even Janos’s handlers seemed to be secretly amused. Still, when Janos set a fire outside of the CHP headquarters to distract everyone so that he could steal another car (this one with Maria in it), Ponch had no choice other than to arrest him.

“I am glad it is you who arrest me,” Janos says to Ponch, smiling like an idiot.

With Janos arrested, it falls on Jon Baker to perfect the stunts while riding Janos’s motorcycle. And Baker is able to do it easily, even the one that involves bursting through a ring of fire. So, I guess they didn’t need Janos to begin with. They should have just had Baker do it and they could have saved a lot of money. Way to waste the taxpayer’s cash, Jerry Brown!

(He was governor at the time. Then, like 30 years later, he was governor again.)

Odd episode, this one. Most season premieres try to go big but this was pretty much just another episode of CHiPs. The California scenery was nice. I always appreciate that this show was largely shot on location and, as a result, even the worst episodes have some value as a time capsule. That said, Janos was an incredibly annoying character. The fact that the show meant for us to laugh at his antics made him even more annoying. There’s only so many times you can watch one jackass try to abduct one woman before you say, “Enough already!”

That sure is an interesting poster, isn’t it? The poster for Color Me Blood Red pretty much screams grindhouse and if you didn’t already know that this 1965 film was directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and produced by David Friedman, you’d be able to guess just from looking at it. My favorite part of the poster is the promise that Color Me Blood Red is “drenched in crimson color.”

There’s a lot of blood in Color Me Blood Red. In fact, it’s a movie about blood. Adam Sorg (played by Gordon Oas-Heim, who I’m going to guess was not a professional actor because, otherwise, why wouldn’t he have changed his name to Gordon O?) is a painter who hasn’t had much success. Sure, he has a house on the beach and he has a girlfriend named Gigi (Elyn Warner) who is willing to model for him but one thing that Adam doesn’t have is respect. No one wants to buy his paintings! Could it be because Adam is living in a city full of Philistines? That’s what Adam seems to believe but I think a far bigger problem is the fact that Adam is not a very good painter. His paintings are cartoonish and his use of color is more than a little dull. However, after Gigi cuts her finger and bleeds all over one of his canvases, Adam discovers that he has now found the perfect shade of red!

So, he decides to paint with blood. Unfortunately, Gigi doesn’t want to give him any more of her blood. So, Adam decides to open his own veins and use his own blood but he faints before he can finish his latest masterpiece. What is Adam to do? Well, he can always kill Gigi and use her blood. And, of course, there’s always a fresh supply of teenagers showing up on the beach…

What’s sad about all this is that, even after Adam discovers that blood is the perfect shade of red, he’s still not a very good painter. Believe me, I understand. I majored in Art History. The majority of my friends are artists. Some paint, some write, some take pictures. Believe me — I get it. We all go through that phase where we fool ourselves into thinking that undeveloped talent, lazy thinking, and lack of ability is the same thing as having a unique vision that is destined to be unappreciated. But most artists either eventually find their own voice or they give up by the time they turn 28. Adam, on the other hand, is a middle-aged guy who is still acting like a student in an Intro to Graphic Design class. What I’m saying is that blood is useless without a unique vision. The perfect shade of red isn’t going to help if you still don’t have your own voice.

Then again, maybe I’m taking the film too seriously.

And really, that’s something you should never do when you’re reviewing a Herschell Gordon Lewis film. Color Me Blood Red was the third part of Lewis’s blood trilogy but, unfortunately, it’s never quite as effective or memorable as either Blood Fest or Two Thousand Maniacs. As silly as certain parts of the film may be, Blood Feast‘s gore still has the power to shock. Two Thousand Maniacs is pure nightmare fuel. Color Me Blood Red, meanwhile, is kind of bland. It feels more like a successor to The Undertaker and His Pals than Blood Feast.

That said, the film is worth watching for some of the dialogue. The entire film is full of campy lines, the majority of which are so strange that they give the proceedings an almost dream-like feel.

“Dig that crazy driftwood!” someone says upon spotting a corpse in the water.

“You mean the type who earn an honest living painting houses?” someone else says when asked for his opinion on artists.

And, of course, there’s my favorite line: “HOLY BANANAS! It’s a girl’s leg!”

Color Me Blood Red is the least essential entry in the blood trilogy but, if you’re a Lewis/Friedman completist, you know you’re going to have to watch it. So, you might as well sit back and enjoy it for the frequently silly little movie that it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY39yi3idzc