(aka, Crimson: The Color Of Terror; Crimson: The Color of Blood, The Man with the Severed Head.
Literal translation: Rats Do Not Sleep at Night)
Look, this is a gangster film.
Yeah, I know it looks like a medical horror film, but at the heart it is really about a war between two rival gangs.
Even if Paul Naschy is playing one (or depending on how you look at it, both) of the rival gang leaders.
Naschy plays Jack Surnett, a gangster who gets shot in the head during a failed robbery, and the only way to save him is to insert part of someone else’s brain.
Unfortunately, the other members of his gang decide the perfect donor would be the head of the rival gang, a nasty piece of work who calls himself “The Sadist.”
And the next thing you know, Surnett is acting very strangely, and it all gets complicated because the other gang is out for revenge now…
Most of this plays out in a very low-key sort of way: the gang’s doctor takes them to the only man who can help, a reclusive scientist doing a lot of strange experiments with his wife’s help. As reluctant as he seems at first, he’s far too happy with the prospect of finally have a human subject for testing his new techniques.
However, his lab is disappointingly simple, and, even though the basic story sounds suspiciously like it was borrowed from an old Monogram film, his operating room is surprisingly simple and presented in a more or less realistic way.
Other than the transplant’s effects on Surnett, and some of the more violent murders, very little of this falls under the heading of horror. Nor do we get a lot of mad science. It all ends with a massive explosion of violence which kills nearly everyone in the film.
I really am not certain why Crimson is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite films. It’s a reasonably good French/Spanish co-production and works best as a gangster film with a bit of a twist. Once it starts, the war between the two gangs builds steadily to a brutal climax, with only a few breaks along the way for mad science and sadism.
But then, let’s face it, Quentin’s favorites aren’t always good, either.
The good news, however, is that after years of being hard to find (except on those fifty film Mill Valley sets) Crimson is now on Tubi, for free.
And you don’t even have to take 49 other extremely bad movies with it…
rivets on the poster 