Deep Crimson

I started to rave about this amazing film I'd just seen to this caffeine purveyor; to tell him how horrifying the movie was and that there was a murder in it that was, well just shocking. I couldn't help myself.

But all the poor fellow could respond with was how scary Scream 2 was! I wasn't surprised by what he said but I was struck dumb. He obviously would be unlikely to ever experience a real movie going experience like Deep Crimson, which didn't come from Hollywood, and is in Spanish with subtitles, but to make matters even worse, Scream 2 isn't even a patch on Scream 1!

I wouldn't have normally cared much about the ignorance of this no doubt intelligent and nice young bloke but I was at the time in a bit of a mess. How could you let the exhilaration, or should I say the horror, of what I had just been introduced to in Deep Crimson pass by without attempting to have a natter about it with someone?

This astounding film shocked many who saw it. I've never been more pleased for two criminals to get their just deserts than the two awful people at the centre of Deep Crimson.

Based on murders that actually did happen in Mexico in the 1940's, Deep Crimson doesn't so much chronicle murder as the personalities of the murderers.

One is female, fat, obsessive, gluttonous, jealous and stupid. The other is male, vain and paranoid about his baldness. Nicholas has been making a paltry living forming liaisons with women by placing ads in a lonely hearts column, and then robbing them.

He liases with Coral who is a sole mother to two young children. We are introduced to Coral as she trys to seduce a wheel chair bound elderly fellow. It's obvious from our first view of Coral that Coral, who is extraordinarily played by Regina Orozco, is an obviously hateful woman. She oozes sloppy slovenliness!

Coral is sexually wonton and when she meets Nicholas through one of his ads and watches his moves, including his petty robbery from her purse, she decides that he's the woman for her! She dumps her children at a run down orphanage, (that's upsetting), and heads off to join Nicholas and to manage his career.

They now together arrange for Nicholas to contact other women with Coral posing as his sister. But she can't bear him to touch other women and so the murders begin.

What is most upsetting and fascinating about these two is their dumbness and the stupid uselessness of the murders. And they're never offered any excuses in Deep Crimson. There's no backing away from the awful reality they create. These two killers aren't smart enough to really figure out why they are doing what they do, but can't help themselves.

Eventually the evil gets so rotten that the horror even shocks them.

Unlike the Scream 2's of the film world, there actually isn't much violence in Deep Crimson, but when it finally happens I had been drawn so much into the strange, confused, bent, selfish world of Coral and Nicholas that it's unforgettable.

Films like Scream 2 are fun and sell lots of tickets but films like Deep Crimson touch us where we know it really counts. Three cheers for the Cairns Celebration Of Film for bringing classy, low budget films like Deep Crimson to Cairns.