THE FUSE

Whether saturating entire frames or dribbling down a rare contrasting design element, there’s red everywhere you look in “The Blood Countess,” as you might well expect. Little of it, however, is the dark congealed claret of blood as we know it. Ulrike Ottinger prefers to paint in the garishly declarative, candied reds of off-brand ketchup, kickass lipstick and iridescent B-movie gore effects — the good, lurid, fake stuff, all the more appropriately artificial for a delirious vampire movie that piles lore upon mythology upon pizza-dream vision, hurtling its story several planets past the true one of its ostensible protagonist, Countess Elizabeth Báthory.