The Bloody Judge

The Bloody Judge (1969/1970)

Dir. Jesus Franco

Written by… well, the on-screen credits say “Screenplay by Anthony Scott Veitch, based on an original story by Peter Welback.” IMDB claims that “Peter Welback” is actually producer Harry Alan Towers in disguise, and that the script was indeed written by Veitch, but also Enrico Colombo (who they say is credited as “E. Colombo,” but who is actually not credited at all), Michael Haller, and Franco himself. I have no choice but to assume all that is true, because who in their right mind would want to take credit for writing THE BLOODY JUDGE if they didn’t absolutely have to?

Starring Christopher Lee, Leo Glenn, Hans Hass Jr, Maria Rohm, Margaret Lee

So, after DREAM HOUSE convincingly reminded me that just because a film is competently made by A-list professionals doesn’t mean it isn't a real piece of shit, I felt refreshed and ready to return to my real bread and butter: z-grade Italian schlock from the 1970’s, which I incorrectly assumed THE BLOODY JUDGE was before turning it on and realizing that it was directed by Jesus Franco and was actually some kind of bizarre hybrid British/Spanish/Lichtensteinese/West German/Italian production. The only actual Italian anywhere on hand is composer Bruno Nicolai (stalwart giallo composer for EYEBALL, YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK, JESUS FRANCO’S BRAM STOKER’S COUNT DRACULA) and the tone is really more sensible British stuffiness than anything else, with just a dash of that old Jesus Franco incompetent sleaze for spice.

And it really needs that spice, because to be perfectly honest this is really more of a historical adventure/romance movie with some torture scenes and Christopher Lee as the bad guy than it is a horror movie. Like the previous year’s surprisingly staid Lucio Fulci torture drama CONSPIRACY OF TORTURE, this is some sort of odd middle ground between sleazy exploitation film and educational period piece. Only it’s not very good at being either of those things, of course. The phrase “this film lacks the coherent narrative and compelling emotional center of a Lucio Fulci film” is not one that I or anyone else should ever have cause to utter, but here we are, this is what THE BLOODY JUDGE has reduced us to.

Although the print I saw credits only one writer and one “story by” (the latter not even using a real name), I can very well believe IMDB’s claim that at least five different authors who did not necessarily share a first language worked on this script, because the plot is pretty all over the place. It seems to be the story of Baron George Jeffries (Christopher Lee, who would inexplicably work with Franco again the next year on Franco’s DRACULA), the “bloody judge” of the title, so-named because of his brutal and zealous fixation on punishing both witchcraft and anyone who challenged the power of King James II, soon to be known as former King James II following the events of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, wherein Dutch Stadholder William III of Orange and his wife, James’s daughter Mary II, joining forces with Parliamentarians angered by James’s staunch Catholicism and limited deference to parliamentary assertiveness, displaced the presumed line of succession and ousted the Stuart line from the throne, establishing years of brutal anti-Catholic persecution as well as significant steps towards permanent civil law through the establishment of the Declaration of Rights of 1689, precursor to the same year’s Bill Of Rights, a cornerstone of the uncodified British Constitution which today forms the basis for zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I know, I know, pretty dry stuff (believe me, i know -- I used to teach this crap to high schoolers). But there’s no getting around it, the movie is pretty deeply invested in the historical context here, and it’s going to be surprisingly difficult to parse for anyone without at least a baseline knowledge of the Glorious Revolution, who it displaced, and what the fuck was going on in English politics in the late 1680s. I know it’s a terrible world indeed where I have to say those painful words in discussion of a Jesus Franco movie, but we have to make do with the world we have, not the one we want.

The title makes it sound like THE BLOODY JUDGE is some kind of giallo killer with a judicatory gimmick, but of course you’ve already guessed that’s not gonna happen and have made your peace with it. More troubling, though, is that arguably the plot is not even so much about the titular Judge as it is about some of his victims, or at least people arguably tangentially related to some of his victims. I’m hedging mightily because it’s a little unclear exactly what the overall thrust of the movie actually is; possibly the most recognizable narrative conflict comes from a young Nobleman named Harry (Hans Hass Jr, Franco’s X312: FLIGHT TO HELL), whose dalliance with local girl Mary Gray (Maria Rohm, Mina Murray in Franco’s DRACULA, and wife of Producer Towers) becomes a touchstone for rebellion when Judge Jeffries decides to use his office to make a victim of her in his longstanding and ruthless quest to purge his region of witches and enemies of the crown. That sounds simple, but it’s actually really complicated, because Mary Gray gets in hot water in the first place due to her sister, Alice Gray’s (Margaret Lee, VENUS IN FURS) association with a coven of witches lead by Mother Rosa (Maria Schell, THE ODESSA FILE, SUPERMAN). As with most movies involving witches, the filmmakers kind of undermine their point about the injustice of witch hunts by giving in to the urge to show us magical ceremonies confirming that witches are, indeed, real. But that’s fairly low on the list of the movie’s problems.

Slightly more structurally damaging is the fact that Harry himself is under suspicion due to his friendship with Barnaby (Pietro Martellanza, THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS [and are there any other kind?]), who is suspected to have supported the rebellion of the Duke Of Monmouth (not pictured) during the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion. What the hell is that, you ask? Whoo boy, now you’ve gone and done it. You see, prior to the Glorious Revolution, James II had already dealt with a Scottish revolt and an insurrection by his nephew the Duke of Monmouth in 1685, who, citing James’s Roman Catholicism and uncomfortable closeness with French King Louis XIV, had himself declared King and raised an army to oppose James. Monmouth’s faction was defeated and he was beheaded, but the memory of this unfortunate episode still loomed large in the minds of Stuart loyalists, resulting in hostility between Judge Jeffries and a fellow noble, The Earl of Wessex (Leo Genn, LIZARD IN WOMAN’S SKIN), who -- good lord, what a small world it is-- happens to be the father of Harry, one possible candidate for “main character” of the movie THE BLOODY JUDGE! It’s good that you came to me with these question, though, because if you didn’t know about the rebellions of 1685 and didn’t understand the complicated series of familial alliances between Wessex, Monmouth, and his subjects the Gray family, it would be pretty difficult to follow the plot of this sleazy torture movie.

But aside from those few minor historical details and characters and a couple dozen more which are too convoluted to get into here, the plot is totally straightforward and elegant. Why, by the halfway point, you can almost pick out a handful of characters who seem important and may or may not show up in or around the climax, if you could identify what that would be! Harry does end up saving the girl, or a girl, anyway, it’s kinda hard to keep them straight, from people who are at least vaguely associated with Judge Jefferies, so I think that’s probably, I don’t know, a story? Or something kind of like a story? It might almost be exciting if it were written or filmed that way. The young kid who plays Harry is not entirely un-charismatic, but there’s no getting around it: his, hers, and and their story is so hopelessly fractured and lacking in structure that it’s barely existent. The best candidates for “main characters” don’t really resolve as such until nearly the halfway point, and their actual conflict with Jeffries --ostensibly the main villain here-- putters forward only in the most tangential of ways. And it’s not like the movie can make up for its narrative issues through ravishing pure cinema. Franco’s usual beat was making movies trashy and exploitative enough that his utter lack of actual filmmaking chops didn’t matter. This, alas, is close enough to a real movie that its disastrous incompetence is a real liability. Good thing they stuck in that scene of licking a dead chick’s ass (more on that later).

A lot of screen time is spent on two battle scenes, which are actually fairly nicely appointed, if you can figure out who is fighting and why it’s important and what any of it might mean for the characters. From what I could parse out, and from my fairly general American knowledge of late 17th-century British politics, I think the history is probably fairly accurate, and I think it pretty clear that the screenwriters made a real effort for accuracy, to the point of actively ruining any hope of a clear story in the service of messy historical fact. The elbow grease in the costuming and battle scenes also points to a movie which had genuine ambitions to be a classy period piece. But of course, actual good historical period epics routinely go begging in the streets, and this one was directed by fuckin’ Jesus Franco. So to bolster their commercial case for why you should watch these vaguely related characters sitting in the awkward no man’s land between the Monmouth rebellion and the Glorious Revolution, they thought it wise to cram in some sleazy exploitation stuff too, in this case several extended sequences of Howard Vernon (THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF, and one of those charming European actors who spent his whole career doing hundreds of z-grade no-talent grindhouse throwaways and sometimes pretty much straight-up porn, but also found his way into at least two movies in the Criterion collection) sadistically torturing various semi-nude women, which was apparently something people (men) in Europe were into back then.

Given the movie’s general dithering attempts at class, I have a suspicion this stuff was shot separately, possibly even without the knowledge of most of the actors, in order to give it a little more exploitation appeal. Most of it didn’t turn up on the American cut (under the brazenly dishonest name NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MONSTER) and it seems only Germany got the whole enchilada. Fortunately due to the miracle of technology, Blue Underground has been able to go back and restore Franco’s original auteurial vision by re-inserting these sequences into the movie (they never bothered to dub them into English, and consequently the version I saw suddenly lapses into subtitled German in a couple of places). The first is just a few-second extension of a courtroom scene where Lee reads the list of charges to one of his victims. Don’t know why the bothered to cut that, but OK. The other, though, is a scene where the diabolical guards make one of our heroines, the blonde one I think, lick the naked body of this other woman who is being suspended in a torture cage, I’m not sure if she’s dead or unconscious or what, but she seems pretty chill with it. It goes on and on for what at least feels like minutes on end. This is unquestionably the most prurient thing in the movie by miles, and really the only thing that seems astoundingly repellent enough to merit the (still totally unearned) label "horror film." It contributes nothing whatsoever to anything which we might, with some generosity, call a plot, but it is also, by virtue of its flagrant transgressive sleaziness, pretty much the only thing anywhere in sight interesting enough to justify watching THE BLOODY JUDGE, so I suppose it was a good call to put it in there. Too bad only the Germans were ready for this sort of shit back in the day, and thank God, thank God we’ve caught up with them in the intervening 47 years.

The real problem here, though, is even bigger than its plotless meandering or bad taste: it’s the inescapable fact that while Lee is the villain, and marquee name, and the title character, he figures into the plot only occasionally. This is pretty much the final strike for the movie, because Lee is the big star and can hardly help but be the focus of the film, but his character doesn’t really have an arc or conflict or even much to do with the plot other than ordering underlings around in generally malevolent sorts of ways. If I recall correctly, Harry, our ostensible hero, never even meets him. This becomes an even bigger problem because, since The Bloody Judge doesn’t figure directly into the story much, the character desperately needs to compensate by dominating the film with the sheer force of his larger-than-life diabolical fiendishness, and yet both Lee and the movie seem resolutely dead set on not playing the part that way. In fact, his dialogue is weirdly filled with a baffling sense of lingering self-doubt, particularly for a character whose main trait is that he’s a murderous zealot who likes to sexually abuse his victims after condemning them in court. It seems like Lee somehow got the idea in his head that this is a real character, something of a complicated, internally brittle monster, who deserves a nuanced performance... but of course the movie isn’t even remotely sturdy enough to handle that, and so he just becomes a hazier villain, not to the movie’s advantage.

Which is not really to disparage Lee, who seems to be working really hard here to be interesting. And it’s not even really disparaging the movie, which also seems to be working hard to, if not exactly be interesting, at least be… I dunno, classy? Educational? Something. Noble goals, probably, but goals which indisputably require a substantially higher baseline competence than THE BLOODY JUDGE is able to muster. As a wise old sage once wrote, you’ve got to know when to hold them, and know when to fold them. And in this case, the time to hold them was well before you hand over directorial duties for a stuffy ensemble piece about British history to the director of IN THE CASTLE OF BLOODY LUST. And the time to fold them is when you realize your movie is so utterly empty that you’d better shoot some second unit footage of a naked chick getting her ass licked for several minutes. Class is all well and good, but when you ain’t got it, you gotta know you ain’t got it, and just lean into that. Franco could usually be counted on to understand this basic truth, but he tried flying too close to the sun of respectability here, and, well, you see the result. Or rather, you won’t, because who am I kidding, you’re not going to watch THE BLOODY JUDGE.

Lies. All lies.

EPILOGUE: IMDB claims that Jack Taylor is alternately credited in two roles here under different phony names-- as Art Director “George O. Brown” and as Set Decorator “George O’Brown.” This would be funny, but the credits don’t list any Set Decorator that I can see, so I don’t know about that. They DO list a "George O. Brown," though, and if IMDB is to be believed (and I think it’s obvious that it’s not) this is, my God, actually the same Jack Taylor who, like Howard Vernon, had one of those weird careers where he appeared in endless awful garbage --including the anti-entertainment classic THE GHOST GALLEON-- but also managed to work with Roman Polanksi, Ridley Scott, Milos Forman, etc. In support of the theory that this is the same guy: IMDB claims that his birth name was actually George Brown Randall, which looks suspiciously similar to the nom de plume here. But then again, why would anyone use a fake name for this movie, especially in his single solitary gig as an Art Director? It’s not like he’s an Italian trying to pass for American. I know THE BLOODY JUDGE is a piece of shit, but come on, he put his name on THE VAMPIRES NIGHT ORGY and TENDER AND PERVERSE EMANUELLE. Would it really have been so devastating to his career to just go as Jack Taylor? Which is, I hasten to remind you, already an alias for “George Brown Randall”? And speaking of which, why all the deception, “Jack”? Jesus, was this guy in witness protection or something?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	HORROR WILL HOLD YOU HELPLESS
TITLE ACCURACY	THE BLOODY JUDGE is fairly accurate, I suppose, though its many alternate titles are increasingly disconnected from reality
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No, “story by” “Peter Welback”
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	England/Spain/etc
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Torture Porn,
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Christopher Lee
NUDITY?	Oh yeah. Two youngsters enjoy some definitely-not-extremely-uncomfortable boning in a barn filled with hay. Oddly, an unbroken ring of hay is sitting on top of him and obscuring his junk. Not so for her, but still, I think I’d brush that shit off under the circumstances.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Do you even have to ask?
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	There’s some pagan-looking dancing at the beginning, but I see no evidence that it’s actually a cult. There’s also a blind fortune teller, but she seems nice
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Just from the camera
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never live in the late 1680’s in England. Never mind the grinding poverty and constant violence and repression, there’s just too damn many names and alliances to keep straight.