mother!

Mother! (2017)

Dir and written by by Darren Aronofsky

Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer

Whoo, boy. Well, if you needed any further evidence that I’m the worst human being to ever live, I’ll provide it in one sentence: I came perilously close to loving MOTHER! Not quite all the way there, I’ll grant, but far too close for comfort. I can’t even defend my reaction by pleading that I came close loving it in some sort of ironic hipster contrarian way, because as much as I’d like that to be true, I know in my heart it isn’t. Alas, my enjoyment was sincere, and possibly even the reaction director Darren Aronofsky (REQUIEM FOR A DREAM) was hoping for. I mean, I certainly don’t think he intended to make a movie which would be so widely and fiercely despised by everyone, everywhere. Or maybe he did, and it’s just me that’s wrong. But I, for one, found it absolutely compulsively entertaining. Exactly what he thought he was doing with it is, to put it mildly, a little unclear. Whatever he was trying to do, MOTHER! Is unquestionably kind of a dumbass movie, but man oh man, is it unmistakably from the outrageous sensibility of the man who brought us NOAH. And I cannot, in good conscience, pretend to resist that kind of manic insanity.

And that’s a long way from the review I thought I’d be writing for this one. Honestly the only reason I was even in the theater was because I was charmed by the vivid intensity of everyone’s hatred, and thought I’d better get in there early and see what all the fuss was about. This deep into pop culture hell, notoriety is vastly more intriguing to me than earnest praise, and I figured this might be my best chance in years to hate-watch something really magnificently misguided with an equally appalled audience (it’s possible the Trump years have not been good for me psychologically). The idea that I’d actually like it never even occurred to me.

After all, let’s just get this out in the open: it’s been increasingly clear for some time now that Aronofsky is a total doofus. A talented doofus, to be sure, but a doofus nonetheless. It wasn’t alway apparent, of course; back when PI came out, it seemed fresh and smart and ambitious, and I adored it. And well I should: it was (and remains) pretty much the perfect starter set for a neophyte cinephile who wants to be into pretentious art cinema but hasn’t quite done the legwork yet to know the ropes. He followed that one with REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, which packed such a powerful, visceral cinematic punch that almost nobody at the time, including me, ever reflected back on how ridiculously silly and overwrought it actually was under all those flashy trappings. With two rapturously received Serious Important Grown Up movies under his belt, Aronofsky seemed like the real deal, a gen-u-ine auteurial master for our times. Then he was attached for years to about a thousand projects which never materialized, and finally when THE FOUNTAIN did come out it wasn’t so hot, but then again we knew it was a compromised mess where the budget disappeared and he couldn’t really make it the way he wanted, and it wasn’t his fault, and hey, it doesn’t quite seem to add up but there are definitely, like, ideas in there, right? And he did marry Rachel Weisz (DREAM HOUSE) so obviously he’s was man of class and distinction.

sick mustache, bro.

My opinion of him really started to change with BLACK SWAN, though. It’s still a technically superb film, but I couldn’t help but notice that, uh, it’s dumb as rocks, just absolutely packed to the gills with over-the-top histrionic silly nonsense treated with almost parodic hyper-seriousness. And that made me kind of reconsider, for all its cinematic potency, how shamelessly melodramatic REQUIEM is. But then again, BLACK SWAN is also a movie from the perspective of a brittle, comically repressed teenage drama queen, and so I thought hey, maybe it just shares its main character’s ridiculously hypersensitive perspective. It’s definitely a lot of trashy fun, after all, so who am I to complain?

And then, NOAH.

Oh man, I fucking love NOAH, but it’s the first film where it became unmistakably obvious that Aronofsky’s ambition had outpaced his intelligence. Not that it outpaced his skill as a filmmaker, mind you, which remained as rock-solid as ever. But NOAH is as pristine an example as ever existed of an artist whose burning need to be thought of as A Serious Artist Who Thinks Big Important Things had superseded his ability to know where high melodrama ended and arch camp began. Which did not make it less enjoyable to me; just possibly enjoyable in a different way than the director intended. The combination of masterful filmmaking, utter grimness, wildly expensive production and total fucking insanity is just so spectacularly perfect. I mean, who could possibly think NOAH was a good idea except Aronofsky? It’s a movie which is 100% earnest about the tragic inner life of giant rock monsters, certain that a simple environmental allegory requires vast intricate battle scenes, and at the end it turns into a slasher flick out of fucking nowhere, like SUNSHINE. Except that the good guy is the slasher!

What’s not to love, unless you have the misfortune of being a normal human being or anyone who has ever experienced even a glimmer of irony? It’s way too blasphemous for the religious, way too religious for the secular, too slow for action fans, but bloated with too much spectacle for serious critics, too dumb for intellectuals, but too talky for the popcorn crowd, and the one thing you might imagine would be the easy selling point of the story of fucking Noah’s Ark (the animals!) are a tiny, minor plot point. And yet, on a technical level it’s absolutely impeccable. It may be one of the best movies ever made that no one alive could possibly be expected to like.

Except me, of course. I am constitutionally incapable of disliking something which is simultaneously so well made and so spectacularly miscalculated.

Jennifer Lawrence at the MOTHER! premier

And it is, without question or equivocation, entirely this Aronofsky who brings us MOTHER!*, another epic-length, possibly environmentally-themed opus which is simultaneously spectacularly well made and spectacularly miscalculated. Though, truth be told, I have to accept the “miscalculated” part based purely on the collective response so unambiguously provided by my fellow cinema-goers. Honest to God, I would never have guessed, based on the movie itself, that it would go over quite as poorly with the public as it did. I mean, I could have told you that turning the two-page Bible story of Noah’s Ark into a fantasy-epic/claustrophobic slasher was misguided folly (it made $362 million worldwide and remains Aronofsky’s highest-grossing film by an enormous margin, haha). I couldn’t have guessed that MOTHER!’s frothy mix of blobby religious allegory and nightmarish awkwardness-porn surreal horror setpieces would be so thoroughly rejected by every other living person on Earth. OK, looking back at that last sentence in stark black and white, I guess I sort of can figure out what the problem might have been, but I swear to you --swear-- that had I just caught this on a lark and not heard anything about it, I would have assumed it would be immediately hailed as cult triumph, a ready-made midnight movie masterpiece.

Which it may yet end up being, I suppose. As it has flitted from the collective consciousness of a furious mainstream into a the subterranean strata of more self-selecting audiences willing to meet it on its own terms, I’ve seen a few flickering of approval. (Which is why it belonged there in the first place, duh; the idea that they released this in mainstream theaters with the fucking MY LITTLE PONY movie is the most bizarre distribution decision since I saw TUSK downtown in a giant empty downtown Washington DC Regal Cinema)

Still, even at that, I honestly don’t understand how people hated it as much as they did. I mean, it’s just so fucking entertaining, like, every single second of the runtime! It’s almost pandering how intent it is on keeping you entertained. Given that magnificent, unfettered “F” cinemascore, I entered the theater expecting some kind of endurance-testing glacial BROWN BUNNY-esque opaque exercise in audience frustration. But it’s not that at all. MOTHER! Is a hoot, and really the only problem it has is that it is, at times, just a little too accommodating and generous in its explanations for its own good. David Lynch would never allow something to explain itself so thoroughly and resolve itself so neatly, and that’s why he’s the king and Darren Aronofsky is just an overcaffeinated kid trying to entertain the ladies at his mother’s book club. But lordy, he’s a really fucking entertaining overcaffeinated kid. He’s annoying, sure, but a hoot is a hoot.

Michelle Pfeiffer is unamused by your antics

Granted, the premise doesn’t exactly scream “whiz-bang entertainment.” Actually it sounds very much like the pretentious bore that everyone seemed to describe watching. Here is how IMDB describes it: “A couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence.” And here’s the thing: that description is technically accurate. And, absent a few details, it isn’t just a premise, that’s a description of the entire thing. The whole thing takes place in one house, and everything that occurs revolves around the disruption brought on by unexpected visitors (which also describes FUNNY GAMES, for that matter -- a movie which truly does deeply and persistently desire your hatred, unlike poor MOTHER! which just begs you to love it). But describing it that way really sort of misses the point; it’s like describing GODZILLA with: “Scientists observe a large aquatic animal which comes ashore in Tokyo.” Technically accurate, but the details make a big difference.

For one thing, it’s almost instantly obvious that the unnamed husband (Javier Bardem, fun fact, there’s an Alex de la Iglesia movie called DANCE WITH THE DEVIL that features Bardem, Rosie Perez, Demian Bicher James Gandolfini and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins!) represents --or maybe literally is-- God, capital G, and Jennifer Lawrence (THE BEAVER), his wife, is the title character. God’s wife, in other words, which would make her our MOTHER!. The movie is fanatically insistent on driving this point home immediately and unequivocally, and demands that the fact that you’re watching symbols! never leaves your mind for even a second of runtime thereafter (the character don’t even have personal names, just descriptions like “mother,” “man,” “herald,” “zealot,” etc).

For another thing, the “disruption” brought by the “uninvited guests” begins benignly enough (with the arrival of “Man” Ed Harris [KNIGHTRIDERS] and “Woman” Michelle Pfeiffer [GREASE 2], who have just a hint of pushy oddness to them), but, without ever leaving the home, will gradually escalate into some total fucking craziness which is as brutally immersive as any film since CHILDREN OF MEN.

Your ability to balance those two aspects of the film will probably determine your enjoyment of it. Because they are, of course, completely contradictory, right? On one hand, you have a movie whose greatest strength (in my eyes, anyway) is its wild, frenzied intensity, its ability to evoke increasingly stressful situations and drag the viewer right into the thick of it with the characters, to plunge them headfirst into its world and never relent. On the other hand... how can it do that when it’s so flagrantly artificial and insistently allegorical that its characters might as well have what they symbolize printed on them in big letters like a 19th-century political cartoon? I know your hero and mine Mr. Majestyk had this problem, ultimately finding the film’s heavy-handed symbolism too alienating to identify with the characters and their predicament in the way you’d need to to feel any real concern or tension about what happens to them. After all, they’re not characters who happen to symbolize things; they’re just symbols, and the plot is just the literal articulation of how Aronofsky thinks these symbols are related to each other, and is not interested in the slightest in ever letting you forget that you’re supposed to be learning a lesson here. So their fates are completely arbitrary and preordained; it’s more important to try to unravel their meaning than it is to relate to them, which can obviously be utterly antithetical to your ability to get invested in the ostensible story.

But of course, it’s absolutely crucial to the movie that you do get invested in the events unfolding, because they’re the best part, and because whatever valuable life lesson Aronofsky thinks he’s generously providing to us, his real calling is not as a lecturer but a master of the moving image, and he pulls out absolutely all the stops here to craft as evocative a living nightmare as I’ve ever seen put to celluloid. And if you can get past the movie’s admittedly persistent and blatant insistence that it’s about something, you’re in for a truly heady mixture of magnificent, virtuoso filmmaking and brazen, fearless nuttiness the likes of which will surely not come around our way for many a year.

To me, that’s the whole show, and the long and short of why I was able to perform the feat of enjoying MOTHER!. For whatever reason, I was able to safely compartmentalize Aronofsky’s flop-sweating parable and simply accept the experience at face value. And, seen this way, I think MOTHER! Is a real triumph, a horror movie which plays off our fears of social discomfort, personal inadequacy, and powerlessness in a chaotic world in ways which are incisive and brilliantly realized. It has a long, perfectly coiled buildup as things subtly and without clear direction begin to slide out of the control of our main character (from whose perspective the entirety of the move takes place, unless I’m greatly mistaken), and, just as it reaches a fever pitch, the movie suddenly stops, pauses and resets, and then begins the entire process over again (a structure which also mimics a key symbolic arc in the film) except at an even more frantic register. It’s expertly paced (though possibly it pauses just a hair too long in-between its two stretches of frantic escalation, losing momentum rather than simply allowing a respite), patient enough to allow the tension to imperceptibly ratchet up, but not so glacial that it feels uneventful or sparse. It’s quite eventful, actually, even before things really start unravelling.

Hey kids! It's beloved genre favorite Stephen McHattie! [Applause]

As to what it all means, I find that much less of an interesting question, which is where Aronofsky and I probably part ways. Alas, I cannot tell a lie, as much as Aronofsky seems more at home simply providing a wild cinematic thrill ride, this is, after all, a movie which steadfastly refuses to allow its symbols to ever even wander in the direction of being real characters, and so there’s no way to escape the distasteful “what does it all mean?” conversation. In fact, he’s so insistent on the message he’s trying to get across here that even though the movie basically comes right out and screams it at you**, he took the demeaning additional step of actually spelling it out, going on something of a multi-media press junket to get down in print exactly what we’re meant to take from all this. 

And it’s what must inevitably bring us back to the fact that, for all his raw talent, Aronofsky is still ultimately a doofus, a superb craftsman who, like Christopher Nolan (whose MEMENTO came the same year as REQUIEM), was praised too much too early and is now cast into the awkward position of being a celebrated genius communicator without the benefit of anything too interesting to actually communicate. An artist explaining their art, of course, is about as antithetical to enjoying it as explaining a puppy to a child by dissecting it, and that’s a fact so patently obvious that I simply assume that when an artist does it, they don’t understand their own art. MOTHER! Is very much a film which wants to convey a message, but Art, capital A, is not about conveying messages -- it’s about creating an aesthetic and emotional experience. Write an essay if you want to communicate a point. Make art if you want to explore the ephemeral, something more rewarding and elusive than anything as dreary and humdrum as a message could ever be, especially one as sophomoric and dopey as this one, which for all its sound and fury barely rises above the philosophical level of an especially baroque Jewel song.

And yet, for all that, I think Aronofsky has succeeded here in spite of himself. As The New Yorker’s Richard Brody titled his absolutely essential essay on the subject we’re discussing here: “Darren Aronofsky Says “Mother!” Is About Climate Change, But He’s Wrong.” After all, Aronofsky would hardly be the first artist to be wrong about his own work. And you’ll notice that I do call him an artist, despite everything. He may think MOTHER! Is about religion, or climate change, or even (ironically) the other obvious interpretation, the process of creating art. But it’s about those things only superficially and incidentally, and probably even to the movie’s detriment, in that they literalize things which are best left to the murky realm of the subconscious (one of the movie’s worst instincts, and the one which definitively holds it back from true greatness, is to literalize its symbols -- the “heart of the house” is an actual physical CG heart, the destruction and rejuvenation imagery is a special effects mess instead of a simple and elegant montage dissolve which would work infinitely better). At its heart, it’s not a message movie. It is, simply and sincerely, a horror movie, a movie which magnificently captures the rising fury of a panic attack as things spiral out of our control. Everyone has had this experience; everyone can see themselves as “mother!” frantically runs around her overrun house, trying to take back some sliver of control and instead finding things growing obstinately more sinister and goading. Even if we can’t get any sense of her character, the experience itself is so immediately potent that we know it, we feel it, and we can live through it as Aronofsky sadistically unspools it on-screen. That’s real. That isn’t a lecture. That’s Art, capital A. And it’s what makes Aronofsky an artist still worthy of respect and consideration, even if he doesn’t fully understand why, and even if he’s manifestly a total doofus.

Of course, your enjoyment of that bit of art is still probably contingent on how much you’ll enjoy enduring a slow burn 121 minute social-anxiety panic attack pushily masquerading as a lecture on environmentalism. Mr. Majestk dubbed the film “LARRY DAVID’S WAITING FOR GODOT 2: BRIDE OF GODOT,” and described it as a "Godot pastiche thought up by two stoners while playing The Sims,” a designation which I can in no way meaningfully dispute. But what doesn’t sound good about that, again? If you’re willing to look past the film MOTHER! Obviously thinks it is, there’s a masterpiece of absurd horror lounging around, waiting to be discovered. And that’s more than enough to earn the exclamation mark.

*As a general rule of style, I always capitalize movie titles to make them easier to spot and pick out. But the correct written version of MOTHER! Is actually all lower-case with an exclamation mark, as in “mother!”

** In short: Bardem is God, Lawrence is Mother! Earth! Harris and Pfeiffer are Adam and Eve, their beefing kids are Cain and Abel, and the “unexpected guests” who subsequently show up and cause so much chaos and ruin are human who are fucking up the Earth but flattering God enough that he won’t keep them in check. In other words, the point is that global warming is bad, says Aronofsky.

Is it "controversial" if pretty much everyone agrees they hate it?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Too classy to have a tagline
TITLE ACCURACY	Yup, that’s a mother, all right.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Nope, although honestly it might work better as a book. Do they still do movie novelizations?
SEQUEL?	No, but count me in if they ever get to MOTHERS!
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Surreal horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	The whole cast
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen McHattie! Hey, look at you there buddy, in a real movie.
NUDITY?	Pretty sure there’s at least one shot of boobs, but not in a sexy context.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Definitely an uncomfortable sexual experience where she’s resisting but then gets into it, hello 1950’s
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Doubtful
POSSESSION?	No…?
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Yes
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Not as such
VOYEURISM?	No
MORAL OF THE STORY	Never send an intellectual to do an artist’s job

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.