The Bloody Judge
Circus of Fear
The Blood of Fu Manchu
The Castle of Fu Manchu
The Blue Underground Christopher Lee Collection

By 1970 the Jess Franco/Harry Alan Towers collaboration was well established, and relaxed censorship was conducive to the marketing of their sexy horror films and perverse art pictures. This costume picture (again, not a horror film per se) is lavish and cheap at the same time, with okay costumes and locations betrayed by cutprice direction and a script tailored for speed and economy. Savagely cut in almost all markets (it was cut radically for the US, and meaninglessly retitled Night of the Blood Monster), the complete version presented here is a ponderous film heavily weighted in favor of exploitative and incompetent nude scenes that make Hammer films' concurrent adult efforts look tasteful by comparison.

One of the first rip-offs of the admirable Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General, this replay of similar historical events a couple of generations later dispenses with any logic for Judge Jeffreys' cruelty beyond patriotic malice. Christopher Lee is given little screen time to do anything but threaten other cast members and blackmail Maria Rohm into his bed. As the money goes to the crown, he has no profit motive, and nobody but the executioner (a successfully creepy Howard Vernon) seems to worry about the issue of witchcraft. The power-mad Jeffreys is not even a sadist; he never witnesses the tortures he mandates.

Actually, neither do we. There's talk of drawing and quartering, but we all we see is one woman burned and one hanging victim hacked at with an axe while choking. The rest of the edgy material is sleazy torture chamber material with lots of fake blood and sadistic guards carving up chained nude women. Some females retain strategically-placed rags while being drawn (so much for Franco's disregard for hypocritical screen standards) while the nuder scenes are laughable in their salacious dullness. Only morbid interest keeps us watching, because the scenes are neither convincing, scary or even very unpleasant. The moment pointed out by liner notes writer Tim Lucas as 'incredible, transgressive erotica' is a bafflingly inane scene where Maria Rohm licks the blood from the body of a hanging female corpse. The display is so pitiful, it isn't even pornographic. It is beautifully scored by Bruno Nicolai, however.

Even less understandable is the championing of Jess Franco's direction, which is only slightly better than his sloppy work on the Fu Manchu series. The liner notes make the laughable assertion that the battle scene herein proves that Franco was clearly the auteur behind the much-applauded knight's battle in Campanandas a medianoche (Chimes at Midnight), the great Orson Welles film on which Franco assisted. The generic and lackadaisical fight in the woods here looks like random coverage. We have no idea who is fighting who or which side our rebel heroes are on. If the color, costumes and location weren't such a good match, we might think it was stock footage from another show. Franco may very well have done the excellent, unique battle scene in the Welles film, but I doubt it, and wouldn't trust Franco's word on the matter. The Bloody Judge would be the last film to suggest a connection.

Although not bad on some levels, The Bloody Judge is still an achingly grim exercise. The English dub job is poor, with lame exposition often injected where it isn't needed. There's little sense of pace, as the film just comes on with arrests and escapes without build-up or context. Witchfinder General plays like a classic by contrast. The German and Spanish minor players (including Diana Lorys from Franco's initial Gritos en la noche carry the story, while Chris Lee and Leo Genn sit in rooms and dispense exposition. Even more scandalous are the few minutes of the wonderful actress Maria Schell, shoehorned in to play a cave-dwelling blind seer. Again, she's irrelevant to the story. Towers is clearly a charming producer; actors like Genn and Schell returned to work with him more than once.

Blue Underground's reconstruction of The Bloody Judge is a triumph of genre husbandry. Besides being cut into different versions for different markets, just finding original materials must have been a chore. This version is touted as the most complete and uncensored ever released, and contains the 'transgressive' material obviously never shown here - some American reviewers actually complained about the lack of nudity and the obvious cuts.

The 'scope picture is anamorphically enhanced and looks gorgeous, showcasing cameraman Manuel Merino's good color lighting of the reasonable sets. Especially good is the musical score by Bruno Nicolai, a definite high point of the picture.

The docu Bloody Jess interviews Franco and Lee. Lee is clearly more proud of this performance, because he liked the character, I suppose. Tim Lucas' liner notes are excellent in pulling up facts about the real Judge Jeffreys. He mentions three different endings, two of which are incorporated into the good windup seen here. The extras also contain some deleted and alternate scenes, mostly clothed versions of nude material.

Horror fans take note: although I don't think much of these pictures in the standard sense, I'm certainly as curious about them as anyone. Jess Franco adepts will be in seventh heaven at the quality, which will appeal heartily to genre fans looking for movies usually seen in garbage video copies, and remembered from their original releases as emasculated butcher jobs. Blue Underground's presentations, from menu design to new docu material, are exceptionally good. Their dedication to their chosen niche makes us earnestly hope that they do well and continue with many more restorations of neglected and misplaced genre attractions.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Blood of Fu Manchu rates:
Movie: Fair
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: docu, trailers, art and still galleries