User Reviews

The Bloody Judge is set in England during the year 1685 under the rule of King James II, loyal James supporter Judge George Jeffreys (Christopher Lee) is the Lord Chancellor & is feared for his harsh sentences or torture & execution. Judge Jeffreys sentences Alicia Gray (Maragret Lee) to death for Witchcraft, Jeffreys then speaks with Lord Wessex (Leo Genn) & discovers that his son Harry Selton (Hans Hass Jr.) has been having an affair with Alicia's sister Mary (Maria Rohm) & is known to be in contact with rebels. Mary & Harry help the upcoming invasion by Monmouth in hope of overthrowing King James II & William of Orange taking his place, Jeffreys suspects that Harry is a traitor & fears for his own position if King James was ever defeated but Jeffreys falls for Mary. As the fighting across England intensifies & the rebels gain in strength & number & start winning Jeffreys orders the execution of 500 known traitors in a sign of defiance including Harry & Mary...

This Liechtenstein, Spanish, German & Italian co-production was directed by the prolific exploitation & sleaze merchant Jess Franco, now I have never hid the fact that I think Jess Franco is one of the two worst director's ever along with Jim Wynorski but with a resume totaling two hundred odd films even Franco was going to make one or two good ones & The Bloody Judge is definitely one of his best films. Obviously made to cash-in on the success of Witchfinder General (1968) the central figure here is Judge George Jeffreys who was a real person, he was apparently nicknamed 'The Hanging Judge' & was widely know for the cruelty of his sentences. Even if the central character is somewhat historically accurate the film itself isn't which is unsurprising given that Franco is a talentless hack (I just love insulting the guy, sorry). For instance the Monmouth rebellion actually failed & I seriously doubt he fell in love with a young girl. Anyway, The Bloody Judge is a real mixed bag of genres with large doses of costume drama, historic epic, biography, horror, sleaze, sex & war film with none particularly gelling together that well. The torture scenes look out of place between the rather dull historical dramatics & none of the character's come across that well, for instance Judge Jeffreys is fairly one dimensional as the script never tries to dig into his psyche or flesh him out as a person. Why was he the way he was? Was he just a sadistic & cruel man who hid behind the law to satisfy his brutal fantasies & desires? Did he genuinely believe that what he was doing was right? The script never even tries to answer this. Lasting for about 100 minutes & although perfectly watchable the majority of The Bloody Judge is quite dull, sure there are occasional scenes of torture, nudity & execution to spice things up a bit but The Bloody Judge is largely a fairly slow moving historic period drama with blackmail, betrayal, treason, rebellions, secret love affairs, corruption & abuse of power & lots of people riding around on horseback.

Released under a plethora of titles including Night of the Blood Monster, Throne of the Blood Monster, Trial of the Witches, Witch Killer of Broadmoor & Witches' Trial among other's. As well as various different titles there are a couple of different versions floating around, go for the US release which is a composite uncut version featuring some scenes in German only rather than the softer & shorter UK release. Although there's a fair amount of torture & sleaze The Bloody Judge isn't that explicit, women are chained up & lashed, branded & stabbed, hands are cut off & tongues ripped out while Rohm is forced to lick the blood of another female prisoners legs & body. There's also a very awkward scene in which Jeffreys gropes the naked Rohm but we never see Christopher Lee's face, only a pair of anonymous hands. Apparently Lee never knew about the harder stuff that Franco shot & wasn't involved in it. There's a bit of sex & nudity as well but not that much.

Filmed in Europe this looks surprisingly good, Franco must have actually had a budget on this. The sets & real period locations look very nice & give the film an authentic look. There are a couple of decent battle scenes involving lots of extra's on horseback & firing cannons, The Bloody Judge is maybe Franco's best looking & most lavish film complete with an orchestral score & colourful photography although he directs things in a rather dull & plodding fashion with plenty of static camera zooms & the like. The acting is quite good, Christopher Lee is great in a role he clearly liked & his booming voice & presence add a great deal of authority to the role.

The Bloody Judge is easily one of Franco's better films, it's quite well made, it's nice to look at with decent amounts of violence, torture, sleaze & sex with an actual attempt to tell a compelling story even if it does plod on at a sedate pace. Not bad at all to be fair, not as good as the other Witchfinder General cash-in Mark of the Devil (1970) but still pretty good all the same.

...Spoilers here

I generally like anything Christopher Lee is in (as a main character and mostly as a supporter actor) but this movie is just a mess.

The movie gets confused about what it is supposed to be: historical re- telling of the "Hanging Judge," a horror film, a romantic story, or a porno?

All those elements are present in this film, and despite best attempts, the film cannot weave it all together.

Lee plays the Hanging Judge, known as Judge George Jeffreys. Jeffreys, by historical account was a severe issuer of justice in the wake of Monmouth's rebellion and up until the Glorious Revolution. His portrayal as the stern, lustful judge is well-done but the rest of the film is just mixed up.

While I always appreciate a nice nude scene, there were some in this film that were just there to keep the audience interested. Some of the torture scenes are heavily erotic in terms of the BDSM aspect. Including a scene where the main female character licks the body of a chained and tortured (and nude) woman. It is a rather long scene and really makes no sense...The jailers had been ordered to bring this woman to the judge, but instead they strip her down and she voluntarily decides to give another woman a tongue-bath while they eagerly watch. It was a bad porno intro scene if you ask me.

Anyway...there is some history here...Monmouth's Rebellion and the politics of the Glorious Revolution play a role, but not enough of one to make this an interesting film.

The horror aspect is really not there...the torture scenes are not horrifying; scantily clad beauties being randomly tortured isn't enough to classify this as a horror film.

The love story is odd as well...highly unlikely that a nobleborn man would fall in love with a 'wench' from the town. And that story is interspersed with everything else, not giving it enough room to grow, even if it were plausible.

You can probably go without seeing this movie...also the version I saw had a couple of sections where the dialogue went German with English subtitles. This occurred at the especially graphic sex and sex/torture scenes leading me to believe that the original of this movie had those edited out to avoid a XXX rating or a ban by some nations.

Just odd.

Judge Jeffreys (Christopher Lee) lives up to his title, sending women and men to the dungeons as witches and traitors. And worse, he also sends them to their deaths. Based on George Jeffreys, the first Baron Jeffreys, he was known as "the hanging judge" thanks to the rough handling of his cases, including a series of trials in the West Country in 1865, in which he judged between 160 and 700 men and women of treason against the crown.

During the Glorious Revolution, when King James II fled the country, Jeffreys stayed in London until the last moment as the only legal authority in the abandoned kingdom to perform political duties. When William III's troops took London, Jeffreys tried to flee and follow the King abroad but was recognized by one of the survivors of his trials. A mob tried to murder him and he begged for mercy. He died in the Tower of London from kidney disease.

You don't need to know history to know this: this is Jess Franco's Witchfinder General and you're about to see him go a little wild when it comes to the torture, but nowhere near the madness of Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun or The Demons.

After an innocent young girl named Alicia Gray (Margaret Lee, Our Agent Tiger, Circus of Fear, Venus In Furs) is tortured on the rack and burnt at the stake, despite the efforts of her sister Mary (Maria Rohm, The House of 1,000 Dolls, 99 Women). She falls for a young rebel, but going up against the power of a man given unlimited power by the crown of England isn't as easy as it sounds. Actually, it doesn't sound easy at all.

Howard Vernon shows up as a henchman and an uncredited Diana Loyrs is here too. Perhaps my favorite thing about this movie was that Lee still protested that he didn't know it would have so much sex and violence in it up until it was released on DVD, which is hilarious, because this was not his first or last time working with Franco.

While I can understand the comparison to "The Witchfinder General", the two films are similar in theme, if not execution. Poor choice of words considering that it deals with the execution of alleged witches for various reasons, some political, others out of jealousy, but that is like comparing "Haunted Summer" to a similar film about Mary Shelley and her literary pals in "Gothic". Both are equally good and enjoyable as historical records of the power that judges and their executioners had and their abuse of it. The blood does flow, and with the gorgeous color in the film, is very vivid, something very noticeable in the uniforms of the uppercrust while the colors of the poor man's clothing is extremely drab.

Christopher Lee is Judge Jeffries, unofficial who truly believed that he was doing what God had ordained him to, and that really shows the sickness of such power during these ages. The opening has a suspected witch being majorly tortured before she is given an automatic death sentence, and the torturer basically uses her own blood to claim that it came out of a dead man near her, a sign that they believed that someone was actually a witch. Further torture scenes our eyes are in real time or in nightmares, and they are definitely quite shocking.

I viewed this, not having seen "Witchfinder General" in several years, and was both horrified and engrossed by how it exposed the noble so-called good Christians for the hypocrites they were. The view of the tortures and rapes show how horribly women were treated, even simply for turning a man's affections down, while the Good Men really risked everything and paid with their lives for standing up for what was right. there are a few erotic scenes (one between two women) put into the film that seems somewhere out of place, but that's minor with the film overall. Lee as always gives the best of show, even if his character is absolutely rotten. As he prays for God's mercy on their soul, you have to wonder if the person he is condemning is actually praying for his soul which seems more fitting.

Finally, I've found some time to post my thoughts on this film. I had already discussed it briefly with Francesco via e-mail (in Italian) but this thread has been quite revealing for me as well.

Well, to begin with, I did not find the film to be as bad as many have claimed (and I see that Francesco hasn't changed his mind in this regard); dull and uninvolving it may be, but it is also intermittently enjoyable (particularly Christopher Lee and Leo Genn's numerous confrontation scenes) for what it is. Even when considering the very few Jess Franco movies I've managed to watch in this one year, I wouldn't classify THE BLOODY JUDGE (1970) among his best work; moreover, it never quite approaches (let alone reach) the cinematic quality of Michael Reeves' far more psychologically compelling WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968): witness the two films' very different conclusions – in Franco's film, the villain is justly 'punished' for his crimes while the two lovers emerge unscathed and the 'revolutionaries' triumphant, a pretty bland 'happy ending' if you ask me; WITCHFINDER GENERAL still has one of the bleakest wrap-ups to a film I've ever seen (spoilers ahead, I'm afraid!): Ian Ogilvy, driven over-the-edge by the social and personal injustices he has witnessed (including the unrepentant deflowering of his girl, Hilary Dwyer, by the dastardly Vincent Price), savagely hacking the latter to pieces with an axe while the former, tied up in a castle dungeon, looks on horrified (as much for what is happening before her as the awful realization that the couple's 'pure' love has been inevitably and permanently scarred by the experience) and screaming her lungs out – on which the scene freezes! Quite a difference, no?

To get back to THE BLOODY JUDGE, I think that Christopher Lee's uncommitted performance (he may have been interested in the project initially but, no doubt, his enthusiasm dissipated considerably when he realized that no serious attempt at authenticity would be made). Besides, because Lee's character is so rigid (a motif visually counterpointed by his hardly ever emerging outdoors, thus appearing constantly cramped as much by his surroundings as by his own physical condition, the very Word of the Law he exercises and the implacable religious fervor prevalent at the time), his role is nowhere near as iconic as Vincent Price's had been, no matter what the DVD's liner and sleeve notes claim!

The film's saving graces basically lie in Manuel Merino's lush cinematography (economically, the production was mostly shot on real locations) and Bruno Nicolai's sprawling yet melancholic score. However, I feel that Franco the auteur was not really inspired by the material at hand, resulting in an almost completely impersonal direction: in fact, it only comes alive inside the creepy-looking Howard Vernon's dungeon/torture chamber (where Margaret Lee's ordeal is particularly striking, eliciting another fine if all-too-brief performance from an underrated Euro-Cult actress of the 1960s) but, then, the sudden change in style and emphasis is extremely jarring, as if these scenes had strayed from a totally different picture! The nudity (especially the entirely gratuitous romantic-interlude-in-the-hay between Maria Rohm and Hans Hass Jr.), even if not explicit, was quite unnecessary here: even the notorious 'forced lesbian sequence', though exquisitely filmed, doesn't really belong here. Regarding the latter, I tend to share Glenn Erickson's viewpoint as expressed in his 'DVD Savant' review of the film:

'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.'

The way I see it, Rohm performed this dubious and quite irrelevant act of her own free will or, perhaps more accurately, in spite of herself – that is, driven to such an extremity of degrading behavior by the sheer physical and psychological torture she has gone through in Vernon's custody. But, then, this scene is immediately followed by the one in which she is seduced by Judge Jeffreys himself, and where she apparently regains enough of her senses to want to kill him! Which brings me to this part of one of Francesco's earlier posts in this same thread:

'As usual I'm in absolute minority in valuing THE BLOODY JUDGE as the worst of the three bad Franco films of the CHRISTOPHER LEE COLLECTION. But in order to explain on the basis of what criteria and valuation-scales I rate this film even lower than the Fu Manchus, I want to make one only example: the scene in which Mary attempts to stab Jeffreys. He's turning his back to Mary; she grasps the dagger and runs towards the Judge, who doesn't realize what's happening; then she lifts up her arm and finally ..... finally does she stab him? no, instead of stabbing him, she stops her arm and cries!!! obviously the man turns round and disarms her, putting at end one of the most embarrassing Franco's sequences ever; even worse than SADOMANIA's stuffed crocodile, IMO.'

Well, in Franco's defence, I'm sure that having Mary Gray hesitate and cry out at such a crucial moment could only be a sign of her essentially virtuous character; she OUGHT to find the act of murder repellent, no matter what Jeffreys did to her, and that is exactly why I feel the preceding 'erotic interlude' to be so uncharacteristic! Still, Francesco, I can think of any number of far more embarrassing moments in either of Franco's Fu Manchu films…

[P.S. By the way, I've just watched the trailers for Blue Underground's upcoming DVD editions of Franco's THE GIRL FROM RIO (1969) and SADOMANIA (1981), and I must say that I'm less than intrigued by them – especially when considering that, for some reason, they seem to have a higher price-tag than the standard BU fare! It WOULD be nice to collect all of BU's Franco titles – including the disappointing MARQUIS DE SADE'S JUSTINE (1968), which I did watch (or rather Anchor Bay UK's R2 equivalent) though only as a rental – but, at least, in the case of the two awful Fu Manchu films I had an excuse to buy them (that excuse, of course, being THE BLOODY JUDGE itself…even if the remaining title in 'The Christopher Lee Collection', CIRCUS OF FEAR {1966}, is actually superior)!]

I refer to other quotes from online reviews I have read of this DVD: Glenn Erickson once again hits the nail on the head (sorry, Tim) with the following stance:

'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.'

Having only recently viewed Welles' Shakespearean masterwork for the first time myself, I was immediately struck by the realism of the battle sequence, its rough-and-ready quality as much the result of a limited budget as Welles' own penchant for skimping over the 'details'. Still, I could detect little if any similarity to what Franco shot for the later film; it's one thing to provide a hastily-assembled skirmish (viewed from both sides) but another thing entirely to do so in style, and the equivalent scenes in THE BLOODY JUDGE struck me as very ordinary indeed!

And this from the 'Monsters At Play' review, penned by Carl Lyon: 'This group, which include a guy named Satchel(?) and one of the creepiest executioners ever, even have a calligraphic letter 'J' emblazoned on their chest like demented superheroes.'

This anachronistic flourish is perhaps an amusing reference to the many vaguely cartoonish spy-spoofs Franco made during this same era (including the two Fu Manchus), thus linking the rogues-in-high-places of yesteryear – flanked by their amoral henchmen who seem to have crawled from under stones – to the power-mad villains of modern times and their endless parade of 'faceless' subordinates.

My rambling thoughts on this film lead me now to examine some of its more noticeable deficiencies:

· first of all, the double irony of the ending as it stands now – Jeffreys awaiting to be executed but dying instead of a heart attack – was probably unintentional, but the fact that three separate endings were shot and used for different versions (which is not the same as having a more explicit take of a given scene) speaks volumes about the film's essential lack of focus, resulting in audience frustration and subsequent detachment

· none of the characters is very interesting and the two that are – Lee and Genn – are poorly developed; Maria Schell's grave-sounding blind woman is an unfortunate miscalculation, in my opinion, especially as she doesn't add that much to the proceedings (why is there such a VITAL need, then, for the young lovers' union to be blessed by her, rendering their capture by Jeffreys' men all-too-convenient)!

· the incessant mumbling of peasant-folk at Jeffreys' trials is positively irritating!

Finally, we come to the DVD itself: picture and sound quality are of the standard we have come to expect from Blue Underground. The extras are a well of information (and entertainment): the controversial featurette is a very well done piece, perhaps the best one yet on a Franco/Blue Underground DVD.

In all fairness, Christopher Lee did not deserve the backlash that he received for his comments: first of all, he admits that he doesn't like the 'modern' trend in horror films and, therefore, he is right in claiming that he has not made one for a long time; as for his 'disgust' at the exploitative content of the film itself as well as Franco's subsequent work, he is only offering his personal opinion and, so, none of us should take offence! What IS rather hard to believe, however, is that he did not know such scenes were in the script to begin with: it's true he isn't in any of the footage concerned (at least physically), but really the script is so filled with this execrable material that I doubt they were added later – unless he only read his lines when given the script, or else he accepted the part without reading it at all, which then means that he got all that he deserved!

It's a pity that the lengthy deleted scene could not be reinstated into the film (probably due to its ragged state) as it certainly smooths the passage from Rohm's grief over her sister's death to her blooming romance with Hass, which is now rather too precipitous. The rest of the supplements – alternate footage, trailer, poster/stills gallery, talent bios – are rather nice to have, too.