Jess Franco’s The Bloody Judge, which was theatrically released in the U.S. by Aip under the nonsensical title of Night of the Blood Monster, is one of the filmmaker’s most lavish productions. It’s one that, absent the outrageous lashings of sadistic violence and nudity that are common to Franco’s work, could almost pass for mainstream cinema.
As a helpful voiceover informs the viewer while the opening credits roll, The Bloody Judge is set in 1684, during the last days of King James II, on the eve of the Glorious Revolution that put William and Mary on the throne. Allegiance to the current king is paramount to the storyline, providing the motivation behind the increasingly sadistic actions of Judge Jeffries (Christopher Lee). Like Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General, from 1968, Franco’s film pits its youthful protagonists against the hypocrisy and intolerance of an authoritarian regime.
This is...
As a helpful voiceover informs the viewer while the opening credits roll, The Bloody Judge is set in 1684, during the last days of King James II, on the eve of the Glorious Revolution that put William and Mary on the throne. Allegiance to the current king is paramount to the storyline, providing the motivation behind the increasingly sadistic actions of Judge Jeffries (Christopher Lee). Like Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General, from 1968, Franco’s film pits its youthful protagonists against the hypocrisy and intolerance of an authoritarian regime.
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- 4/9/2024
- by Budd Wilkins
- Slant Magazine
“There’s so much to see and do in Arous,” read the brochure for a Sudanese vacation spot where visitors could go scuba diving amid reefs “made famous by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Hans Hass.” Never mind that Sudan was in a state of civil war and no place for tourists in the early 1980s. European tourists came anyway, oblivious to the fact that the exotic getaway — rechristened “The Red Sea Diving Resort” for the Netflix film of the same name — was a front for a Mossad-run rescue mission: Israeli agents used Arous to smuggle Ethiopian Jews out of refugee camps to the coast, where offshore boats could ferry them to Jerusalem.
The true story of this operation is so wild you couldn’t make it up — the kind of recently declassified real-life operation that savvy producers could conceivably pitch as a cross between Ben Affleck’s “Argo” and Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.
The true story of this operation is so wild you couldn’t make it up — the kind of recently declassified real-life operation that savvy producers could conceivably pitch as a cross between Ben Affleck’s “Argo” and Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.
- 7/29/2019
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
World Without Sun, Jacques Cousteau’s classic portrait of life in a submarine lab with half a dozen paperback-reading, chain-smoking Frenchmen, ends with a scene in which Cousteau’s saucer-shaped submersible briefly surfaces in an air pocket in an undersea cavern. It’s a strange and inspiring coda, but also blatantly staged (though so is almost everything in World Without Sun) and could never pass muster in our age of interchangeable educational nature documentaries. But lest one think that Cousteau’s light-on-facts approach was easier (“As soon as you are specific, the poetry disappears,” he said at that film’s premiere), there are bad imitations to prove otherwise. If nothing else, Jean-Christophe Jeauffre’s insipid Passage To Mars instills a greater appreciation for the classic movies that clearly inspired it.
Admittedly, Cousteau and other nature documentary pioneers like Jean Painlevé and Hans Hass had it a little easier, because they...
Admittedly, Cousteau and other nature documentary pioneers like Jean Painlevé and Hans Hass had it a little easier, because they...
- 9/29/2016
- by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- avclub.com
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