(1970)
Overall: MEH
So many witch-burning films. Jesús Franco sensationalized re-telling of the later days of Judge George Jeffreys in The Bloody Judge, (Proceso de las Brujas), could afford to be a little more sensational. For starters, it contains probably the least exciting battle sequence ever filmed, mostly because it plays more like stock footage with just an endless see of horses, canons, and soldiers that have no names doing the whole war thing over dramatic marching music. That is just one relatively minor and somewhat amusing blunder though. Christopher Lee is very Christopher Leey as the stereotypical, ruthless Judge who coldly condemns every accused witch he comes across, of course has his own hypocritically lustful intentions, and gets his comeuppance at the end. Though his preordained demise is anything but satisfying as he just kind of randomly faints to death after witnessing someone else get what is heading his way. Even Franco's nearly mandated nudity/violence quota is also noticeably diminished. The only really surprising element to the sub-genre here is that he forgoes abundant scenes of eye-wincing, dungeon-set torture. We get a few of those, but really, (for a Franco film in particular), it is "disappointing" to instead spend extensive amounts of screen time talking politics, alliances, betrayals, and watching villainous brutes calling women "whores", "bitches", "wenches" and then smacking them around.
(1970)
Overall: MEH
On paper, this Dracula adaptation from Jesús Franco should work better than it does. It has both Christopher Lee once again in the lead that he had already long made famous for Hammer Studios AND has Klaus Kinski ideally cast as Renfield a mere nine years before he would play the Count himself in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu remake. Though the concept of vampires, a Gothic setting, and sexual overtones all seem ideal for such a filmmaker to take on, the results in Count Dracula are far from satisfying. First off, Kinski is absolutely wasted as the would-be ranting and raving lunatic Renfield. He instead spends all of his handful of scenes staring off into space and only utters a single word of dialog. For his part, Lee gets to indulge in a rather faithful to the novel speech proclaiming his zealous, ancestral pride, but otherwise he is comparably dull when compared to even his phoned-in, later Hammer Dracula sequel performances. He is off camera for large chunks of time and when he does show up, he pretty much just stares menacingly for a few seconds. If you were expecting nudity at every opportunity, there is absolutely zero to be found. Do not worry though, there is gallons of zooms, not even trying day for night sequences, and plenty of "people walking around" scenes. The screenplay was credited to no fewer than seven people and it certainly reeks of having too many cooks in the kitchen. Once the first relatively straight forward act is over, the movie waddles off at a snails pace and seems to lose all focus by the finale, the last twenty minutes or so coming off as if they were shooting it chronologically and were running out of film stock and money.
(1975)
Overall: WOOF
There are pointless, meandering, and suffocatingly boring vampire films and then there is The Bare Breasted Countess, (Female Vampire, various others). Three different versions under even more titles exist, (a "normal" horror one, a softcore erotic one, and a still soft yet more genitalia revealing pornographic one), but you would be very hard pressed to find any of them comprehensible let alone entertaining. Franco's indulgences of combining the absolute bare, (har, har), minimum storytelling with tedious, uninteresting shots of people moving as slow as humanly possible through random terrains finds its apex here. Other directors such as Jean Rollin come to mind in utilizing similar ingredients to their bizarre, seductive works, but Franco's images are so vapid that combined with the almost unwatchable pacing, the film is a mindless headache. Lead actress/Fraco's eventual wife Lina Romay plays a mute whose only actions are to look into the camera, nod her head a few times, and thrust her body on anyone and anything that she comes in contact with. Meanwhile there is a sort-of subplot with some doctors and inspectors not-really-at-all investigating her murders and Jack Taylor narrates a bunch of nonsense that until about halfway through the film leads us to believe that his scenes were taken from a completely different movie. Franco seems to be intentionally dreaming up something artistically important here as he compared the film to Nagisa Oshima's far superior In the Realm of the Senses, but sadly this is just an amateurish mess that cannot honestly be enjoyed on any level.
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