Although Christopher Lee appears in every film, this collection should really be called the Harry Alan Towers collection. Towers (who just died in July at the age of 88) was a prolific low budget English producer who was responsible for all of these films and, unlike Roger Corman, was rarely able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The major difference between Corman and Towers is that Towers fancied himself a writer and wrote the scripts for most of his movies under the pen name of Peter Welbeck. In the end it didn’t matter as most of his movies turned a tidy profit.
Towers would sell a film based on a star performer (in this case Christopher Lee) and then shoot it in exotic locales for as little money as possible. Most of the films featured his wife, Austrian actress Maria Rohm and were directed by Spanish director Jesus (Jess) Franco. Action/horror films have traditionally had sexist elements but the amount of nudity/torture/porn in Towers’ movies are excessive considering when they were made (the late 1960s) and border on undisguised misogyny. One could argue that they opened the door to the torture porn movies of today. They also represent the shift in European horror films from the fanciful to the literal.
Three of the four films included here (the two FU MANCHUS and THE BLOODY JUDGE) were directed by Jess Franco. They make excellent use of their outdoor locales and are less successful when they move indoors. It’s not a question of cheap sets so much as what Franco does with them which isn’t much (BLOODY JUDGE is the exception). The films are competently shot and edited and the international casts (all dubbed into English with varying degrees of success) wander through with various degrees of conviction. The women, in ongoing states of undress, are often abused in myriad ways for no other reason (it seems) than to show us their attributes and to watch them scream in pain.
I’m a big fan of Christopher Lee’s but these films have little to offer and reminded me of just how far the FU MANCHU series had sunk and how unlike WITCHFINDER GENERAL most of its successors were. The best of the lot is CIRCUS OF FEAR which was directed by John Moxey (HORROR HOTEL/CITY OF THE DEAD, THE NIGHT STALKER). It’s actually a whodunit with Lee in a small but pivotal role. In fact none of these movies are horror films as they don’t generate fear but rather indifference (with the exception of CIRCUS). The transfers are first class (typical of Blue Undergound) and there are interviews and commentary aplenty but for me it wasn’t enough to justify the enterprise.
The Capsule Critic 