feedme-4

Every bit as good as the original serial (and shorter!), Judex is a masterpiece. I've had quite a few arguments over whether this was the director's best with partisans of "Eyes Without a Face"... though it's a close call. Edith Scob's performance is astonishing (more so for the early '60s) - she also appeared in Bunuel's exquisite "Milky Way", but little else.

It's too bad that Franju never had the chance to make more films - he was a real master.

Maybe TCM will book Judex on one of those late Friday cult programs. Until they do, I found a fairly good copy through Atlas Visuals.

A lost classic of Mexican cinema. Influenced by (and improving upon) "El Topo" (as if remade by Bunuel and/or David Lynch), there's a savage humour that anticipates the best of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino overlaying the traditional Clint Eastwood/spaghetti western plotting. Saw it 25 years ago in a Merida grindhouse, so the exact details are a little vague... there were lots of deformed, cackling uglies, some dwarfs (including one riding a blindman that Mel Gibson might've copped for Mad Max) and the occasional fireworks of magical realism, Telemundo has been running some of Jorge Rivero's wrestling movies with El Santo at three in the morning... with any luck, they'll pick up the El Payo series too.