The Castle of Fu Manchu

Dastardly Chinese super-villain Fu Manchu (Sir Christopher Lee) is at it once more. Again focused on the worlds' destruction, his plan this time is to freeze its oceans solid using some sort of "crystal". However, he needs the expertise of a professor named Heracles (Gustavo Re), whom he's holding prisoner. But the good professor is dying, and Fu also abducts a doctor (Gunther Stoll) who can pull off a heart transplant. The intrepid Home Office inspector Nayland Smith (Richard Greene), Fu's persistent nemesis, must save the day once again.

A lack of action and a not particularly interesting plot hamper this final entry in the series, which tanked both commercially and critically. Cult favourite director Jess Franco directs without much zeal; you feel that most people involved are just going through the motions by this point. That said, the movie is not without *some* pleasures, such as the gorgeous female cast members Tsai Chin (as Lin Tang, Fu's nefarious daughter), Rosalba Neri (as Lisa), and Maria Perschy (as Ingrid, the doctors' young companion). The location shooting in Spain and Istanbul definitely adds some flavour and atmosphere. Charles Camilleri composed the score for the English language version, and it's suitably rousing.

Sir Christopher (one of those performers who could entertain this viewer just by reading from the phone book) is a delight, as always. He does seem to be having some fun, which definitely helps matters.

Considered by cinephiles to be the worst in the series, it's actually not all that bad. It's just not that good. But it does deliver some amusing, schlocky entertainment in the B movie tradition.

Copious footage is cribbed from both "A Night to Remember" (the ocean liner sinking) and "Campbell's Kingdom" (the dam cracking).

Five out of 10.

Evil Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee) has devised a way of freezing vast amounts of water and plans to use it in his quest for world domination. To be honest the plot is as mad as a box of frogs but it does help make it fun. Director Jess Franco is best known for his X rated horror movies so it is a nice change to see him make a film that is rated PG and your kids can watch. As usual he appears the other side of the camera too, this time playing a police detective. Horror legend Lee plays Fu Manchu, the make-up department did an OK job of making him look Oriental, however he plays the role straight and I couldn't help but chuckle a few times, such a contrast from playing say Dracula. We are also treated to the inclusion of two beautiful actresses, Rosalba Neri and Maria Perschy, both familiar faces to fans of Euro horror and erotica. The movie's locations include Spain and Istanbul, some great scenery. I also liked Fu's dungeon and laboratory, the various colours (red, green, blue, etc) make it look really good. Fu's arch enemy Nayland Smith is back and it is laughable how easily he is able to break into and moved around fiend Manchu's castle despite being fortified by the latter's small army. The special effects include a cruise liner sinking and a dam bursting, not bad at all. The Castle of Fu Manchu is certainly no classic but I found it fun and colourful, plus I am a fan of both Lee and Franco.

Despite bad reviews and a low box-office success, this film must be considered a classic among movies. With a very low budget, it achieves what a lot of big-budget flicks never did: being interesting and funny to watch. With the acclaimed performance of Christopher Lee, his master counterpart, and some good directing, this film is a must-see.

The film that was to be the final entry in the new Fu Manchu series from international quickie film financier Harry Alan Towers made its belated theatrical appearance four years after it was made. In the USA, it played the bottom of the bill on the drive-in theater circuits. It crept into theaters sheepishly, victim of the commercial and critical thrashing given to its predecessor. The word in fan circles was that "Castle of Fu Manchu" was a new low, even worse than what had come before. It would be years before many of these same fans were able to see the film, which rapidly disappeared into obscurity until resurrected from its public domain limbo by the home video market. This film's non-performance at the world's box offices effectively killed the series: the contracted sixth Fu manchu film was never made.

On a technical level, "Castle" is a notch below even the low standards established by its predecessor. The shadows of the camera crew are visible in some scenes. Director Jess Franco's chronic zoom photography is more annoying and lazy here. Parts of the film are so technically shoddy, they barely achieve the level of the average home movie. The most professional scene in the film is a dolly shot of Maria Perschy crossing a Madrid street, and this was filmed by the second unit!

However, because its script is slightly better, this film can arguably be ranked above "Blood of Fu Manchu", although few fans would risk their credibility defending either film. At least "Castle" is concerned with Fu Manchu's current plot to conquer the world and does not pad out its running time with irrelevant subplots. What it does use for padding is stock footage. For its opening sequence, "Castle" lifts the entire climax of "Brides of Fu Manchu" and, incredibly, extends this sequence with footage of the Titanic from the 1958 film "A Night to Remember"! Using stock footage to supplement stock footage is either brashly clever or establishes a new standard of cheapness.

Perhaps the ultimate snub to the film came from the producer himself, who kept his wife Maria Rohm out of the cast.

It boggles the mind that anyone could possibly defend this movie as some sort of lost classic or claim that people only say it's bad because it was on "Mystery Science Theater". When *two* lengthy scenes in a movie consist largely of footage borrowed from better movies, and when both of those scenes could be removed without anyone noticing the break, you know that the director's aim was to exert himself as little as possible to get the required length of film in the can. Anyone here with a burning zeal to uphold the reputation of THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU against its boorish detractors is almost certainly exerting more effort on the movie's behalf than Jess Franco ever did.

Nevertheless, the film is not among the all-time worst. Roger Ebert is correct when he says, "There's probably a level of competence beneath which bad directors cannot fall....they've got to come up with something that can at least be advertised as a motion picture, released and forgotten." It can be safely conjectured that this was just what Jess Franco wanted. The dialogue is passable, the acting (what little is needed) is serviceable, and occasionally the editing actually drums up something like tension.

So if no one aspect of THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU is really *that* bad, why is watching the whole film such a chore? A bad movie can be difficult to watch, but an *aggressively* mediocre one can be worse. When Roger Corman cranked out his listless, paint-by-numbers adventures and fantasy movies, at least he had the excuses of working with zero budget, a cast of third-stringers, and shooting schedules permitting him maybe a week's use of a sound stage. I'm guessing that Franco's budget was scarcely greater, but he had a decent cast and enough freedom for location shooting in more than one country. Yet he produced a movie as uninspired and perfunctory as Corman did at his worst. What was Franco thinking?

The plot seems almost to go out of its way to abandon consistency. Fu Manchu kidnaps Prof. Heracles and then his doctor because he needs help to make the magic freezing crystals in quantity (crystals, by the way, which also perform the totally unrelated duty of a knockout gas), but then even though we see Heracles at the end refuse to help Fu Manchu, his refusal doesn't even slow Fu Manchu down, who initiates his freezing plan without apparent need for Heracles's assistance. We *had* seen Fu Manchu demanding a ransom earlier one (without bothering to name terms) but any idea of actually collecting on the ransom never comes up. Fortunately for the world Nayland-Smith shows up to foil his plot to freeze the ocean, although Franco can't be bothered to show us how he foils it. We see him beating up some flunkies and trying to contact London by radio, then suddenly there's a loud report and soon Fu Manchu is watching helplessly as everything blows up around him. I'm used to villain's fortresses improbably blowing up because the hero fires one well-placed shot or smashes one control panel, but THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU gives us the only case of a villain's fortress exploding merely because the hero makes a long-distance phone call.

It's not as though Franco didn't have enough screen time to fill these plot holes. It's just that he decided to fill that time with lengthy establishing shots, walking, and creeping around dark corridors and tunnels. He also directs his actors to speak as slowly as possible and pause whenever possible. They have excuses, I suppose. Fu Manchu is "inscrutable", being an offensive Oriental stereotype, and Omar Pasha is probably stoned out of his mind on opium half the time. The police chief in Istanbul simply doesn't care and spends a good deal of his screen time sulking and telling people not to bother him. And why should he bother doing his job? He's played by Jess Franco, after all.

With so little actually happening in THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU, we have to be content with watching the scenery. There are some beautiful background shots in the film, to be sure. Mostly, though, Franco traps us in Fu Manchu's lair. The quarter-hours slip by as the "action" takes us from one room or chamber to another and another, none of them very well lit, while Christopher Lee sits and looks smug, or stands up and looks smug, or even speaks while looking smug. Eventually a lot of people die and Fu Manchu disappears into the billowing fake smoke. Dry ice, Rosco fog, and blood, indeed.