The Terror of the Tongs (1961)

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Did you people see the same film I saw?

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Blistering performances.

Well, maybe not exactly "terrible", but not very good at all. It's nicely photographed, and Yvonne Monlaur--a French actress playing a Chinese girl--is hot, but those are pretty much the film's only good points. Everything else is subpar at best. Christopher Lee tries hard as the villainous leader of the murderous Red Dragon Tong, but he is sorely miscast, as is pretty much everyone else. The Chinese characters are, with a few exceptions, played by white British actors, and not played very well. The "hero", Geoffrey Toone, is stiff, dull and unconvincing and seems to be standing around waiting to be told what to do. There are a few perfunctory and poorly done fight scenes--although there's a somewhat better brawl on the docks at the end--and the script is predictable, anemic and lifeless. Many of the characters, especially Toone's Capt. Sale, act just plain stupidly--for instance, the Tong breaks into Sale's home and murders his daughter, then later sneaks into his home again and tries to murder him, but he takes no measures to protect himself (doesn't carry a gun, doesn't ask for police protection, when he hears a knock on the door he opens it without trying to see who it is first, etc.). The pace is leaden, thanks to Anthony Bushell's uninspired direction--it was his third and last film as a director, and I can see why it was his last--and the acting ranges from over-the-top ham (especially when the British actors try doing what they think are Chinese accents) to under-the-top inept.Overall, despite a few small--VERY small--pluses, it's really not worth your time.

A distasteful, violent muck of a thriller, this returns to the days of the "Dr. Fu Manchu" movies with its one dimensional vision of "Orientals" as evil murderous torturers. You can forgive the memories of the Warner Oland and Boris Karloff portrayals of Fu Manchu because they come from an era where society was unaware of the offense made by Caucasians playing other races in stereotypical fashion and with mean-spirited evil or idiotic, buffoon like characterizations. While Asians did not get slammed as much as blacks and Hispanics, when their portrayals did show up with white actors in outlandish make-up playing them, it seemed even more over the top with their characterizations turning the Asian characters into monsters, not human beings. When Peter Sellers played his various made-up characters, audiences for the most part laughed because he played it for comedy. However, in the characterization of "The Red Dragon", here played by Christopher Lee, Asians had every right to take offense, as there is nothing redeemable about his character.Garish color photography gives the disturbing portrayal of Lee's Chung King an almost devilish presence that is difficult to stomach. The attacks on Tong victims with a hatchet are garishly bloody, and even an innocent young girl is brutally murdered because of the Tong's search for secret documents that were hidden for her father (Geoffrey Toone) to find. Ironically, the messenger who also gets a horrific death scene is Burt Kwouck, best known as Peter Seller's valet in the "Pink Panther" series. I half expected him to scream in his Japanese accent, "Inspector Clouseau", but he played the role very serious even though he didn't look any different. The film is truly distasteful on almost every level, and if it is indeed classified as a "horror film", that is mainly because the true horror comes from its upsetting premise. While the Hammer horror films were usually pretty chilling, this one just ends up being a head scratcher because it utilizes themes which I had hoped disappeared with the end of the certain discriminations and the onslaught of common sense and political sensitivity to other races. As it is, I could barely make it through this without becoming completely disgusted.

Christopher Lee is good as Chung King but his performances in other films, both for Hammer and other films, are far better. In fact, this is one of my least favourite of his performances. It has some nice performances from Roger Delgado and Burt Kwouk (one of the few people in the film actually of Chinese descent and the only one with more than a few lines) but otherwise it's very dull. Marne Maitland, who was Indian, makes for the least convincing of the faux Chinese people but he's up against some pretty stiff competition. "The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films" said it best: "The Terror of the Tongs, perhaps thankfully a rarely-seen film, remains resolutely undistinguished in almost every department." It's only 73 minutes long, making it the shortest Hammer film that I've seen, but feels twice that. It's underwritten and the characters don't behave like real people. This is second only to "The Horror of Frankenstein" as my least favourite Hammer film, I'm afraid. This is the third and final film directed by Anthony Bushell, who had a solid career as an actor. I can't say that I'm surprised that his directing career never took off.

Christopher Lee stars as the leader of The Red Dragon Tong, a secretive cult/business venture in 1910 Hong Kong that specializes in crime and vice. When the tong kills the daughter of a sea captain, he vows revenge, becoming determined to take it down by any and all means possible, but the Tong isn't so easily defeated or intimidated, and begins a retaliatory campaign against him, costing many lives. Future "Doctor Who" star(as the Master) Roger Delgado costars as a ruthless Tong enforcer. Nicely filmed in color, but Christopher Lee is miscast as an Asian(!) A fine performance, but makeup is unconvincing, and film ultimately too routine and predictable to succeed.