The Castle of Fu Manchu (1972)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

A Masterpiece!

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

After the roundly derided 'Blood of Fu Manchu', director Jess Franco once again tackles Sax Rohmer's indomitable moustache twirling super villain. Richard Greene 'guest stars' as sleuth Nayland Smith, and Howard Marion Crawford, in his last performance, plays second hand man, silly old Professor Petrie.As Fu, Christopher Lee is exactly as you would expect – clipped, precise and cool. Under impressive oriental make-up, he conveys moments of anger, complacency and effective degrees of evil. His relationship with far more interesting daughter Lin Tang (Tsai Chin) is slightly more focused than previously, but the most interesting character here is Lisa (Rosalba Meri), 1971's 'Lady Frankenstein'. Lisa is a duplicitous and beautiful creation, often dressed in a suit ("She fights like a man") – and yet, like everyone else here, she is fearfully underwritten and little more than a cypher.Added to that, much of the stock footage that provides the more spectacular moments is generously scooped from other productions, notably a dam-busting scene from 'Campbell's Kingdom' from twelve years earlier.Despite a strong start, this soon dissolves into the kind of muddled plotting that blighted 'Blood…' previously. Although I actually found this slightly more entertaining than that previous film, it is still difficult to maintain interest in events when both storyline and characters are so sketchy.A further entry into the Fu Manchu series was contracted, but due to the drubbing 'Castle…' received both critically and commercially, Fu's promise that 'the world will hear from me again' remains unfulfilled. With a fairly generous budget (most likely due to the further involvement of Harry Alan Towers) and a good cast, it seems to me that Franco just wasn't interested in telling a story about Fu Manchu – and subsequently, the audience felt the same way about paying to watch it.

I've never been a fan of the Fu Manchu franchise both with the original books and with the various films that have been made from the books, namely because they smack of racism (the so-called "yellow peril", to be exact.) So I had some prejudice when I sat down to watch "The Castle of Fu Manchu". After watching it, I'm pretty sure that even fans of Fu Manchu would consider this film to be the pits. It's not only notorious schlock producer Harry Alan Towers at his worse, he got the notorious Jesús Franco to direct, a director who didn't make many good (or even merely okay) movies during his prolific career. There are many things wrong with the end results. It's really cheap, from the tacky sets to blatant use of stock footage. The actors (including even Christopher Lee) seemed bored and demoralized to be there. It's frequently poorly photographed and lit. But the biggest problem with the movie is that it's unbelievably boring. There's almost no action, and the character of Fu Manchu not only doesn't show up very often, he doesn't do that much that's interesting. The movie is a pretty painful slog to sit through, and long before the end you'll be thankful that Fu Manchu was retired from the big screen for the next eleven years before he returned one more time in the 1980 comedy "The Fiendish Plot Of Dr. Fu Manchu" - which was almost as bad as this movie.

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.

What a difference a decent transfer makes. For ages only viewable in muddy, heavily cut, nearly unwatchable prints, The Castle of Fu Manchu is now available, thanks to Blue Underground, in all of its colorful, zoom-laden glory. The last of producer Harry Alan Towers' five-film Fu Manchu series, and generally considered to be the worst, The Castle of Fu Manchu is actually a fun, trashy time waster, and far better than the previous film in the series, The Blood of Fu Manchu, which was burdened by a tedious bandito sub plot that dragged the film to a grinding halt. Directed with a certain pulpy vitality by the highly erratic but occasionally brilliant Jess Franco, Castle has a tacky comic book verve that is hard to resist, and that is certainly more entertaining than many of the expensive, highly touted bombs that Hollywood has been dropping lately. Contrary to what others have reported on this site, Christopher Lee is in excellent form, delivering his lines with distinctive aplomb and offering a stunning, iconographic series of facial expressions as he attempts to overact under the restrictive 'Oriental' make-up. The great Tsai Chin (soon to be seen as 'Auntie' in Memoirs of a Geisha), as Fu's devoted, sadistic daughter, Lin Tang, is terrific as always, and looks particularly fetching in her white Hejab. Best of all, Rosalba Neri shows up as a tough, Fez-topped lesbian, of whom Fu says "Keep her alive. She might be useful to us. She fights like a man." Peter Welbeck's screenplay may be incomprehensible rubbish, but they don't write lines like that anymore.