The Castle of Fu Manchu (1972)

Christopher Lee is almost always worth a look, but this "Fu Manchu" entry (his fifth and final round in the titular role) isn't worthy of Lee...nor any self-respecting actor. International mishmash via Italy, Spain, West Germany and the UK sounds as bad as it looks, with perilous fiend Fu Manchu and his evil daughter terrorizing the planet with an Opium-fueled device that is able to freeze the world's oceans. Never mind political correctness, this chaotic, poorly-dubbed movie is a real shambles, loaded down with stock footage. Unintentionally funny when it isn't deadly dull. * from ****

Castle of FuManchu, The (1968) * 1/2 (out of 4)The fifth and final film in Christopher Lee's FuManchu series is considered by many to be the worst but I personally found it so bad that I was able to have a little fun with it. The film has FuManchu (Lee) once again trying to take over the world and by now you might be asking when the guy is just going to give up and go home. Anyway, this time he plans on freezing all the oceans in the world so he kidnaps a doctor to perform an operation on the one man who knows how to do such a thing. THE CASTLE OF FUMANCHU isn't a good movie so you shouldn't go into the film expecting anything other that pure silliness. There's no question this is a bad movie but thankfully it's bad enough to be mildly entertaining but I'm sure most people will be smart enough to hit the eject button by the thirty-minute mark. Once again Lee appears to have only enough energy to cash a paycheck as he's obviously not too thrilled about doing this picture. As in the previous film, Lee pretty much just sleepwalks through the film and offers up very little energy. The supporting cast includes Gunther Stoll playing the doctor, Jose Manuel Martin as an opium dealer and cult favorite Rosalba Neri playing an assassin. These supporting players are certainly one of the few good things in the film. The film has a bigger budget than most Franco pictures but that's not saying too much because we still get all sorts of cheapness including some stock footage from the Titanic picture A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, which certainly doesn't mix well with any of the new footage. The film does have some decent cinematography but there's just not enough here to make it worth viewing. Fans of Lee, Franco or FuManchu are bound to be disappointed with this film, which turned out to be the last in the series.

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.

This little nothing was really bad. As a struggling law student, I often watch horrible films because I don't need to pay attention or even care for the damn thing. This film, however, was a total waste of time. Christopher Lee, shame on you for playing Fu Manchu in this. Even though I have a lot of respect for Christopher Lee, this was definitely not one of his finer performances. The whole thing was really awful.The plot is that Fu Manchu is trying to take over the world using a machine fueled with opium that freezes water and creates ice bergs. That's really about it. I don't think that I can elaborate on it much (at least in any way that would make sense).The cast is mediocre (again, Chris Lee was their shining star), the script was a crime (the dialogue was pretty bad), and despite there being some talent the whole thing was totally sub-par. What really got me was how they casted Spainish or Latin American guys as Chinese soldiers. AAAARRRUUUUGGGGHHH. Did they think that we wouldn't notice? This was bad, but not quite so bad as something like "Manos the Hands of Fate." Don't bother with it.