The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969)
Directed by Jesus Franco

Film Review

At some point in the last hundred years, someone, somewhere on planet Earth, has probably made a worse film than The Castle of Fu Manchu, but, through divine Providence and my remarkable knack of avoiding really bad films, I have yet to come across it.  The fifth entry in the Fu Manchu series made in the 1960s, with Christopher Lee doing his bit for political incorrectness as the heavily made-up oriental madman, was the one which brought the series to a decisive end, and just as well.  When you hit rock bottom as decisively as this film did, it's time to get out and do something else.  The greatest mystery of all is why an actor of Christopher Lee's ability and profile should have stayed with the series so long.  They're an inscrutable lot, these thespians.

To say that the final Fu Manchu film is an abysmal, utterly contrived pile of ill-conceived, ill-excuted trash that is bereft of any artistic merit whatsoever would be something of a mild understatement.  If a party of intellectually stunted, half-blind, one-armed chimps, whose cumulative life experience had consisted only of sitting about in trees eating bananas all day, set out with an iron resolve to make a film so bad that it would never see the light of day, then it could hardly be any worse than the vile spectacle of grade-A ineptitude and inanity which The Castle of Fu Manchu so clearly represents.   I write, of course, in moderation.

The toddler's erratic doodling that purports to be a script would have been enough to sink the film, but no, its director, camera crew, cast and editing team just had to get into a bidding war to see who was least suited to his job.  You can forgive the use of stock shots and clips stolen from other films (notably the Titanic sinking in A Night to Remember (1958)); after all economies had to be made to pay for Christopher Lee's substantial fee.  But who in their right mind can excuse the ramshackle editing and utterly atrocious camerawork?  Never, in the entire history of filmmaking, has the telescopic zoom been so overused and misused as it is here.  Zoom in.  Zoom out.  Zoom in.  Zoom out.  At least ten times a minute, as if the camera lens was a bloody yoyo.   But even this cinematic abomination seems stylish compared with the editing which is so indescribably bad that I really can't describe it.  This is one occasion when I am thwarted to express myself by the limitations of the English language.

I suppose I should say something about the script, although I shall probably rupture my spleen and suffer a fatal attack of apoplexy in the process.  Okay, with my medical attendants close at hand, here's the plot.  Fu Manchu intends to blackmail mankind into making him the master of the world (you could ask why, since it really is a lousy job, as any traffic warden and Anne Robinson will tell you, but we'll let that pass).  To back up his threat, the aforementioned Mr Manchu (or should that be Mr Fu?) has invented a machine which can turn all of the water in the world's oceans into ice.  This machine is fuelled not by a product derived from SwellGel, as you might reasonably expect, but instead by opium.  Yes, opium.  Now, as luck would happen, there is only one person who understands how to process the opium for the machine to work properly, and he is about to die from a heart condition.  But never fear, Mr Fu has a cunning plan...

Now, I don't know about you, but I would say this is probably the daftest storyline ever to make it onto the big screen.  Just why couldn't Mr Fu come up with a more sensible plan, such as flooding the financial markets with highly risky loans and investments in order to bring the world banking system to its knees so that he could then step in and take over the world, buying up all the toxic debt with money raised from opium sales?  Much more plausible -  or maybe he was saving that one for a later date?  We really should all be very grateful that Fu Manchu went into retirement after subjecting us to this tacky, intelligence-insulting monstrosity.  If ever he comes back, I'm going to get me a one-way ticket to the other end of the solar system.  There's a limit to how much crud the mammalian nervous system can cope with, and this film has completely used up my life's quota.

Film Synopsis

Fu Manchu's latest plan for world domination is to threaten to freeze all the oceans of the worlds.  Alas, his trial run, which involves creating an iceberg in the Caribbean to sink an ocean liner, is only a partial success.  In his enthusiasm, Fu Manchu has yet to perfect the process and desperately needs the help of Professor Heracles, a world authority on ocean freezing.  Having spent considerable time and effort on abducting Heracles, Fu Manchu is not inconsiderably miffed when he learns that the professor has a heart defect and will soon die.   No worries.  Fu Manchu will abduct a heart specialist and his assistant who will perform a heart transplant, from a living donor.  (It's okay, the living donor is happy about the arrangement.  He presumably needs the money to pay off his student loan.)  Now all that Fu Manchu needs is a vast supply of opium, not for recreational use you understand, but because it is an essential ingredient in the ocean freezing process.  So, Fu Manchu and his gang of bloodthirsty assassins seize the governor's castle in Istanbul and set about their evil ocean freezing plan with a vengeance.  Not even Fu Manchu's resourceful adversary Nayland Smith will stop him this time...