ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

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Rpgcatech Disapointment

ShangLuda Admirable film.

BA_Harrison Christopher Lee returns as the titular evil Asian, who is up to his wicked ways again, this time holding the world to ransom by threatening to freeze the planet's oceans. Mwahhahhahhaaa!Of Jess Franco's 204 directorial credits, this is the 23rd that I have seen, with only a handful of those being worth the time and effort. Castle of Fu Manchu, Franco's follow up to his abysmal Blood of Fu Manchu, is - surprise, surprise - another complete stinker.From the get go this is film-making at its most inept: the movie opens with Fu Manchu demonstrating his power by sinking a cruise ship, the director blatantly lifting footage from British Titanic movie A NIght To Remember (1958). A later scene showing a dam bursting borrows footage from Dirk Bogarde film Campbell's Kingdom (1957). These two scenes only serve to illustrate just how lame everything else is. Franco botches numerous fight scenes (rubber bayonets bending as the men do battle), stages the most boring heart transplant imaginable, and commands dreadful performances from all involved, while the use of strong coloured lighting throughout makes the whole thing look incredibly tacky. Worse still, there's none of Franco's trademark sleaze to keep things interesting; what's the point of casting giallo hottie Rosalba Neri and keeping her fully clothed throughout? It's like he couldn't be bothered...

Aaron1375 I can understand why this is the last of the films, but I have to wonder how five of these things got made. I am guessing that the other films were a bit better as even the Dracula films that Lee starred in started to go down in quality as the series progressed, but even so, none of them were as badly done as this film was. I have never seen any of the other Fu Manchu films so I really cannot say for sure if the quality in them is any better. The whole premise of the films just does not seem very good as they are all focused on the villain rather than the hero. It is like if in the James Bond films had the exact same enemy every time and Bond was more behind the scenes and did not really do much. The action is nearly nonexistent and the same can be said for the plot too. There are also periods when the color of the film will change and then there are a couple of scenes that looks as if they are from other movies included here as well. Just a huge mess of a film, then again, it is the fifth film of the series. Back in the day, sequels generally garnered less money than their predecessors so the budget would continually get cut so that may explain some of it, but not the totality of it! The story shows Fu Manchu sinking a boat with some new process that creates ice in the water; wow, that is so new and innovative. The boat he sinks seems to be a part of a different film. It is in this scene that one of his henchmen tries to stop Manchu by refusing to pull a lever. The diabolical Fu Manchu has servants who will die for him by letting a doctor remove their heart, but a lever is too much! Soon he takes over a castle and Nayland Smith is off to Istanbul to stop the evil madman! I guess James Bond is way too busy stopping way more nefarious villains so the more bureaucratic Nayland Smith is sent instead because you do not really need anyone with the skill set of Bond to take out this villain! Doctors are kidnapped and a dam that also seems like it is in another film is collapsed before we reach the awesome conclusion where no one really does all that much to stop Fu Manchu's plans.This made for a rather good episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 which is how I saw the movie. When I got the set of DVDs containing this episode I thought this may have been one of those films that was borderline good that they have done over the years. Seeing Christopher Lee was the star is one of the main reasons. I generally love seeing him in anything; however, this film was really bad. I only give it a two because of Lee. The jokes are aplenty, but I do believe they exaggerated how bad this film was. It was not worse than Monster-a Go Go or quite a few others they have done. Just kind of a poorly edited film that liked to change color schemes a bit too much.So this is not really a good film, and it did mark the final film of the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu films. Lee is a fine actor, but he is also one of those actors of a bygone era where they actually felt that acting was a job so they appeared in as many movies as possible. Today there are stars that will appear in a film and not do so again for multiple years. I cannot speak for the other films, but if this is as low as they got I somehow doubt the other films are Oscar worthy.

monoceros4 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.

bensonmum2 Even if it's only two or three sentences, I generally like to begin one of these with a brief plot outline. In the case of The Castle of Fu Manchu, that's pretty much impossible. The movie is a mish-mash of ideas that don't necessarily fit together to form a coherent plot. The movie may start out with Fu sinking a ship, but that storyline is quickly abandoned in favor of another . . and another . . and another. In the end, I'm not sure what the movie's about or what happened.But the biggest single problem with The Castle of Fu Manchu is that it is extremely dull. You would think that any movie that included a ship sinking, a fight for a castle, explosions, kidnapping, and other 1960s secret agent type trappings would be action packed. Well, you would be wrong. The movie has no pace, no zip, and no energy. It's as if the life had been sucked out of the movie. Add to that some less than stellar acting, abominable lighting, amateurish editing, and no continuity and you've got one fine mess of a movie.On the positive side, The Castle of Fu Manchu does feature Christopher Lee and Rosalba Neri. Also, there's the…err…uhm...did I mention Christopher Lee and Rosalba Neri? I have now seen The Castle of Fu Manchu twice – once with and once without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary. And, as hard as this might be to believe, I actually prefer this one without the MST3K treatment. This MST3K episode has to be one of the worst I've so far seen. The jokes don't work. And, I was really put off by some of the comments that showed a complete lack of understanding about how European movies of the 60s were made.