"Let her taste the kiss of death".
International mastermind villain Fu Manchu and his sadistic daughter Lin Tang are hiding out in their secret underground lair in the deep jungles of South America planning next quest for world domination. This involves kidnapping 10 beautiful young women and infecting them with an ancient poison that one kiss from their lips will bring instant death. They are sent around the world to eliminate Fu Manchu's enemies and then eventually he would unleash this plague on the world.After the disappointment of "Vengeance of Fu Manchu", what was to follow was truly scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Now in the hands of the infamously prolific director Jess Franco. The next two Fu Manchu entries would be the death of the series, which was started up by producer / writer Harry Alan Towers. Most people would label the 1969 "The Castle of Fu Manchu" as the worst, but for me it was easily "Blood". Both were sloppy, ramshackle and messily plotted, but "Blood" was downright flat and terribly dull for it. The uneventful side distractions (South American bandits) and overall padding just stalled the pacing and even magnifying the daftness of it all. The action was laboured and there was a real lack of adventure to this serial. Plenty of groping though, but not much else. For most part it's uninspired in its direction. We would see Christopher Lee and Tsai Chin reprising their roles with malevolent glee. Lee going about things in the usual diabolical manner and Chin as glassy as ever. Outside of these two performances, there's not much to it. Surprisingly the exotic jungle backdrop is made to good use by Franco. It looks low-rent, but while some of the previous films had that cheap quality they were better handled than this project. Its limitations really do show it up. Franco tries to bring his trademark (no, not the zoom. But there's plenty of it) use of sleaze and torture, but it just feels forced and becomes a tired method sapping out any real sense of fun. In other words it's dreary and unpleasant but not effective in its execution to have any sort of impact.
A wooden Richard Greene plays Fu Manchu's number one nemesis Nayland Smith, but the story doesn't really give his character all that much to do mainly keeping him rather secondary. So it's not much of a battle between the two and the characters the plot seems to follow (Gotz George & Ricardo Palacios) don't leave much of an impression. Although Howard Marion Crawford was an annoyance. The women in the cast are attractive and this is to serve an important notion in the plot's progression. Some of ladies to show up would be Maria Rohm, Lon von Friedl and Shirley Eaton.
score 3/10
lost-in-limbo 29 November 2014
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3132847/34967
Pages:
[1]