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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.
score /10
Wizard-8 6 January 2016
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3389610/ |
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25-2-2021 12:05:08