The Crap Hole of Fu Manchu

Oosterhartbabe

dreadful. This total mess of a movie makes as little sense as our modern tax code, and is as hard to pick your way through.

Basically, we have Christopher Lee doing some of his worst work ever, dressed in Chinese drag and a terrible make-up job that doesn't make him look oriental but does make him look pretty gay. He drones on in a monotone as the dreadfully evil Fu Manchu, sucking the air out of the room in every scene he's in. The only thing I can think that is oriental about him is the obvious opium addiction, because he must have been high on SOMETHING to help him get through this stinker. Plus, his eyes are pretty glazed. That could be just boredom, however. Couldn't blame him if it was.

The plot, such as can be made out of it, is that ol' Fu has acquired a way to turn the world's oceans to ice, and is using that as his threat to make the world's government's kowtow to him a la Dr. Evil. Unfortunately, this scientist with the silly name who's the only one who can help him make this device has a heart problem and is at the edge of death. So Fu kidnaps an English heart specialist and makes him perform the world's first heart transplant. They never show on screen whether there was any tissue typing of any kind, so the scientist could easily have rejected the (unwilling) donor heart. Oh, wait, that would require the plot to make sense and be coherent, and it's not having anything to do with that, no sirree.

In the meantime, Fu's killed the governor of a province in Turkey(I think) and stolen his castle, with the aid of a girl who he promptly locks up in the dungeon. I was never sure about her role in this film, but like so many other things it was a loose end that never really got resolved. It might have been Turkey, or it might have been a huge Shriner's convention, I can't be sure.

To convince the English heart doctor to go through with the surgery, Fu obliquely threatens his girlfriend by blowing up a dam. A pretty puzzling way to carry out a death threat, but o.k. This scene, like so many of the others in this movie, was unnecessarily long and tedious. They should have called it the Sleep Aid of Fu Manchu, that would have been closer to the actual substance of the film.

Fu's enemy is a bland English guy with zero charm and a habit of blending into any background like a chameleon. I wasn't even totally sure of his name throughout most of the film. James Bland, I think it was.

Anyhoo, Fu's plan is foiled and his castle blown up(I was never sure how or by who,the editing's pretty bad at the end). The doctor and his girlfriend escape through the sewers, which couldn't stink more than this movie. The boring hero type drags the heart patient scientist out the front way, and the movie comes to its incoherent end with no idea on the part of the viewer about what was going on for the last hour and a half. There aren't words enough to describe how bad this film was, at least not in the English language. Maybe in Mandarin? We should ask Fu Manchu, eh? Oh, wait, he probably doesn't speak any Chinese dialects, being British and all..

score 1/10

Oosterhartbabe 30 November 2005

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1228308/