‘The ‘Blood’ and ‘Castle’ of Fu Manchu’ or — Sweet Jesus?
Let’s go over both of these together and get this done as quickly as possible because boy, these are bad.
For the last two entries in producer Harry Alan Towers’ Fu Manchu Cycle Spanish director Jesus (Jess) Franco was brought onboard, a director known for getting the job done — i.e. finishing a film even if the finished film wasn’t even in a finished state, or even technically a film.
This is most apparent in ‘The Blood of Fu Manchu’ (1968) which feels like a film production crew had gone on location and inadvertently made a feature movie by mistake. It’s a dreary, boring, tedious slog of a watch with absolutely none of the pacing the first two films were powered by.
Fu Manchu has gone all Bin Laden on our asses and is hiding out in a cave plotting world domination, although he’s still stuck in vengeance mode against his arch rival, Nayland Smith. To throw the world into chaos he has abducted ten women and built up their resistance to a poison by having them repeatedly bitten by a deadly snake. Via this process these women are now capable of delivering lethal snogs to the leaders of the free world. Once they are all the dead the world will belong to Fu!
What’s deeply infuriating about this movie isn’t so much the technical sloppiness, slap-dash execution or the fact there’s zero invention in this swamp of necessity but that the story is so dull! Nayland Smith (the protagonist) is incapacitated from the get-go so is, once AGAIN, incidental to everything that’s going on whilst Fu Manchu himself is simply arsing about in a cave with snakes and tits, so he’s not much of an antagonist again either.
The biggest issue for me though was the focus on Mexican bandit leader Sancho Lopez, an even bigger caricature than Fu Manchu himself and profoundly more annoying. He’s plays up to all the bandit leader clichés and as someone who never finds bandit leaders entertaining in movies as it is he quickly became insufferable. And it’s all very badly filmed.
But at least it WAS actually filmed as opposed to whatever the bastardised fuck is going on with ‘The Castle of Fu Manchu’ (1969).
The film starts with Fu Manchu declaring he shall freeze the world’s oceans with his opium-powered ocean freezing device thus causing chaos to shipping, although his biggest atrocity this time will be against the very medium of cinema itself. Using footage from ‘The Brides of Fu Manchu’ (1966) and ‘A Night To Remember’ (1958) and mixing them both up to create the illusion Fu Manchu has sunk the Titanic, still with an ice berg but this time in the Caribbean, it’s an act of cinematic vandalism that I found so lazy and offensive that I switched the movie off there and then. No filmmaker should do something like that!
However, I then discovered that director Jesus Franco wasn’t too pleased at this cannibalising process either (I guess the guy had standards after all) so, feeling a little more forgiving, I forged ahead into Fu Manchu’s castle.
I’m not saying I was glad I did as this film certainly lives up to its reputation as the worst in the series, but I oddly preferred it to both of the previous two entries. This was down to the fact that, plot wise, it actually feels like a Fu Manchu movie again. Fu Manchu has a suitably silly plot for world domination — freezing the world’s oceans with an opium powered device from his castle in Istanbul — whilst Nayland Smith hasn’t been waylaid (naylaid?) or incapacitated this time. Not that he has any more screen time mind you.
So even though it’s creaky, plunders images from other films with brazen abandon, has the pacing momentum of a dead tortoise and looks like certain shots were filmed in one take with no preparation or regard for continuity in the slightest the story actually feels like a Fu Manchu yarn again. There are some brief flashes of half-arsed inspiration (a fight in a waterfall lit by coloured lights evokes the feeling of substandard Mario Bava) and the insertion of footage from other films gives the editing a weirdly avant-garde vibe at times, as well as adding some misplaced ambition and scale the previous two lacked.
It’s not a good film by any means and possibly only of interest if viewed in context of the entire cycle itself but it’s also an oddly endearing testament to the fact that it can be a miracle that not only do good films, let alone bad films, get made but sometimes that even ANY film has made at all can be an achievement.
Whether it’s worth sitting through is another matter all together.
Watching the Fu Manchu Cycle has been a real blast, even though the quality of the films varies wildly. Don Sharp’s first two entries of legitimately fast-moving blasts of fun so it’s been worth watching them all for those alone, and the other films have various interesting aspects to them (although you have to look HARD) as well as being examples of how a film series can vary depending on who is involved and how much care and attention is devoted to a project.
The world might not hear from him again but Fu’s left behind a fun, if baffling, little legacy.
