Christopher Lee is almost always worth a look, but this "Fu Manchu" entry (his fifth and final round in the titular role) isn't worthy of Lee...nor any self-respecting actor. International mishmash via Italy, Spain, West Germany and the UK sounds as bad as it looks, with perilous fiend Fu Manchu and his evil daughter terrorizing the planet with an Opium-fueled device that is able to freeze the world's oceans. Never mind political correctness, this chaotic, poorly-dubbed movie is a real shambles, loaded down with stock footage. Unintentionally funny when it isn't deadly dull. * from ****

Associate producer: Jaime Jesus Balcazar. Producer: Harry Alan Towers. A Terra Filmkunst (Berlin)/Balcazar Productions (Barcelona)/Italian International (Rome) in association with Towers of London (London) co-production, filmed on locations in Spain and Istanbul. An Anglo- EMI presentation, released through M-G-M. The film was made in 1968. No release dates recorded, but U. S. release would have been in 1970, U.K. around January 1972. No theatrical release in Australia. 8,280 feet. 92 minutes.SYNOPSIS: By courtesy of stock footage from "A Night To Remember", the bad old doctor sinks a cruise ship. Unfortunately, he runs out of stock footage, and is forced to kidnap a scientist. Very unfortunately, the scientist has a bad ticker. So Fu is also forced to kidnap his doctors. Even more unfortunately, the bungling kidnappers carry out their work under the very nose of Nayland- Smith. This draws Fu's castle hide- out close to discovery. (Available on passable Optimum and excellent Blue Underground DVDs).NOTES: Although the evil genius vows to return and fight yet another round with Nayland-Smith as the end titles roll, he failed to keep this appointment. "Castle of Fu Manchu" turned out to be the last of the five Lee/Manchu pictures. See my review of "Face of Manchu" for a complete overview of the series.COMMENT: While admittedly a long way from the peaks of Face, Castle isn't all that bad a picture. Mind you, it starts off very poorly, utilizing scads of obvious stock footage from "Night To Remember". But with the credit titles and their change of scene, the visual aspect of the movie improves dramatically. Indeed the real locations in Spain and exotic Istanbul, are the film's best feature. Away from the garish studio sets, Manuel Merlino's cinematography shines.The story rates as okay — a few slow passages here and there — and the dubbing (as usual) is none too hot, but the girls are attractive, the locations fresh, and director Franco manages to muster up just enough pictorial pizazz to offset both occasionally inept scripting and all-over dubbing deficiencies — plus a brace of somewhat forced (Marion Crawford particularly) and/or stale (Richard Greene) performances.

The fifth and final of Christopher Lee's Fu-Manchu outings – a planned sixth film was cancelled due to its overwhelmingly poor critical and commercial reception - and the second to be directed by schlockmeister Jess Franco. Played as a parody, 'Castle' might actually have been quite fun. Fu-Manchu is essentially reduced to a poor knock-off of a Blofeld (though I'm not sure he was ever much else). Lee actually brings his A-game here, having phoned it in previously in the series, lifting the ludicrous dialogue to the point where it's almost palatable, but everything else about the film seems to be mocking itself without knowing it. The production design is so camp it makes The Ipcress File look like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The action and violence is again tepid and clumsy (lest we forgot this is a Jess Franco film) and the plot manages to be confusing in spite of being threadbare. There are some babes thrown in, but this is a PG movie so, again, Franco fans expecting anything resembling titillation will be thoroughly disappointed. Unlike its predecessor, which is by far the more insipid and dreary of the two, 'Castle' has a handful of things going for it. One is Jess Franco in a supporting role, wearing a fez and dubbed to sound like… I don't really know. The score is totally derivative but actually rather nice. The wacky production design and multi-coloured fluorescent lighting add a lot of hammy fun. The attempt at seamless in-scene cutting between the various, disparate filming locations is endlessly amusing. Some of the dialogue is hilariously quotable, and played to the hilt by everyone involved. Frankly, though, the two high points of the show are the sizeable inserts from A Night To Remember and Campbell's Kingdom. While definitely a cut above its predecessor in some ways, I'm still struggling to give this any kind of recommendation.

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.