The Castle of Fu Manchu

• Directed By: Jesus Franco
• Written By: Jaime Jesús Balcázar
• Country: Spain
• Released: 1969
• Running Time: 92 min
• Buy It: Amazon
• Action, Reviews

How many plot contrivances is it possible to cram into a single film? Not being much of a keeper of statistics, I don’t know if The Castle of Fu Manchu holds any records, but it is certainly a contender.

Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee) is back, and this time he has found a way to control water, allowing him to form icebergs in the Caribbean. Although his technology is far from perfected, he decides that now is the time to issue an ultimatum, giving the world 14 days to accept his terms or face annihilation.

We never find out what Fu Manchu’s terms actually are.

Fortunately, the world has a saviour in the form of Denis Nayland-Smith (Richard Greene). Once called back from his fishing trip, Nayland-Smith – with the help of his faithful companion, Dr. Petrie (Howard Marion-Crawford) – a man seemingly modelled on Holmes’ Watson – immediately sets about tracking down Fu Manchu’s base of operations.

Nayland-Smith’s first deduction is that Fu Manchu must have his base near a large body of water, which immediately narrows things down to Suez, Panama, Gibraltar… or Turkey. It’s lucky for us that there just weren’t that many large bodies of water in the late 60s.

The action then switches to Turkey where local drug lord Omar Pascha (José Manuel Martín) enters a deal with an inscrutable Chinese woman to take control of the castle of the governor of Anatolia. Apparently, this governor has the greatest opium supply in the world and Omar and the inscrutable Chinese woman agree to split the horde 50:50.

Of course, the sneaky Chinese double cross the honourable Turkish drugs baron and are revealed to be in the employ of none other than… Fu Manchu.

Given how trivial the role of Omar’s gang in the raid actually is, I was left briefly wondering why Fu Manchu had bothered to contact him at all. After all, leaving a presumably major criminal at large with the knowledge of where your secret base is doesn’t strike me a hugely intelligent idea. But it all becomes clear later in the plot.

Meanwhile, back in London, Dr. Petrie has found The Book That Explains Everything. Being a detective, he happened to have a book in his Scotland Yard office, written by a Professor Heracles, which discusses in pseudo-scientific detail how ‘crystals’ can be used to cause large bodies of water to rapidly freeze.

These crystals, if you hadn’t already guessed, are derived from opium.

And Professor Heracles is out of the country… in Turkey.

Things are really starting to fit together now.

Of course, being an Englishman, Professor Heracles (Gustavo Re) would never willingly help Fu Manchu destroy the world. However, we quickly learn that he has no choice as he has a heart problem which even Fu Manchu’s cunning eastern medicines can no longer alleviate.

Since he knows he is dying, Heracles is no longer giving Fu Manchu the information he requires so the cunning Chinaman decides to send his men to kidnap Heracles’ doctor, the multi accented Doctor Kessler (Günther Stoll). They also kidnap his companion, Lisa (Rosalba Neri).

Fortunately Nayland-Smith is at the Kessler surgery when the kidnapping takes place and, on realising what has happened (one of the many things I learned while watching this film was that a doctor would never leave a burning cigarette on a polished wood table), calls Scotland Yard and heads for Turkey.

Meanwhile, Omar has learned from the teleporting informer that Fu Manchu now has two captives and things start to get really silly.

Fu Manchu wants Kessler to perform a heart transplant on Dr. Heracles, the donor being both alive and healthy. In order to press Kessler to comply, Fu Manchu makes threatens Lisa. But the threat of violence is evidently not enough reason for Kessler to comply with Fu Manchu’s wishes and we are treated to a bizarrely inconsistent ethical debate between Kessler and Lisa during which Kessler actually says “I’m a doctor, I save lives” while ignoring the fact that he is going to cut the heart out of a healthy donor in order to do so.

Meanwhile, Nayland-Smith and Omar team up, devising another plan that puts Omar in the hands of Fu Manchu for no good reason.

The big problem with The Castle of Fu Manchu is that it screams Lazy Scriptwriting from start to finish. It’s an amazing collection of plot contrivances – one convenient coincidence after another until we finally reach the explosive climax in which nothing surprising happens.

It’s a truly terrible film, but one that – with the addition of a few beers and a couple of friends willing to appreciate its awfulness – can be thoroughly enjoyed.