The Blood of Fu Manchu
Christopher Lee (Dr. Fu Manchu), Tsai Chin (Lin Tang) and Howard Marion-Crawford (Dr. Petrie) are the only actors to appear in all five "Fu Manchu" films.,Fu Manchu: Centuries ago, an ancient race conquered this continent. Now their secrets are mine, and with this knowledge, I shall master the world.,The original cinema version was cut by the BBFC to receive an 'A' certificate with edits to nudity during the dungeon scenes and shots of Sancho's men attacking the women in the village. The 1994 Lumiere video release was more heavily cut and lost 1 minute 46 secs of censor cuts to shots of chained women, a scene where a woman is stripped topless and bitten by a snake, and shots of a snake being crushed by falling rubble. For the 1999 Warner video similar cuts were made though the cuts length was reduced to 44 secs via different edits. All the cuts were waived for the 2007 Optimum DVD.,Edited into The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969),The evil Fu Manchu continues his endless quest for world domination but first; he has developed a plan to eliminate his arch-enemies (of which Scotland Yard's Nayland Smith is top priority). So our oriental master-criminal has kidnapped 10 of the most beautiful women on the planet and stuffed their bodies with the world's deadliest poison. Their orders are to seduce the enemies and kill them with "the kiss of death". His fiendish plan almost succeeds but Smith survives the assault and goes after Fu Manchu, who shelters in the jungles of South America. The premise of this sequel sounds promising enough but, don't be fooled, it's a terribly boring and unexciting film. There are so many things wrong with this production I don't even properly know where to start. For starters, the screenplay introduces way too many characters and actually none of them are worth mentioning. There's no tension and there's a total lack of gore and sleaze, as well (considering Jess Franco signed for the direction, I was at least hoping for this). There are a lot of battle sequences but they're painfully tame and tedious. Franco makes no use of the great jungle-location at all and the editing is lousy. Judging by his emotionless performance, Christopher Lee wasn't interesting in repeating the Fu Manchu role for the fourth time at all. Jess Franco also directs on automatic pilot, meaning without the slightest bit of passion or motivation. For him this was just another easy-money job in between some euro-trash cinema highlights like "99 Women" and "Marquis de Sade: Justine". The absolute best Fu Manchu film remains the 1932 "Mask of Fu Manchu" (starring Boris Karloff), although Don Sharp's efforts "the Face of." and "The Brides of " are pretty good as well. There's absolutely nothing to recommend about this one, so avoid unless you're a perfectionist...or really REALLY bored.,