Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

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 ****

After the roundly derided 'Blood of Fu Manchu', director Jess Franco once again tackles Sax Rohmer's indomitable moustache twirling super villain. Richard Greene 'guest stars' as sleuth Nayland Smith, and Howard Marion Crawford, in his last performance, plays second hand man, silly old Professor Petrie.As Fu, Christopher Lee is exactly as you would expect – clipped, precise and cool. Under impressive oriental make-up, he conveys moments of anger, complacency and effective degrees of evil. His relationship with far more interesting daughter Lin Tang (Tsai Chin) is slightly more focused than previously, but the most interesting character here is Lisa (Rosalba Meri), 1971's 'Lady Frankenstein'. Lisa is a duplicitous and beautiful creation, often dressed in a suit ("She fights like a man") – and yet, like everyone else here, she is fearfully underwritten and little more than a cypher.Added to that, much of the stock footage that provides the more spectacular moments is generously scooped from other productions, notably a dam-busting scene from 'Campbell's Kingdom' from twelve years earlier.Despite a strong start, this soon dissolves into the kind of muddled plotting that blighted 'Blood…' previously. Although I actually found this slightly more entertaining than that previous film, it is still difficult to maintain interest in events when both storyline and characters are so sketchy.A further entry into the Fu Manchu series was contracted, but due to the drubbing 'Castle…' received both critically and commercially, Fu's promise that 'the world will hear from me again' remains unfulfilled. With a fairly generous budget (most likely due to the further involvement of Harry Alan Towers) and a good cast, it seems to me that Franco just wasn't interested in telling a story about Fu Manchu – and subsequently, the audience felt the same way about paying to watch it.

I've never been a fan of the Fu Manchu franchise both with the original books and with the various films that have been made from the books, namely because they smack of racism (the so-called "yellow peril", to be exact.) So I had some prejudice when I sat down to watch "The Castle of Fu Manchu". After watching it, I'm pretty sure that even fans of Fu Manchu would consider this film to be the pits. It's not only notorious schlock producer Harry Alan Towers at his worse, he got the notorious Jesús Franco to direct, a director who didn't make many good (or even merely okay) movies during his prolific career. There are many things wrong with the end results. It's really cheap, from the tacky sets to blatant use of stock footage. The actors (including even Christopher Lee) seemed bored and demoralized to be there. It's frequently poorly photographed and lit. But the biggest problem with the movie is that it's unbelievably boring. There's almost no action, and the character of Fu Manchu not only doesn't show up very often, he doesn't do that much that's interesting. The movie is a pretty painful slog to sit through, and long before the end you'll be thankful that Fu Manchu was retired from the big screen for the next eleven years before he returned one more time in the 1980 comedy "The Fiendish Plot Of Dr. Fu Manchu" - which was almost as bad as this movie.

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..