Good movie but grossly overrated

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

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.

I own every single episode of MST3K, have seen each many times. Been an ardent fan since 1991.To this day, I find e. 323 "The Castle of Fu-Manchu" the most stomach-churningly bad one of all - not that it's the most inept, most intrinsically AWFUL Mistied movie of all time - I leave that to "Beast of Yucca Flats" and "Manos"... But for me, personally, this one punches me in the gut and kidneys. Other MisTies may disagree - but I say Bring on the Coleman Francises, your Ray Dennis Stecklers, your Bert I. Gordons... Leave me OUT of Fu-Manchu land. The levels of "bad-good" and "bad-bad" get turned upside-down when a movie is Mistied - but no amount of riffing by Joel and the bots can save this technicolor-spraypainted dog turd. So much I'm confused about - this is a Spanish film made in Turkey ? did they just completely run out of money before post-production ? Has any movie ever had worse color printing/timing ? Did they not think anyone would notice B&W stock footage spliced back-to-back with color soundstage shots ? Did they just lose 50% of the film and spliced together as best they could ? Just what on earth was it about ? What was with the ending ? What happened ?I think the reason this one MST3K movie makes me so livid mad and sickened more than any other is that, up to a certain point in the film-making process, "The Castle of Fu Manchu" had a budget and some promise - there are some nice costumes, some good casting, pretty women, and cool locations. But in the end, I feel like I've watched some guro/snuff film - physically sickened. In fact, the last time I had the flu, nauseous, retching up everything I'd ever eaten EVER until there was nothing left to reverse-peristalsyze but stomach lining, I couldn't help but have the movie's bored, listless mid-tempo title music playing in my head while I dry-heaved and my head spun and I cursed the day I was born.In conclusion, if I met this movie on the street, I would slap it in front of its own mother and spit on its shoes.Other MST3K movies suck. "The Castle of Fu Manchu" FAILS.

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..

I cannot believe how bad this movie is!! I should have expected it coming from Jess Franco, the schlockmaster of Eurotrash but I wasn't even prepared for the intense pain that this film caused. What in the hell was Christopher Lee thinking? Granted, he has been in some bombs but this has got to be the very bottom of the barrel. Richard Greene had pretty much become a has-been when this film was made but,unless he was desperate for money, he should have known better. I often wonder how actors can hold their heads up after appearing in films of this caliber....it must be absolutely humiliating.The faults of "Castle" are just too numerous to mention but a few of them go something like this: they were obviously having power failures during filming since the shots are either totally dark or green; the actors can't act (even Lee is bad here) and the badly written dialogue often doesn't match the "action"; the fight scenes involving overweight, over age Greene are embarrasing to watch: the premise of the story (freezing the oceans or whatever they were attempting to do)is feeble; and then there is the "doorway to eternity" which leads to the front porch! Huh?So......if you are looking for a movie so bad that it is good, this is not the one. Watch "Plan 9 From Outer Space" for those kinds of laughs. "Castle" is harmful to small children and animanls and should be avoided at all costs.....even if you are a Chrisopher Lee fan.