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The Castle of Fu Manchu
[Blu-ray 4K]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Blue Underground Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (24th July 2025). |
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The Film
 British Secret Service agent Denis Nayland Smith (The Black Castle's Richard Greene) and his partner Dr. Petrie (Secrets of a Windmill Girl's Howard Marion Crawford) must cut short their fishing trip in the countryside when the Home Office summons them after receiving radio transmitted threats from Fu Manchu (Horror of Dracula's Christopher Lee) and his daughter Lin Tang (Rentadick's Tsai Chin) giving them two weeks to submit to his demands. Although he does not make clear the "biblical" nature of his threat, Nayland Smith and Petrie find curious the newspaper story of a cruise ship that crashed into an iceberg in the middle of the Caribbean. Surmising that Fu Manchu's new master plan has something to do with the control and transformation of water, they start trying to determine the whereabouts of his hideout in areas where he would have access to large volumes of water. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, Lin Tang on behalf of her father offers to split half of the world's largest reserve of opium with kingpin Omar Pasha (Count Dracula's Great Love's José Manuel Martín) if he and his men – along with his favorite envoy Lisa (Lady Frankenstein's Rosalba Neri) – to storm the governor's castle in Anatolia whereupon Fu Manchu betrays Pasha and takes prisoner Lisa who "fights like a man" and may have further value. Petrie happens upon the works of Professor Heracles (The Summertime Killer's Gustavo Re) who surmised that the chemical structure of water could be rapidly changed with a derivative of Opium leading Nayland Smith to surmise that Fu Manchu was behind the "unsuccessful" raid on the castle which was blamed on Omar Pasha. Fu Manchu has already got his hands on Heracles but the man is suffering from a severe heart ailment and needs a heart transplant so he has his dacoits abduct Heracles' doctor Curt Kessler (What Have You Done to Solange?'s Günther Stoll) right from under the noses of Nayland Smith and Petrie alng with Kessler's lover/colleague Ingrid (The Mad Executioners' Maria Perschy) for leverage. Arriving in Istanbul, Nayland Smith and Petrie learn from Inspector Ahmed (director Jess Franco himself) that Omar Pasha is camped out in the mountains with his men planning to rescue Lisa. While Kessler and Ingrid are forced to operate on Heracles so that Fu Manchu can realize his plan of turning the world's ocean into one giant block of ice, Nayland Smith must deal with drug traders and bandits in order to infiltrate the castle. The fifth and final film in the Harry Alan Towers Fu Manchu series – only loosely based on the characters and novels of Sax Rohmer – and the second directed by Jess Franco as part of what would be a nine-film collaboration between the producer and director, The Castle of Fu Manchu is simultaneously more "lavish" and threadbare than its predecessor The Blood of Fu Manchu. On the one hand, we get location shooting in Istanbul and a dazzling Gaudi park monument in Barcelona as the titular castle but the film makes extensive use of stock footage, some of it black and white and tinted. The supposed cruise ship that runs into an iceberg is taken entirely from the Titanic drama A Night to Remember while Fu Manchu's later demonstration of his powers to terrify Kessler and Ingrid is the dam-breaking sequence from Cambpell's Kingdom, and various bits of explosions are inserted as flashes into the climactic destruction which might have been better without it. Intercut with the Titanic footage is a repurposed and redubbed sequence from The Vengeance of Fu Manchu featuring Burt Kwouk's Fang getting shot again by Fu Manchu. All of the original footage, on the other hand, is handsomely-lensed by Manuel Merino (Horror Rise from the Tomb) with some striking compositions within the Gaudi location and some vivid, almost three-dimensional sequences lit in green and pink gels like the scene of a horrified Heracles seeing two "corpses" rising from wooden coffins and the dungeon labyrinth setting of the climax. Lee and Chin get more screen time, and Chin gets more wardrobe changes, but just as with the previous film this leave unexplored whether Lin Tang's apparent bristling at her father's dismissal of her concerns as inconsequential is a character thing or Chin herself feeling underutilized. Greene as Nayland Smith has more to do this time around but his role still feels more like a "guest star" part than a lead as he actually interacts on camera with very few other cast members, and even though he does eventually share the frame with the other actors in some scenes it still seems at first like a lot of his footage in those same scenes was shot at a separate time rather than just as reverse angle take (which might be more the fault of the editing as makes some of his shots seem like cutaways). Once again, Franco seems more interested in the more ambiguous Omar Pasha and Lisa while Stoll's doctor is another secondary hero engaging in more convincing fisticuffs than Greene while Perschy gets overshadowed by Neri in terms of getting involved in the action. A certain strain of morality in Towers' script demands that even the villains who turn heroes must perish, which at least seems fitting when it comes to Omar Pasha since his own murder after informing on Nayland Smith recalls an earlier scene in which he has opium-addicted stool pigeon Melnik (Night of the Blood Monster's Werner Abrolat) murdered after he tells him of Lin Tang's sighting in the city, but Neri's fate seems as similarly tacked on here as in Franco's first Sade adaptation Justine. Once again, there is a tacked-on "The world will hear from me again," pronouncement by Fu Manchu but the way he lingers in the climax as the castle fall in around him seems to hint that he might have been wanting to throw in the towel; indeed, the possibility of obliterating all human existence including himself anticipates Lee's last bow as Count Dracula for Hammer Films in The Satanic Rites of Count Dracula. Appearances uncredited in the English version of the film include Herbert Fux (Mark of the Devil) as the ill-fated governor and filmmaker Pere Portabella – who later directed Cuadecuc, vampir, the avant-garde behind the scenes documentary of Franco's Count Dracula – in a bit part as one of the Turkish soldiers killed during the attack on the castle. 
Video
Although completed in 1969 and released in West Germany then, The Castle of Fu Manchu was not released in the U.K. and U.S. until 1972 through small distributor International Cinema in the latter country. The film had a VHS release in the early eighties by Electric Video and then a later LP-mode sell-through cassette from Viking Video Classics. The film has always looked rather poor on video, and even Blue Underground's DVD – first issued in the four disc The Christopher Lee Collection – direct from the negative was cleaner and more colorful but somehow did not make up for our past perceptions of the film while the 2017 double feature Blu-ray regrettably turned out to be upscaled from the SD master. The first real HD remaster came overseas from Studio Canal who licensed their 4K restoration to Indicator in the U.K. for The Fu Manchu Cycle and a separate standard edition. Like Blue Underground's recent 4K UltraHD/Blu-ray of The Blood of Fu Manchu, their 2160p24 HEVC 1.66:1 Dolby Vision widescreen and 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen discs come from their own 4K restoration which is brighter and more saturated than the U.K. edition. Opinions may be subjective about which is the truer representation of what the film was meant to look like, but the Blue Underground transfer gives the film some much needed pop with the loud gel lighting giving the coffin "resurrection" sequence the same sort of EC Comics feel Creepshow later tried to achieve with similar lighting effects. Clothing materials get an uptick in detail evident even in medium shots – look at those felt fez hats – along with facial features giving Martín a more rugged look and close-ups of Lee looking less "waxy" and more the effect of thick foundation make-up. The differences between stock footage and original footage are more apparent not only in the tinting but in generational loss with a few shots that were just soft appear to have actually been optically-enlarged. 
Audio
The sole feature audio option is the English DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 track in which the German and Spanish cast are of course dubbed while Lee, Chin, Greene, and Howard are also post-synched by themselves. Some of the dubbing sync is loose including an obvious bit where Franco's inspector turns away from the camera while speaking but it is quite obvious that his mouth is not moving, but that is organic to the film's production. Sound effects do a lot of heavy-lifting to make action scenes seem bigger than they actually are while the scoring of Charles Camilleri (House of 1,000 Dolls) is really too breezy for the film's action. 
Extras
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historians Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson who discuss how the film has often been used as "ammunition" by Franco's detractors and concedes that the opening composed recycled footage and stock footage makes it hard to get into. They also discuss the perception of Franco as a "finisher" of franchises, having directed the last Fu Manchu films for Towers, the last krimi in The Corpse Packs His Bags for CCC's series of Bryan Edgar Wallace films in competition with Rialto's more successful Edgar Wallace series, as well as CCC's The Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse. They also discuss the merits of both Franco entries in the franchise, the co-production cast – along with confusion arising from the credits of different versions – the "comic strip brought to life" aspect of the film, and Thompson's observation of Franco's use of locations as "mind palaces" as an extension of a character's personality. They also compare Franco's approach to the earlier films, noting that Franco really does not strive for period accuracy in combination with the settings and mixing of locations as a deliberately unrealistic world. Ported from the Blue Underground edition is "The Fall of Fu Manchu" (14:01) featuring interviews with Franco, producer Towers, and stars Lee and Chin. Franco recalls being called up in the middle of the night and being offered the first of his two Fu Manchu films and Towers' option to do more films while Towers, Lee, and Chin reflect on working with Franco (Chin recalls announcing "Jesus is coming!" when she used to throw parties). Lee and Chin separately puzzle out the plots of the two films, both admitting that they barely read the script and did not see the final films while Franco tells an amusing anecdote about working with Lee in the later film Dark Mission involving his love of golf.  "Castle of Carnage" (21:25) is an interview with Stephen Thrower, author of Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco who notes Towers' observation that Franco was more successful than Nayland Smith in "killing Fu Manchu" while offering up a defense of Franco, noting that he undoubtedly had input on the script but that Towers laid the blueprint and made the editorial choices including the money-related issue in licensing footage from the other film. He also once again discusses Franco's usage of tourist attractions familiar to locals as locations in the film – like repurposing the Gaudi building in Barcelona as a Turkish castle – as well as likening Fu Manchu's "self-destructive streak" to Franco's and Towers' falling out and wondering what a subsequent Fu Manchu film might have looked like had they made up during their prolific periods in the eighties. Thrower also discusses Franco's later Fu Manchu-adjancent films like Esclavas del crimen in which Franco's muse Lina Romay plays daughter "Tsai Chin" communicating with her father from beyond the grave and continuing his work (on a smaller scale). The disc also includes the film's international trailer (2:26) and an extensive poster & still gallery of well over a hundred images, as well as the full RiffTrax edition Riffed by Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett & Kevin Murphy (75:05) which abridges the feature and features obnoxious commentary (presumably Shout! Factory has the rights to the 1992 Mystery Science Theater 3000 take on the film). 
Packaging
The two discs are housed in a keep case with a reversible cover and embossed slipcover (the latter for the first pressing only).
Overall
Jess Franco may have been more successful than Nayland Smith in killing off Fu Manchu with The Castle of Fu Manchu but he had a lot of help behind the scenes as evident here.
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