Review of Vengeance of Fu Manchu, The

Introduction

In the 60`s and early 70`s, before the Lord Of The Rings came along, Christopher Lee was famous(ish) for another series of films in which he played the evil crime lord Fu Manchu. The title character, Fu Manchu, is an evil Chinese crime lord and sorcerer. This, the 3rd in the newer series of films (there were earlier ones released in the 1930`s) features Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard under threat from Fu Manchu`s fiendish plot to discredit him and ultimately kill him…(yep, it is that ropey!)

Video

Visuals are a mixed bunch, they tend to range from quite poor to…er…mostly poor. A lot of visual grain is evident as well as evidence of dirt both on the film and the camera lens. All of this though can be put down to the fault of the original source material and unfortunately the DVD transfer can`t improve on such things.

Audio

The sound in the film for the most part, like the visual quality, is pretty bad. Voices are almost constantly muffled and unclear, music bursts in too loudly quite often and the volume is disproportionate to that of the sound effects. A quick check on IMDB revealed the fact that the film was indeed filmed on non-soundproofed soundstages which contributed to the dire results.

Features

You get a trailer and that`s it basically!

Conclusion

I was reliably informed that I used to like these films when I was younger, I certainly couldn`t remember them and looking back I can`t see why! The plot is ropey, Christopher Lee is very much out of place as Fu Manchu and overall the film is pretty bad. If it a attempted some humour it might not be so bad, unfortunately it doesn`t and it`s not even cheesy enough to be watchable. The one thing it has going in its favour is that the accents are so bad they are "almost" funny including a greek sounding Chinese henchman, a "Texan" who sounds more like a german, not to mention Christopher Lee`s Fu Manchu himself!

Visually its bad, sound wise it`s poor, story wise…well you can see a theme developing here no doubt! Definitely one for collectors only.