October Horror Challenge 2019 #79: "The Castle of Fu Manchu"

Christopher Lee is  a great actor, and he was in many good movies. This isn't one of them. The Fu Manchu movies are really racist in general, because they have a white actor donning "yelliwface" to pretend to be Asian, but the first few Gu Manchu movies at least had a halfway decent plot going for them. This being the fifth and final Fu Manchu movie, the filmmakers had pretty much given up on all that, because they knew the movie would make money no matter how terrible it was,  I guess.

Like in the other movies in the series, this movie has the evil Fu Manchu threatening to destroy the world. This time he's got a device that forms icebergs in any temperature water, thus crashing ships and killing everyone on them. What a jerk. The movie opens with a scene of a cruise ship crashing into an iceberg and everyone on the ship drowning. Back in 2006, I actually drowned, as in I died and had to be pulled from the water and revived, so ever since then, any movie with scenes of people drowning will freak me out, no matter how terrible it is, so this drowning scene was actually really creepy to me.

Any of the scenes that take place in the water are similarly effective, but the rest of the movie is really boring. It's a bunch of guys from Scotland Yard arguing with each other about how to stop Fu Manchu, while Cristopher Lee frowns and tries to look menacing. He mostly succeeds, because Christopher Lee, but even he can't save this movie from its own silliness.

The plot doesn't even make sense. Fu Manchu has kidnapped a dying scientist and is keeping him alive in order to further his plan to destroy the world with his machine, but I never really understood how that was supposed to work. Something about taking over Istanbul in order to control their supply of opium because his evil death machine needs opium to run, and I guess the scientist has knowledge that Fu Manchu needs, but I don't get how he expects the guy to give him the information. He keeps injecting him with something,  so maybe it's a truth serum to get him to give up the information. I don't know why I'm even trying to make sense of the plot, because the people who made the movie didn't do that. It's just a bunch of pseudoscientific hooey with Christopher Lee being evil and the good guys trying to stop him. Not a great movie by any means.