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Fatale beauté is the cornerstone of the scheme, a gimlet-eyed pinup faces the camera in a dark chamber, "horrible... inescapable... universal... death." Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee) in the jungle, with zombified maidens to bring the venomous essence of snakes to archenemies. Nayland Smith (Richard Greene) in London is the first victim, stricken blind by the kiss of an "emissary," "she was carrying enough poison in her body to kill a regiment!" Off to South America in search of the antidote, his assistant (Howard Marion-Crawford) with thermos of tea at the ready. "Only the prelude to my drama," says the mastermind, "the sickness will finish when the moon is at its fullest." Sax Rohmer's villain is a natural for Jesús Franco, the modernist's fascination with pulp serials seals his kinship with Lang while laying the ground for subsequent women-in-prison fevers. A lost city, "an old Inca legend," a Teutonic nurse named Wagner (Maria Rohm) and an agent posing as an archeologist (Götz George). Ricardo Palacios goes to town like Wallace Beery's Pancho Villa redivivus, presiding over a proto-Wild Bunch bacchanal in a pillaged village and recognizing the Reaper in the half-clad odalisque who slinks out of the shadows. (Caught, he watches as Tsai Chin materializes in upside-down close-up as the fiend's loyal daughter.) "If I wasn't an English gentleman, I'd tell you exactly what you were, you pot-bellied basket!" Zoom lenses reign, the occasional striking image emerges all the same, e.g. Lee's ascetic profile on a throne as incense smoke suffuses the screen. "A poison to kill a poison" is the solution, applied by the director to the franchise itself one year with The Castle of Fu Manchu. With Shirley Eaton, Loni von Friedl, Frances Khan, and Francesca Tu.
--- Fernando F. Croce |