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"Not the Yellow Peril again!" Christopher Lee's vampiric stillness is a natural for Sax Rohmer's villain, his entrance on the chopping block is a feint, Scotland Yard's Nayland Smith (Nigel Green) is not convinced. Reports of the fiend's death are greatly exaggerated, his latest scheme involves a kidnapped scientist (Walter Rilla) and the lethal distillate of the "Black Hill Poppy." "Cruel, callous, brilliant, and the most evil and dangerous man in the world," also an attentive dad to the eager sadist (Tsai Chin), their underground hideout is decorated with swathes of red and blue liquids bubbling in beakers. The lawful nemesis has his own brand of implacability, a steely Holmes complete with a stout Watson (Howard Marion-Crawford). "Now the wheel of fate has turned full circle." The ideal would have been the Franju of Judex, the necessary hallucinatory quality eludes the staid Don Sharp. The flavor of the serials emerges in bits all the same: Eyes darting behind a stone graveyard cherub, a car vanishing into a truck in the middle of a chase, the bejeweled pinky that makes mind and camera alike go blurry. Most strikingly, there's the Essex burg decimated "right in the middle of breakfast" by Fu Manchu's refined poison, beginning with grousing grunts suddenly dropping dead on a frigid beachfront. (The stroll through a placid street strewn with collapsed figures is a Cold War sight as well as a nod to Village of the Damned.) Thames water and the Museum of Oriental Studies figure prominently in the nefarious plan, the upshot is a placid Himalayan vista lit up by an exploding palace. "The world shall hear from me again." Franco's sequels locate the proper luridness of the yarn. With Joachim Fuchsberger, Karin Dor, James Robertson Justice, Harry Brogan, and Francesca Tu.
--- Fernando F. Croce |