If The Blood of Fu Manchu were a dish, it’d be lukewarm racist noodles dumped on a plate of expired spy thriller with a side of colonial guilt and served by a waiter who’s been drunk since Tuesday. This is Jess Franco in full autopilot mode—one hand on the camera, the other rooting around in a jar labeled “cultural insensitivity.” It’s not just a bad movie. It’s a cinematic oil spill with Christopher Lee standing in the middle, wondering where his dignity went.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Fu Manchu should’ve been left in the pulp pages of the 1930s where he belonged, alongside ads for asbestos toothpaste and powdered milk that gives you polio. But no, Jess Franco, ever the patron saint of Eurotrash cinema, decided in 1968 to resurrect this dusty caricature with a movie so lazy, so poorly constructed, that you start to question if anyone involved was actually awake during filming.
Christopher Lee, in full yellowface, reprises his role as Fu Manchu like a man cashing a check with one foot already in the cab. He speaks in the slow, deliberate cadence of someone reading IKEA instructions in Klingon, his face slathered in enough makeup to make a geisha wince. Franco gives him almost nothing to do—he sits, he monologues, he touches some beakers, and once in a while, he pets a snake like a Bond villain on Ambien.
The plot, such as it is, centers around Fu Manchu’s diabolical plan to take over the world using “the kiss of death”—a venom transferred by hypnotized women who seduce then poison men with a smooch. It’s an idea that sounds like it came from a fever dream after binge-watching Barbarella and then getting hit in the head with a coconut. The film wants to be sexy and sinister, but it ends up about as erotic as a DMV pamphlet on foot fungus.
Our so-called hero, Nayland Smith (Richard Greene, whose performance is so wooden it could have termites), bumbles his way through the jungle looking for answers. And by “bumble,” I mean he squints into the sun and yells at people. He gets poisoned early in the film by one of Fu’s lipstick assassins and spends the rest of the runtime looking like someone slipped a dead pigeon into his gin and tonic.
The jungle scenes are endless and baffling. Franco reuses footage from his previous films like he’s on a dare to see how many times he can recycle the same two shots of a parrot and a snake before anyone notices. There are long, meandering shots of people walking through foliage that look like they were filmed by accident, as if the cinematographer tripped and just let the camera roll.
Let’s talk about the women—the so-called “kiss assassins.” They’re supposed to be deadly sirens, oozing with danger and allure. In reality, they look like bored fashion models dragged from a Milan nightclub and forced to rehearse their lines on the flight to Brazil. They barely emote, rarely speak, and mostly stand around in various states of undress, waiting for someone to yell “Cut!” or at least offer them a sandwich. Their lethality is laughable—one of them gives a “deadly kiss” so slowly it feels like she’s asking for consent in slow motion while trying not to wrinkle her mascara.
And let’s not forget Franco’s signature move: zooms. Endless, nauseating zooms. He zooms in on faces, on snakes, on maps, on absolutely nothing. At one point, there’s a zoom in on someone drinking water, and it’s shot with all the tension of a shampoo commercial. It’s as if Franco discovered the zoom function on his camera and decided to film the rest of his career like he was trying to operate a telescope in a hurricane.
The dialogue? Imagine a bunch of Bond villains trying to do improv while recovering from dental surgery. Characters speak in riddles, exposition dumps, or vague philosophical nonsense. Nobody ever talks like a human. They monologue like malfunctioning robots who’ve read too much dime-store espionage pulp. Here’s a sample line: “The poison of a woman is the perfume of death!” What the hell does that even mean, Jess? Were you high on mosquito repellent again?
The soundtrack slinks along with a kind of half-assed jazzy vibe that sounds like someone gave a Casio keyboard to a drunk cat. It occasionally bursts into what might generously be called “suspense music,” but mostly it just hums and chirps like a dying refrigerator. There are long stretches with no score at all, which is merciful because it lets you focus on the real horror: the editing.
Oh, the editing. It’s as if Franco spliced the film together during a blackout while being chased by angry creditors. Scenes don’t transition so much as slam into each other. Characters vanish mid-conversation. One second you’re in the jungle, the next you’re in a castle with a snake pit and no explanation. At one point, Fu Manchu shows up in a secret lair that looks like it was decorated by a blind man with a discount rug fetish.
And then there’s the racism. The Blood of Fu Manchu isn’t just culturally tone-deaf—it’s proudly, relentlessly offensive. From yellowface to exoticizing women of color to the “savage jungle” trope, it’s a parade of bad ideas wrapped in a gauzy, mosquito-bitten shrug. Franco doesn’t just perpetuate stereotypes—he embraces them like old drinking buddies and invites them into every frame.
By the time the film limps to its non-ending, with Fu Manchu vanishing into the shadows to “return again,” you’ll be praying he doesn’t. Not because he’s scary, but because another hour of this would be grounds for a class-action lawsuit. Jess Franco may have made worse movies later in his career—yes, Vampyros Lesbos and Oasis of the Zombies say hello—but The Blood of Fu Manchu is the turning point. It’s where he stops caring about plot, coherence, or the possibility of being taken seriously, and starts filming like he’s just trying to stay ahead of the repo man.
Verdict: A sluggish, offensive, incoherent mess that proves even Jess Franco can get bored with his own insanity. If you’re looking for pulp, this is the kind that clogs your creative arteries. Avoid unless you’re writing a thesis on cinematic failure. Or on Christopher Lee’s poor life choices.
