Our first feature is The Vengeance Of Fu Manchu, the 3rd film with Christopher Lee playing the evil Chinese villain Fu Manchu. It's a 1967 British German film that was partially filmed at the Shaw Brothers Studio in Hong Kong. It certainly meant more actual Asians in the film than when they were filmed in England. Douglas Wilmer plays Nayland Smith and Howard Marion-Crawford plays Dr Petrie. Fu Manchu survived the last film and he's holed up in his castle in a remote part of China. His plan is to surgically turn a hypnotized Asian guy into a copy of Nayland Smith. He kidnaps Smith and leaves the copy which has been programmed to murder. Smith is locked up, put on trial and sentenced to death. Fu will kill the real Smith, now in his clutches, when the hanging of the copy happens. Luckily for Smith he's got some pals who come to rescue him. There's some fun stuff with lots of running around and some action. Fu is a real good villain, and the Shaw Brothers studio helps add a nice bit of production value. The story isn't the greatest but the characters all help carry it along. I enjoyed it well enough and I'd watch it, and the series, again.
I got Odd Thomas from the library on a whim. I didn't know anything about it. It's based on the first book of the Odd Thomas series by Dean Koontz. I haven't read any Koontz since he was a science fiction writer in the 1970s. I wrote him a fan letter back then and he wrote back telling me he was going to stop writing SF and write thrillers instead. He figured to make more money. I never read anything of his since. I'm just not much of a thriller reader but his books are highly popular. The movie is directed, written and co-produced by Stephen Sommers. Odd is a guy with the ability to see dead people. Distressed ghosts come to him for help and he chases down their killers. There are some other invisible creatures called broachs that feed on death. They usually don't appear unless there's going to be some large event ending in carnage. Odd has a dream about a bunch of people in red bowling shirts getting shot at an event of some sort. He spends the movie trying to figure out what's happening and who's responsible. It didn't make any money, the opening box office was a half million bucks on a $27,000,000 cost. It got slammed by the critics but the fans seemed to have come to like it better than them. It scores a 6.8 on the IMDb and half that from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm somewhere in the middle, I found it interesting enough while it was playing out. I liked the story and the characters though I'm not thinking I need a copy. I wasn't too happy with part of the ending but that's probably Dean's fault as it's in the book too. It makes me think I did the right thing in not reading any of Dean's books but the ending does leave Odd the ability to move along and help ghosts in other places. Odd's story continues in the 6 novel sequels but based on the poor box office I doubt that we will see them turned into films. The final book in the series just came out about 2 weeks ago. I read the synopsis of the other books and the story just gets sadder and sadder but Odd does save a lot of people.
Comments