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Hidden deep in the South American jungle, Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee)
has devised a plan to kill all his enemies by having them given lethal
kisses by his slavegirls (!). & one of his arch-enemies is of course
Nayland Smith (Richard Greene), who is soon kissed by one of Fu Manchu's
girls but only goes blind (which is a side effect of the snake poison
that makes the girls' kisses lethal). But what Fu Manchu does not know
is that Smith's top agent Janseen (Götz George) has already found him
out in the jungle, & he tells Smith, along with Doctor Petrie
(Howard Marion Crawford) where to go to get the antidote. Fu Manchu's
only natural enemy in the jungle meanwhile is Sancho Lopez (Ricardo
Palacios), who he first tries to have eliminated by a death kiss, but
the bandit is to clever to let just anyone kiss him, & he shoots the
exotic dancer who already puckered up to give him his farewell present.
So Fu Manchu switches to plan B, which involves all of Lopez' followers
to be killed & him to be captured & interrogated. Fearing he
would be one of Smith's spies at first, Fu Manchu is soon persuaded
otherwise & employs the bandit himself, but as a precaution giving
him Carmen (Frances Kahn), one of his deathkissing girls, as companion.
Smith & Petrie have in the meantime met up with Jansen & Ursula
(Maria Rohm), niece of Jansen's deceased associate, & soon Jansen,
Ursula & Petrie decide to enter Fu Manchu's headquarters all on
their own, thinking they would be a match for the villain's many minions
- a mistake of course, since Petrie & Ursula soon are captured by
Sancho Lopez & his men, & Jansen, after losing a fight against
Fu Manchu's guards, is left to die in the jungle. But then Fu Manchu
makes the mistake of also incarcerating Lopez - & that man is too
clever to stay behind bars all that long, soon persuading Carmen (yes,
the death-kisser) to set him free, & then freeing Ursula &
Petrie as well. All four of them escape together, soon to be joiuned by
Jansen who hasn't died after all, & who agrees to hold off Fu
Manchu's minions at the headquarters exit. Lopez meanwhile is kissed by
Carmen & dies instantly, but Petrie & Ursula get the firl back
to Nayland Smith & extract the antidote out of her body, so they can
soon go back to the villain's HQ, free Jansen who has just been captured
& blow up Fu Manchu's hideout. The villain himself, of course,
escapes ... Jess Franco was never really the man for a
straight, larger scale adventure yarn, as this movie ably proves: The
story is way too clichéd, with the active, heroic male & passive
female, very little kinky stuff, sex or sleaze, & the spontaneity
& the tongue-in-cheek-humour that permeate so many of his other pulp
movies, are totally missing here. Ricardo Palacios as Sancho Lopez, the
rude but likeable bandit-turned-villain-turned-hero is pretty
entertaining, though. Shirley Eaton has a little & totally
pointless walk-on-appearence here as someone doing something (really,
there's not more to it), which was allegedly filmed under the pretense
that it was for Girl from Rio, which was produced at the same
time, just to have her name to feature prominently on the Blood of Fu
Manchu-poster without paying her extra.
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