theskylabadventure

The fifth and final of Christopher Lee's Fu-Manchu outings – a planned sixth film was cancelled due to its overwhelmingly poor critical and commercial reception - and the second to be directed by schlockmeister Jess Franco. Played as a parody, 'Castle' might actually have been quite fun. Fu-Manchu is essentially reduced to a poor knock-off of a Blofeld (though I'm not sure he was ever much else). Lee actually brings his A-game here, having phoned it in previously in the series, lifting the ludicrous dialogue to the point where it's almost palatable, but everything else about the film seems to be mocking itself without knowing it. The production design is so camp it makes The Ipcress File look like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The action and violence is again tepid and clumsy (lest we forgot this is a Jess Franco film) and the plot manages to be confusing in spite of being threadbare. There are some babes thrown in, but this is a PG movie so, again, Franco fans expecting anything resembling titillation will be thoroughly disappointed. Unlike its predecessor, which is by far the more insipid and dreary of the two, 'Castle' has a handful of things going for it. One is Jess Franco in a supporting role, wearing a fez and dubbed to sound like… I don't really know. The score is totally derivative but actually rather nice. The wacky production design and multi-coloured fluorescent lighting add a lot of hammy fun. The attempt at seamless in-scene cutting between the various, disparate filming locations is endlessly amusing. Some of the dialogue is hilariously quotable, and played to the hilt by everyone involved. Frankly, though, the two high points of the show are the sizeable inserts from A Night To Remember and Campbell's Kingdom. While definitely a cut above its predecessor in some ways, I'm still struggling to give this any kind of recommendation.

The two-dozen or so existing reviews for this movie neglect to specifically address its most likely audience; the committed Jess Franco fan.

(Yes, I suppose there may be some fans of the late, great Christopher Lee so dedicated as to want to watch it too, for whom this review will hopefully suffice.)

So what does a Jess Franco fan look for in a movie? Simple. Gore, sex and nudity, terrible acting, threadbare plot, ludicrous dialogue, and generally inept film-making in every department (pretty much in that order).

Okay, so the acting is embarrassingly bad. I believe it's testament to what a good bloke Christopher Lee was that he continued making (awful) films with Franco because they were friends, but even he is woeful here. This is obviously not helped by the poor attempt on the part of the make-up department to make him look Chinese. If you've ever seen the early seasons of the original Hawaii Five-O, you'll know what I mean.

The plot, beyond being simply terrible, is utterly confusing. There's some scheme by the titular miscreant to use women as a means of killing his enemies (whose status as such is never actually established), by having them bitten by a snake whose poison bizarrely doesn't affect them but will kill anyone they kiss. Of course. But it doesn't stop there. There's some baffling sub-plot involving some pre-Indiana Jones archaeologist / adventurer / good guy which I honestly cannot explain.

The dialogue, while not exactly Shakespeare, is not nearly as wince- inducing as it needs to be in order to actually be amusing, unlike many Franco films ("She sucked the semen and the life right out of him" from Erotikill being one of my all-time favourite bits of dialogue), and the film-making here is far less offensively poor than most (later) Jess Franco efforts. Sadly, this actually serves as a disappointment to those of us who came to the show hoping for wobbly, out-of-focus shots of pubic triangles and bad dubbing. That's always been part of the fun.

The real con here, though, is the near total absence of any titillation. The snake poison / kiss of death plot would've been a perfect excuse for Franco to stuff the film with boobs and crass sexy bits, but there's only one instance I caught of partial nudity (though by the end I was barely watching) and a wholly unsatisfying one at that. Similarly there is literally noting in the way of badly executed gore.

The Jess Franco of a mere five years later would have made a totally different film - a film his fans would have wanted to see. Given how bafflingly stupid the, err, story is here, nobody would have questioned the random, curtly inserted sex of later Franco movies, and he'd have replaced the multiple PG deaths in this movie with some needlessly excessive and gory ones.

Unless you're an obsessive completest and/or a die hard fan of Franco or Lee, give a miss.

Scratch that - I AM an obsessive completest AND a die hard fan of Franco, and I still can't find anything to recommend in this mess.

Skip it.

The Devil's Rain is a totally baffling film, somehow both more and less than the sum of its parts. Borgnine, Shatner, Satanism - sounds like a giggle, right? And yet somehow the fact that it's so silly, and clearly so reticent to take itself seriously for most of its running time, means that it doesn't really fall into the so-bad- it's-good category, yet it's so far short of actually being good at the same time as not really being all that bad.

Confused? You will be. Leaving aesthetic appreciation aside, the plot of The Devil's Rain is a total muddle. There are huge plot gaps, in which the audience is presumably expected to make leaps to connect one scene to the next, or to try and establish context which is missing more often than not. I genuinely wonder if there isn't a stash of deleted scenes out there which, if cut back in, would actually help the continuity of the film. Instead, what we're left with is a series of moments - some fun, some dumb, some hilariously badly executed - which only really add up to a coherent movie experience if you're really, really paying attention. The likelihood is that you won't be, given the overall sub-par writing, hammy acting (notable Shatnerisms abound) and direction which clearly has no idea of the tone it's going for.

Approach this film with curiosity and you'll have some harmless fun. You'll chuckle at the sight of Ernie Borgnine dressed and made up like a goat. You'll cringe at Shatner's pseudo-pensive-horizon- staring delivery of the ludicrous dialogue. And you'll love the pre Incredible Melting Man melting men. But I'm pretty sure you won't know - or care - what the hell (pun intended) is going on.